Imagine someone opens a box with a new iPhone 12 inside. Out of box it came with iOS 14. When the phone gets upgraded to the latest software, does it automatically gets updated to the latest one, or will the software get upgraded incrementally (14 to 15 then to 16…..)?
In: Technology
Not sure about IOS, but in android, for most devices, over the air updates are usually incremental: as the patch only contains the difference between the previous and immediately next build, each patch must be applied sequentially. If a user is behind on updates, this can meana pretty long reboot cycle.
Many manufacturers also post full system images as well (and sometimes make them available through the OTA mechanism as well), allowing the current version to be flashed even if the currently installed OS is outdated or missing.
Technically this depends on the OS design. Typically it’s done incrementally because you have to test each upgrade path to make sure it works and it’s much more complex to try to be able to “skip” versions.
Related to this, Apple are busy rolling out a new system that can update iPhones to the latest software without taking them out of their boxes. Apple Stores will be able to placed boxed iPhone on device that will talk to the phones via NFC, which will then connect to wifi to do the update.
That should mean that someone buying an iPhone that was made months ago will walk out of the shop with an up to date phone.
I have an Android for testing purposes and it seems to have to do its updates in order where iOS does not.
As others have said, it depends on how the OS is built as to how updates must be done. Either is possible.
Apple maintains 3 delta patches for the current version, meaning you can patch up if you are 3 minor versions behind, for example the current version is 14.1.1 and previous 3 releases are 14.1, 14.0.2, 14.0.1, Apple will prepare different patches to update those 3 versions straigh to 14.1.1. Anything more than that will require a full download of the entire system image but the phone can handle it like a normal update, it just takes slightly longer time.
(This is how they implement OTA delta updates when it first came out around maybe iOS5, not sure if they still do it now.)
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