When developer Guilherme Rambo saw that Apple had released firmware for the upcoming HomePod speaker, he thought it must have been a mistake. The HomePod doesn't come out until December, after all. Curiosity piqued, he started digging through the code, where he found perhaps the last thing he expected: Apple's next iPhone.
While some details regarding Apple's redesigned, high-end iPhone—called the iPhone 8 or iPhone Pro, though no one outside Cupertino knows the official name yet—had previously leaked, Rambo found in the HomePod not rumors or hints but Apple's own documentation of one of its biggest releases in years. It confirms a new look with a slimmer bezel, the death of the Home button, and a powerful new face-recognition feature. It's the biggest bombshell Apple leak in years—and it came from Apple itself.
The HomePod firmware first appeared on an official Apple public update feed a few days ago. Rambo unpacked it, hoping to glean anything interesting about how Apple's Siri-powered speaker works before Apple realized its mistake and pulled the code.
Like the iPhone, HomePod runs iOS. That in itself is unremarkable; developers have had access to a beta version of iOS 11 for more than a month now. But Rambo, a developer for a Brazilian ecommerce company, quickly made a critical discovery: The HomePod firmware that Apple released was iOS 11.0.2, a full two patches ahead of what's publicly available.
That means that it included some performance-related tweaks, sure. But more importantly, because it wasn't intended for public release, Apple hadn't scrubbed the code for mentions of its unreleased products. Like, say, its upcoming iPhone, which is expected in September.
"It's a process Apple goes through every year, to make sure developers can still access the upcoming iOS without revealing too much about the unannounced iPhone that will come upon the final release," says iOS developer Steven Troughton-Smith, who backed up Rambo's findings.
Realizing the potential for discovery, Rambo set to work.
"I decided to search for strings inside the firmware that could be related to the rumored 'Face ID' feature," Rambo says. "I searched for the word 'face' and noticed it matched several symbols in BiometricKit, the framework that currently handles Touch ID." Those references don't exist in the iOS 11 beta.
Rambo was onto something. So he kept digging.
References to face recognition do not an iPhone 8 make. But as Rambo continued to comb through BiometricKit, he realized that the same terminology used to register a new Touch ID finger ("EnrollTouchID") had a face-authentication counterpart: EnrollPearlID. "Pearl ID" continued to show up throughout his searches, always tied to facial recognition.
That may not end up being what Apple calls its face-recognition feature, but calling it Pearl ID at this stage likely isn't intended to hide its purpose. "The codename just makes it easier to find all the related pieces of code in the OS, and by inspecting the code you can then see what kind of functions it has," Troughton-Smith says. What Rambo saw at that point, in other words, was an unreleased, unannounced Apple feature laid bare.
Figuring out what "Pearl ID" meant led to an even bigger find.
"During the search for references to this 'Pearl ID' thing I found a reference to 'Pearl-D22,'" Rambo says. "I decided to search for 'D22' and discovered it is the internal codename for the 'iPhone Pro' or 'iPhone 10.'"
While there aren't many D22 references, Apple left little doubt as to what it means. What sealed it? Rambo found a file in the PassKit framework, used by Wallet, called "Payment_glyph_phone-D22.caar," a format type that Apple uses to store vector graphics for animated UI elements. When Rambo rendered that image, he saw an iPhone unlike any he had seen before, because it doesn't yet exist.
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Rambo found another reference to D22 in a video file, not present in the firmware, called "Enrollment_Tutorial_Loop-D22," which likely shows iPhone 8 owners how to register their face with Pearl ID.
"There are also some references in the firmware that suggest this D22 model will have a different battery charging method," Rambo says, though iOS 11.0.2 offers no clues as to what those differences might be.
These leaks detail Apple's unreleased iPhone to a previously unthinkable degree, excepting the iPhone 4's early debut by Gizmodo in 2010. The minimally bezeled design and lack of a Home button mark the iPhone's most significant overhaul in years. The face-ID feature seems primed to be a focal point of the company's eventual introduction of the phone.
"This is a rough situation for Apple," says Troughton-Smith. "For them to be the source of the only concrete leaks about it and its design is going to upset a lot of people internally."
Embarrassment aside, the impact on actual sales may be muted. "I think the kind of people likely to wait for a new iPhone based on leaks were likely well aware of all the reporting on the subject already," says Jan Dawson, founder of Jackdaw Research. Dawson also notes that while this seems to confirm existing rumors, the real test of the iPhone's upcoming features is how well they work. Firmware can only tell you so much.
In which case, the biggest takeaway remains that Apple's internal security has once again slipped, as it did when macOS Sierra showed off Apple's MacBook Pro with OLED touch panel last fall, a few days before the product's official debut. The lapse this time seems even more glaring; Apple has more riding on the iPhone 8 than it does on its whole laptop line put together, and while airing it out a month before its release may not have a material impact on the company, it certainly doesn't help.
"We're seeing what we believe to be a pause in purchases of iPhone, which we believe is due to the earlier and much more frequent reports about future iPhones," Apple CEO Tim Cook said during the company's most recent earnings call.
This time, at least, Apple has no one to blame but itself.
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