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There are not 8 major versions between iOS 18 and iOS 26. Apple skipped the monotonously increasing version numbering system since iOS 1 during WDDC 2025 to adopt a year suffix based versioning system.

iOS 17, then iOS 18, then iOS 26, then iOS 27.

You're not the only party confused.

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Haha thanks! Good to know they are on years now. Back to random version numbers in 5 year? :p

How is increasing by 1 every year random? :P

At some point they will decide to release two versions in a single year and have figure out how to distinguish them.

It's inevitable because they decided on year, and Murphy's law dictates that'll they will encounter this problem.

Semver has always been king

Edit: Oop, I misread! Right, yes, the change up was arguably not entirely boring. Some people were excited at least.

Originally: To be the annoying pedant, version numbers did still monotonically increase, even with the gap, because each version is >= to the last. The mono means a single direction, not a step size of one.

to be an even more annoying pedant. they technically said "monotonously" not monotonically, though skipping to 26 still seems pretty monotonous.

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