First iOS 11 Devices Spotted Online Before WWDC

iOS 11 hasn’t yet been officially announced, although we are expecting it to be unveiled at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 5. And while it isn’t available to the masses yet, that hasn’t stopped a few mysterious users from leveraging the elusive software before its official release.

While using Google Analytics, a service that helps website owners learn more about their users’ behavior, we noticed an anomaly. Users were browsing iDrop News using what appeared to be iOS 11. Upon further investigation, this irregularity was certainly not a misprint or a mistake on Google’s part. Google Analytics reported that various iOS 11 users had browsed our articles more than 50 times, on iPhones and iPads alike.

What seemed to be most interesting was not that these users were reading our site on iPhones or iPads running iOS 11; it was the question of who they were, what they were reading, and why they were reading it.

These mysterious iOS 11 users had visited multiple iPhone 8 rumors pages, as well as an iOS 11 wish list that describes all of the features we’d like to see in the next version of iOS, as well as other iOS 11 rumors and related articles.

Being unsatisfied with the information that was available to us, it was time to dig deeper. Using the City ID feature available in Google Analytics, we are able to cross reference the City IDs tied to the devices running iOS 11 and learn where the users are from. A quick search revealed that the iOS 11 users were located in Sunnyvale, California (1014315) and Cupertino, California (1013715); both of which are cities where entities of Apple reside.

It’s clear at this point that Apple employees were in fact the ones who were browsing iDrop News on iOS 11 devices, but it’s still unknown what exactly they were searching for. More than likely these visits were part of routine testing before iOS 11 is officially released to developers. Either way it’s apparent that iOS 11 is nearing its final stages of completion. In the photo below we can see that iOS 11 is currently being tested on an iPhone 7 (375×667), iPhone 7 Plus (414×736), and iPad mini (768×1024).

When iOS 11 is finally released we can expect advanced Siri features, three-way FaceTime calling, security improvements, bug fixes, and more. iOS 11 will be announced June 5. A beta version will likely become available to developers shortly after the announcement, and finally a public beta will be available in the weeks following.