Apple's iOS 7 introduced Jony Ive's redesigned flat interface and a slew of new features built around it. Then iOS 8 brought the Mac and the iPhone closer together with a bunch more feature additions, with more incremental updates on the way to add Watch into the mix. It looks like iOS 9 won't be packed to the gills with more new stuff, but will finally make sure all of it reliably works.

Don't expect the next major iPhone software upgrade, iOS 9, to bring a slew of fancy new features. Rather, the next iOS will stabilize, optimize and generally get the last two years' worth of new stuff working seamlessly on most iPhones.

iOS 9 to Improve Stability, Footprint for 16GB Devices

That's at least according to 9to5Mac's Apple intelligence guru Mark Gurman, who has a reputation for getting the inside scoop on upcoming Apple initiatives.

Gurman's latest anonymously-sourced report asserts that iOS 9 will be focused on "fixing bugs, maintaining stability, and boosting performance," instead of what we've come to expect each year from Apple, simply handing the iPhone crowd a bunch of new bells and whistles to play with.

And Gurman reports that update is coming this year. Here's the most important bit from his blog:

For 2015, iOS 9, which is codenamed Monarch, is going to include a collection of under-the-hood improvements. Sources tell us that iOS 9 engineers are putting a "huge" focus on fixing bugs, maintaining stability, and boosting performance for the new operating system, rather than solely focusing on delivering major new feature additions. Apple will also continue to make efforts to keep the size of the OS and updates manageable, especially for the many millions of iOS device owners with 16GB devices.

Some might be let down by the idea that iOS 9 might not have lots of new things to play with.

But this is good news for a large proportion of iPhone users, many of whom are increasingly skeptical of installing every new iOS update, fearing that each upgrade might destroy their iPhone's battery life, cellular connection, device performance, create crashing issues, break the lockscreen, or you-name-it.

Remember when iOS 7 literally made some users sick?

Many more users with 16GB devices will also be glad to hear that iOS 9 might address the increasing footprint of the operating system in their limited storage space.

Gurman compared the iOS 9 update to Snow Leopard for Mac, which included a ton of under-the-hood fixes after stability issues and bugs began to plague Apple computers under previous updates. But it might be more apt to compare it to what Google tried last year with KitKat, an update that required about 16 percent less storage to install than the previous Jelly Bean OS, and used smartphones' hardware about 13 percent more efficiently.

For Google, the Android 4.4 KitKat update was all about trying to bring users of its highly-fragmented Android operating system into one "big tent" version of the OS, by making the it run better on older and low-end Android smartphones than previous iterations. According to the latest figures (which also showed how miserable Lollipop adoption has been so far), KitKat has at least managed to land on about 40 percent of Android devices, making it the second-largest Android version out there.

Apple iOS 9 Not So Inclusive?

However, for Apple (for whom OS fragmentation has never been much of an issue), it appears that iOS 9 won't be all about inclusion -- something that will come as a letdown for anyone with an iPhone that's more than about two years old.

Gurman speculates that iOS 9 support might be limited to "relatively recent devices," which he defines as devices with the 64-bit A7, A8 and A9 processors: Basically only the iPhone 5s or newer (and not including the iPhone 5c). According to a Localytics report from September of last year (pre-iPhone 6 release) the vast majority of legacy iPhone users -- at least 67 percent -- definitely wouldn't make the cut for the ostensible iOS 9 upgrade.

(Photo : Localyitics)

That sounds like a major problem for Apple and its users. But technologically, it makes sense, since clearly Apple is interested in bringing Mac and iDevices even closer together and Macs have been supporting 64-bit apps since (coincidentally?) Snow Leopard. And 64-bit is, for all intents and purposes, the future of mobile computing as well. Strategically, it would be another incentive to get people to upgrade their old iPhones.

But it would still suck for the huge crowd of users with the iPhone 5 or earlier.

However, reliable as Gurman tends to be, it's still a rumor report, so take all of this with a grain of salt, especially "the 64-bit support" part -- which is more speculation on Gurman's part than anything else. And he could be wrong about the whole thing, anyway.

Time will tell.