Apple updates apps with support for iPhone 6 and iPhone 7. Wait, what?

iphone 6

Apple posted tiny updates for a number of its apps this week, including iMovie, iPhoto, Pages and more. And while the updates themselves seem insignificant—most of their change logs read “addresses compatibility issues”—they may not be.

It’s been discovered that all of these apps, and several others from third party developers, now show that they’ve been “optimized for iPhone 6” in their Compatibility sections on the App Store. Does this mean the iPhone 5S is actually the iPhone 6?

Update: as noted by several commenters below, it appears that Apple either has a major glitch in its iTunes backend, or is totally trolling us. Users are seeing “optimized for iPhone 6, 7” and so on, depending on their region. We have updated the title of the post to reflect this.

As noted by The Verge, it’s very possible that the message is merely an odd mistake, or, even an intentional one to throw a wrench in the rumor mill. So there’s no guarantees here that this is indicative of Apple’s plans. But it is rather interesting, isn’t it?

Adding to the mystery is the fact that it looks like you’ll only see the ‘this app optimized for iPhone 6’ text in the browser-based version of the App Store. Folks using the iTunes desktop app or the App Store app on their iDevice will still see ‘for iPhone 5.’

Since rumors regarding this year’s iPhone began late last year, the consensus has always been that it will be an S-model. That means the handset would look nearly identical to its predecessor, with some internal upgrades and at least one big new feature.

iPhone 5S (graphite, gold, Sonny Dickson 001)

And this assumption didn’t just come out of thin air. No, not only has Apple been doing S-model iPhones for the past 4 years, but all of the photos, videos and insider reports we’ve seen up until now have pointed directly to a familiar-looking iPhone 5S.

So what’s the deal? Your guess is as good as mine. I could spend all day talking about Tim Cook’s plan to “double down” on secrecy or the 2011 tear-drop iPhone that never materialized, but I won’t. One thing’s for sure, though, Tuesday just got a lot more interesting.