Apple Inc. is a company that manufactures smartphones with the brand name iPhone. The operating system used in iPhone is the iPhone OS. Apple Inc. develops and markets the iPhone OS. It is programmed in C language and belongs to the Mac OS family of operating systems. The latest and the most widely used version of the iPhone OS available in the market with iPhone handsets is iPhone OS 3.1.3.
The design of the iPhone OS is such that it acts as a mediator between the device hardware and the native applications on the phone as well as any other third-party applications installed. The iPhone OS system framework and Objective – C language are used to build the native applications and they run directly on the OS. The native applications do not necessarily require a network connection to operate.
The technologies used in iPhone OS are implemented as a set of 4 layers. The 4 layers are core OS layer, core services layer, media layer and cocoa touch layer. Lower layers of the OS form the fundamental services. All the applications depend upon the core OS layer and the core services layer for their proper functioning. These layers possess all the required information for the working of all application programs. The higher levels of the layer are made up of more systematic services than those in the lower levels. The Media layer is responsible for the operation of the media content stored in the device. The iPhone OS uses graphical user interface which allows the user to interact with the programs in ways other than typing. It is also programmed for the multi-touch interface that facilitates the user to operate the device using multiple finger gestures on the display screen and give complex commands to the mobile device. These two interfaces together form the cocoa touch layer of the iPhone OS. The space allocation acquired in the device’s storage by the iPhone OS is less than 500 megabytes.
Such is the compact structure of the iPhone OS and is one of the reasons for the success of the OS in the global market.
