The world has been digging into the iPhone 8 in hopes of getting any information about the upcoming Apple anniversary phone. Many of these leaks pop in China where the handsets are manufactured, but this time Apple made an inexplicable “mistake” posting an under-test build of the iOS 11 on a public server.
It was neither the public beta release nor the developer beta version; it was the actual HomePod iOS 11 build that Apple is currently testing. What followed the event was not a surprise at all, as the iOS developer Steve Troughton-Smith along with a bunch of other coders dug into the software fishing for any information they could get about the iPhone 8.
The only question is, how could Apple make such a horrendous mistake while desperately trying to contain any leaks about the upcoming iPhone. While they usually protect the software to prevent developers from poking around too much, this was a party.
https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/891856682464280576
The mega leak dropped for us the phone’s design, its code name, display resolution, wireless charging option, and even confirmed that the Touch ID will not be embedded into the display, just as many early rumors suggested.
https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/891855995172945924
All the information was just a confirmation of the rumors that had sprouted earlier, but Apple making this kind of a blunder is something none of us can fathom. Apple blog Daring Fireball brings a lot of inside Apple information and this time they posted a quite accurate explanation of the event. John Gruber of Daring Fireball writes:
“My understanding is that Apple is (or at least was) on the cusp of a widespread deployment of prototype HomePods to employees. Someone prepared an over-the-air software update and because it was intended to be distributed only to Apple employees, the OS was compiled without all the usual flags set to omit code that pertains to unreleased hardware. (Kind of makes sense, insofar as HomePod itself is unreleased hardware.) Building the OS without those flags set may not have been a mistake. But distributing it via a world-readable server was.”
Here's a higher resolution version: pic.twitter.com/p60xeEn7Ie
— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) July 31, 2017
Apple developers generally omit code while developing both the public and developer beta builds of the iOS, so the release does not contain any sensitive code. For an internal build, there was no need for the flags as no one outside Apple is meant to see it. The mistake has been made, and the details are out, and there is no taking it back.