‘homeOS’
At last year’s virtual WWDC, Apple covered innovations in the Apple TV, HomeKit, and the HomePod lumped into a whole new “Home” category. It’s clear now that this was the beginning of a trend that continued with the debut of the HomePod mini at last fall’s iPhone event, and was repeated at this year’s WWDC.
Combined with a reference to “homeOS” in an Apple job posting, this led to speculation that Apple was planning to vastly expand its home category in a broad new way, however the event came and went without even a mention of the operating system. Nor did anything about this alleged “homeOS” surface at any of the developer events throughout the week.
If anything, Apple has been downplaying the operating systems found in its home devices. It did much the same thing with tvOS last year, talking more about the Apple TV as an overall platform than the software that runs on it. Further, even though the HomePod is also now based on tvOS, Apple still calls it “audioOS” internally, and officially it’s simply “HomePod Software.”
That said, since the references to “homeOS” came right from one of Apple’s own job postings, we have to assume it has something in the works that it’s simply not ready to announce to the wider community just yet. The way it was phrased in the job posting is a bit too specific to simply be the name of an internal operating system, but at this point it may also merely be the groundwork for Apple’s next big home product.