It is said that Apple has been set to change its approach to software naming and to effectively skip iOS 19, and it can work very well for the best.
The problem with the different software range from Apple is that they have little intuitive sense. We currently have iOS 18, Watchos 11 and MacOS 15, which do not offer an indication of which is the oldest platform (it is macOS, for the record).
A new Bloomberg report claims that Apple is planning to change all of that, starting with the platform to which we have referred iOS 19.
Goodbye iOS 19, Hello iOS 26
According to the always reliable Mark Gurman, Apple is planning to make radical changes to its software nomenclature that influences each device on its selection.
From the next version of iOS, every new Apple platform will be known in the year. In this way we have iOS 26, MacOS 26, Watchos 26, TVOS 26 and Visionos 26.
This is very logical for us, because it means that you can instinctively tell when a certain platform was released. In the future it will be easy to distinguish different legacy platforms.
Apple is expected to make this announcement on WWDC 2025 on 9 June, and it will apparently be accompanied by a new and more united onion on all different devices from Apple.
Apple
Apple’s rivals have written the precedent
Apple is of course not the first technology company to achieve this realization. In 2020, Samsung changed the naming of his Galaxy’s flagship smartphone series to display the year of their release – hence the Samsung Galaxy S25 of this year.
An even more famous example – and one that is more applicable to the Apple situation – is Microsoft with its Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows 2000 control systems.
Of course, Microsoft would proceed to reverse that intuitive naming schedule with subsequent versions, so we had released Windows 11 in 2021.
A potential confusion is that Apple will use the following year for its name schedule, not the actual year in which the platform is released. So close, Apple. So close.
