IT Home On November 13, according to foreign media outlet AppleInsider reporting tonight (the 13th), with the help of AI and emulator technology, a 15-year-old, never officially released iPhone multitasking interface that was long buried has been recreated.
In early 2010, the media reported that Apple was testing a interface similar to the Exposé overview function. In 2011, a special version of iOS 4 with this interface was found on a prototype iPhone 4.
For more than ten years, this card-based multi-task interface remained unreleased, until a simulator developer used AI to bring the design abandoned by Apple back to life.
Developer Steve Trauton-Smith shared a video on Mastodon that shows the never-released interface. The iOS 4 in the video runs on a branch version of the QEMU emulator, with a system version number of 8A218, which was not previously disclosed. This version is slightly later than the 8A216 version discovered in 2011.
The developer told AppleInsider: “With the AI-assisted simulator for development, any old version of iOS that can be found can now be run.”
Based on the available information, this rare iOS version is expected to have been extracted from a prototype device, rather than an internal system recovery package from Apple. Someone extracted the root file system from a development device or iPhone prototype, and with the help of ChatGPT, the system was successfully launched in a QEMU emulator.
The video shows the Exposé-style multitasking interface that Apple tried when developing iOS 4. All open applications are arranged as cards on the screen, presenting a 9-grid layout. By pressing the Home key twice, users can directly select the application they want to switch between, without having to scroll through them.
IT Home note: Before the common card-style app switching interface became popular today, the iPhone used a drawer-style menu that slid out from the bottom of the screen to switch apps.