You may be thinking, “What happened to iOS 14.1?”
My theory is that the new iPhones will ship with iOS 14.1, and in that codebase Apple may be hiding new phone-specific goodies, and 14.2 will come along afterwards and re-unify everything.
It wouldn’t be the first time Apple’s done something like this. Here’s Jason Snell, back in 2010:
On Monday, Apple released iOS 4.2, a free software update that brings the features of iOS 4—including multitasking, fast app switching, and a unified mail inbox—to the iPad for the first time. We had a chance to use the update, which also adds the new AirPrint and AirPlay features to all compatible devices, for a few days: here’s a first look.
[…]
Despite the presence of AirTunes and AirPrint, the big story of iOS 4.2 is really that it brings the features of iOS 4 to the iPad for the first time. The iPad shipped on April 3, but only five days later Apple announced iOS 4.0, which shipped two months later. For the intervening five months, the iPad has been a full step behind the rest of Apple’s iOS devices. On Monday, that ends, and the iPad and iPhone will be running the same version of iOS for the very first time.
I may be wrong about iOS 14.1, but like everything else this year, this is wild and fun to talk about. It could be that we’ll see 14.1 in a few days as a regular bug-fix release, in which case this post will not age well.