Apple is reportedly changing how it builds its operating systems, and the change comes at the very start of the cycle for iOS 28, iPadOS 28 and macOS 28, well before anything is shown at WWDC next summer.
Apple’s software development has traditionally been split into three main milestones, known internally as M1, M2 and M3. Each lasts eight weeks, divided evenly between four weeks of writing new features and four weeks of integrating that work into the wider build. For the first milestone of next year’s releases, Apple has reportedly changed that split to six weeks of coding and two weeks of integration. The milestone is still eight weeks long, but engineers get more time to build and experiment.
The projects involved carry internal codenames. iOS 28 and iPadOS 28 are reportedly called Bell, while macOS 28 is Poppy. That first milestone is said to be finished already, and engineers are reported to have welcomed the extra room. Apple has not commented publicly, so the details come from reports rather than an official announcement.
The reasoning is fairly straightforward. Integration becomes harder as a release develops, because each new feature has to work with everything already built. At M1, little has been completed, so less integration work is needed. Moving time from integration to development at that stage costs relatively little, whereas doing the same in M3 would be risky.
Users won’t see any effect for a while. The schedule only applies to the first stage of development, and the results will not be clear until iOS 28 and macOS 28 are released. If the approach works, Apple may apply it to later milestones as well.