Article · AI translation
IT Home reported on November 13 that, according to a report by AppleInsider this evening (the 13th), AI and emulator technology have brought back to life an iPhone multitasking switcher interface that had lain dormant for more than 15 years and was never officially released.
In early 2010, AppleInsider reported that Apple was testing an interface similar to the Exposé window overview feature. In 2011, a special version of iOS 4 featuring this interface was found on an iPhone 4 prototype.
For more than a decade afterward, no one publicly demonstrated this card-based multitasking interface, until an emulator developer used AI to bring Apple's abandoned design back into view.
Developer Steve Troughton-Smith shared a video on Mastodon showing the unreleased interface. The iOS 4 shown in the video runs on a fork of the QEMU emulator and has a previously undisclosed build number, 8A218, slightly later than the 8A216 build found in 2011.
The developer told AppleInsider: “With the help of an emulator developed with AI assistance, any old version of iOS that can be found can now be run.”
Based on the available information, this rare iOS version is believed to have been extracted from a prototype rather than an internal Apple system restore package. Someone extracted the root filesystem from a development device or iPhone prototype and then used ChatGPT to get the system to boot successfully in the QEMU emulator.
The video shows an Exposé-style multitasking interface that Apple tried while developing iOS 4. All open apps appear as cards arranged on the screen in a 3-by-3 grid. Users can press the Home button twice to select the app they want to switch to directly, without scrolling.
IT Home note: Before the card-based app switcher commonly seen today appeared, the iPhone used a drawer-style menu that slid up from the bottom of the screen to switch between apps.