We are very used to Apple leaks, but not so much when, as in the case of HomeOS, they originate from a communication error of the company itself. However, any indiscretion is worth it if you can extract interesting information from it, and with it try to determine what are the plans (whether immediate, intermediate, or distant) of Cupertino.
What will Apple HomeOS bring?
And as we have already experienced on other occasions, one of these sources of information are the job offers published by technology companies. A few months ago, for example, we learned the numbers that Microsoft was handling regarding the adoption of its Edge browser. And sometimes, the simple publication of job offers looking for a specific professional profile also gives us some clues. However, it rarely happens as on this occasion, in which we find a specific name, HomeOS, an operating system that we still know nothing about, but in which Cupertino is already working, as detected by the developer Joan Lluís Díaz.
In this job offer, Apple is looking for a senior engineer to work on the company’s operating systems. Among them are iOS, WatchOS, tvOS, and, surprisingly, also appears homeOS, an operating system that we had not heard anything about so far, and that has caused that during the last hours we are all wondering what will be the plans with it.
The most interesting thing is that the homeOS leak has been published just a few days before the WWDC 2021 begins, which invites us to think that Apple will present it sometime next week. Otherwise, if it were a more long-term project, those responsible for publishing the job posting would have been more careful and would not have mentioned it explicitly in the job posting.
Be that as it may, the question now is to which device or devices HomeOS will be directed. There are two options that we can imagine. The first, of course, has to do with the HomePod Mini, Apple’s smart speaker introduced last year, and on which Apple has concentrated all its efforts, after ceasing production of the HomePod, which is still on sale in Apple’s online store, but only until stocks are sold out.
The other possibility has to do with HomeKit, Apple’s system for managing smart devices, and which could be close to undergoing a redesign accompanied by a name change. However, and given that HomeKit is not an operating system, but a framework for interconnecting devices, it seems odd that homeOS is simply a HomeKit redesign, as in such a case it would not be listed alongside iOS, WatchOS, and so on. Only a major change would justify the name change in this case.
