Along with the release of the fourth beta of 14.5 for developers on Monday, 9to5Mac has discovered some interesting code suggesting that Apple may be working on delivering security updates separately from main OS downloads in the future.
Fairly often, users of older iPhones or iPads will forgo new iOS downloads for fear of making their gadgets run slower, since these updates are always catered around the latest lines of devices. While Apple made sure that iPhones from the 6s model and newer would be able to use iOS 14, it is well known that they are not the focus of the updates, and some of the upgrades may not be able to improve functionality on older models, unnecessarily clogging up space.
However, updates focused solely on improving security are light and wouldn’t change your operating system, only patch existing issues and enhance data safety online. For example, the 14.4.1 update was simply released to fix a single security flaw in WebKit (Apple’s internally developed browser engine for Safari).
The code suggesting all this is not something discussed or confirmed by Apple, it’s just there as a potential idea. Not all of Apple’s ideas have come to fruition in the past, but it’s good to know there’s at least the possibility of such a convenient security patch delivery method in the future.
