Max Rudberg played around with some ideas for a future iPhone with a notch in the status bar and a virtual Home button:

Apple’s accidental release of the HomePod firmware prompted Steven Throughthon-Smith’s to go digging through and uncovering a lot of exciting pieces on the upcoming high-end iPhone, codename D22. Allen Pike then had an interesting take on what that new form factor could mean for the UI.

Allen’s idea of how the UI will change on the new phone match many of my own thoughts. iOS 11’s large navbars seems like the biggest hint of upcoming change, and moving the left and right navbar items next to the home button allows for a much more convienient bottom oriented navigation. And everything just seems to fit.

I wanted to explore how this could look with a little more graphical polish, to try and figure out which way Apple would be most likely to go. I’ve used the same App Store Top Charts-screen as Allen did.

His mockups encapsulate why the next few weeks are going to be so fun – we think we know what the next iPhone is going to be like, but we also know nothing of its software. And an all-screen iPhone is, by definition, all about the flavor of iOS it runs.

I prefer the mockups that embrace the notch with a seamless transition of the title bar into a split status bar, but I could see a return to the old-school black status bar too. I haven’t felt this excitement around the new version of an iPhone from the design and developer community in years.

Brian Barrett, writing for Wired on the biggest iPhone scoop in months:

When developer Guilherme Rambo saw that Apple had released firmware for the upcoming HomePod speaker, he thought it must have been a mistake. The HomePod doesn’t come out until December, after all. Curiosity piqued, he started digging through the code, where he found perhaps the last thing he expected: Apple’s next iPhone.

While some details regarding Apple’s redesigned, high-end iPhone—called the iPhone 8 or iPhone Pro, though no one outside Cupertino knows the official name yet—had previously leaked, Rambo found in the HomePod not rumors or hints but Apple’s own documentation of one of its biggest releases in years. It confirms a new look with a slimmer bezel, the death of the home button, and a powerful new face-recognition feature. It’s the biggest bombshell Apple leak in years—and it came from Apple itself.

If it was an accident, this is a remarkable slip-up for Apple – not only was a glyph depicting an unreleased iPhone found in the HomePod firmware uploaded to Apple’s public servers – itself quite a curious story – but Rambo and the ever-proficient Steven Troughton-Smith are finding all kinds of references by digging into the software. From face unlock with support for facial expressions and an infra-red camera to major changes to the status bar (which is going to support a split mode) and the expected removal of the Home button, it sounds like the next iPhone is going to change the most basic iPhone interactions we know. We’re far from rumor territory at this point: we’re looking at references and APIs scattered throughout a firmware file uploaded on Apple’s servers.

Beyond changes to the core of iOS though, I’m interested to see how much iOS 11 was designed with this next iPhone in mind. The large title bars and new safe area inset APIs always seemed like obvious hints; I think Allen Pike is on the right track with his idea of title bar controls being docked at the bottom, next to the virtual Home button (which follows the theme of thumb-friendly navigation this year). But what about ARKit with the addition of a 3D-capable front-facing camera? And will a possible function area around the Home button be programmable by developers to add custom buttons and shortcuts, à la Touch Bar/iPad Shortcuts Bar?

As always, hardware leaks and rumors only tell one half of the future iPhone story, and to me that’s not even the most interesting part anymore. It’s all about the implementation of the hardware and software together, the constraints Apple faced, and the trade-offs they chose. This has never been more apparent than this year: we all seem to know what the next iPhone is going to look like, but nobody knows how iOS will work on it. The next Apple event is going to be a fun one.

The Wall Street Journal released a short documentary called Behind the Glass to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the iPhone’s release on June 29, 2007. The almost ten-minute long documentary cuts between interviews with Greg Christie, former Vice President of Human Interface, Scott Forstall, former Vice President for the iPhone Operating System, and Tony Fadell, former Senior Vice President of the iPod division. The three describe the struggle over whether to base the iPhone’s hardware on a multi-touch interface versus the iPod and the ensuing 2.5-year effort to create the first iPhone.

The interviews are short but recount several anecdotes, including the attempts to find a way to adapt the iPod’s interface to work as a phone and the predictive software used to make the touch keyboard accurate. Even ten years later, the retelling of the stories behind the iPhone’s birth is captivating.

The Verge has a lengthy excerpt from Brian Merchant’s upcoming book, ‘The One Device: the Secret History of the iPhone.’ Merchant’s book chronicles the development of the iPhone from the recruitment of engineers, designers, and others at Apple, through the battles over its hardware and software implementation. What’s unique about the excerpt of ‘The One Device’ is that it doesn’t try to fit the story of the iPhone’s development into a neat and tidy straight-line narrative. Instead, the excerpt embraces the messy, twisted path the product took from inception to launch.

The first battle was over hardware and whether the iPhone would be a multitouch device or an adaptation of existing iPod hardware. According to Merchant, an iPod-based Apple phone made the first calls:

The first calls from an Apple phone were not, it turns out, made on the sleek touchscreen interface of the future but on a steampunk rotary dial. “We came very close,” Ording says. “It was, like, we could have finished it and made a product out of it… But then I guess Steve must have woken up one day like, ‘This is not as exciting as the touch stuff.’ ”

Once it was decided that the iPhone would be a multitouch device, the battleground shifted to whether the operating system would be based on OS X or the iPod’s OS:

“At this point we didn’t care about the phone at all,” Williamson says. “The phone’s largely irrelevant. It’s basically a modem. But it was ‘What is the operating system going to be like, what is the interaction paradigm going to be like?’ ” In that comment, you can read the roots of the philosophical clash: The software engineers saw P2 not as a chance to build a phone, but as an opportunity to use a phone-shaped device as a Trojan horse for a much more complex kind of mobile computer.

Ultimately, the iPhone was released as a touchscreen device that sported a stripped-down version of OS X, and has proven to be the mobile computer that its creators envisioned. What I like most about the excerpt, and why I immediately purchased the book, is that it tells the story of the iPhone from the perspective of the people who worked on it, which provides details that only the engineers and designers working on the front lines can bring to life.

‘The One Device: the Secret History of the iPhone’ by Brian Merchant will be released on June 20th and is available for pre-order on the iBooks Store and Amazon.