Here's why Apple put the development of iOS 18, iPadOS 18 on hold

Let's discuss something that has probably not entered your mind at all, iOS 18. After all, less than two months have gone by since Apple released iOS 17. But even though it might not be something that you're consciously thinking about right now, you can be sure that Apple is hard at work developing next year's iPhone operating system. However, Apple is taking some time off and is pausing its development work on iOS 18 according to Bloomberg (via AppleInsider).

Now we could say that this is being done to give the iOS development team a rest. After all, all work and no play can make you a dull boy and lead you to take an ax to your bathroom door while imitating Ed McMahon (okay, that's a reference to The Shining). But this is not the case. With 10 months remaining before iOS 18 sees the light of day, Apple has decided to halt development of the software and take time off to exterminate the bugs that have started to surface.

Bloomberg reports that as November kicked off, Apple told its employees about the delay in developing the software according to sources with knowledge of the announcement. Instead of working on new items for iOS 18, the development team is working on improving the performance of what has already been developed for iOS 18. This is done by getting rid of the bugs that are causing issues.

Besides iOS 18, Apple has also paused development of iPadOS 18, macOS 15, and other updates that it will first unveil to the public at WWDC 2024 next year. After the week-long delay to concentrate on exterminating bugs, Apple software chief Craig Federighi's team will get right back to its work on developing new features for iOS 18 and the other aforementioned OS titles as well.

Apple hopes that by pausing further development of iOS 18 before continuing to move forward on developing new features, it will be able to release the OS next September with zero bugs. This year, just days after launching iOS 17, Apple released iOS 17.0.2 to fix a bug that caused iPhone 15 series handsets to freeze when transferring data from an older iPhone to a new one.

Despite the one week hiatus on developing new features on iOS 18, Apple says that it doesn't expect to change the release schedule for the 2024 software.