OS Overview - iOS, watchOS & tvOS

Apple maintains a few mobile operating systems, most famously iOS. In this section i will explain the history behind iOS, watchOS, tvOS and even the operating system behind the Touchbar on newer Macbook models.

iOS

iOS is one of the most recognisable operating systems in the world. Everyone who uses a phone would have tried iOS, whether they liked it or not. It's famous for being the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad, for being the alternative to Android, and being much more secure than Android.

iOS is a stripped down macOS, it uses much of the functionality, for example: the XNU kernel. iOS was never always called iOS, it was originally named iPhone OS as that was the only device that iOS ran on at the time. After iOS 4, and the release of the iPad, the name officially was changed from iPhone OS to iOS. Much of the functionality that iOS has today was not in the original, for example cut/paste wasn't added for an embarrassingly long time but was finally added in iOS 3. The most famous part of iOS, the App Store, also was not in the original version. iPhone OS 1 did not have support for third party applications, so developers got creative. They began making mobile web apps and, because of the "Add to homescreen" functionality, they acted like native apps. The lack of an App Store also gave birth to Jailbreaking, but more on that later. iOS went through a major design change with iOS 7, which also influenced a design change for macOS. This was the first big move that Apple made after the sad passing of Steve Jobs. iOS moved to a more clean, bright and more modern design.

When it comes to security, iOS is well known for it's level of security. Apple's security is getting better and better with each iOS version and it's becoming increasingly more difficult to exploit vulnerabilities if found, but we'll discuss the security of iOS in a later chapter.

watchOS

The Apple Watch runs a stripped down version of iOS called watchOS. It's similar to iOS in many ways and basically just has anything that isn't required cut out, a replacement for Springboard called Carousel, obviously a different UIKit etc. Some things, however, are the same. As watchOS is a stripped down iOS, watchOS uses XNU, majority of the KEXTs and all of the security features that were present on 32bit versions of iOS.

tvOS

Much like watchOS, tvOS is a specialised version of iOS built for the Apple TV.

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Touchbar

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