iOS 5 to Bring Over-The-Air Operating System Updates

Submitted by lalit on May 5, 2011 - 9:21am.

9to5mac is reporting that they have heard from multiple sources about Apple’s plan to bring over-the-air iOS updates with iOS 5. The new iOS 5 won’t come as an over-the-air update, but following point updates will. Apple and Verizon are in talks to bring the feature to CDMA iPhone since early this year. However, 9to5mac points out that there are two things that will be required for this feature to work seamlessly:

  1. Updates are now over 600MB.  Apple would have to make these smaller to get the carriers to agree to push these things as they are.  We believe that Apple will make the updates much smaller by using incremental patches rather than full OS downloads.
  2. iTunes provides the backup to the iOS device so a failed update would need some sort of backup.  We think there will be a Cloud-based backup system.

Over-the-air updates can make iPhone update deliver faster, but Apple has to make sure that carriers don’t poke their nose in update schedule as they do on Android.