A story based on details provided by developers familiar with Apple’s plans reveals that Apple had good reason to focus primarily on the iPhone platform at this year’s WWDC. The company reportedly sought to make iOS catch up with its desktop operating system on a feature level, in order to bring the two platforms into parity.

Apple itself claimed during this year’s developer conference that iOS 4 was the biggest leap, on both a hardware and software level, since the original iPhone had been introduced. Developers say that Apple’s iPhone operating system is now beginning to catch up with the core features of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, according to a report by AppleInsider.

Citing these developers, who, according to the site, are familiar with Apple’s plans, the report notes that iOS 4 improvements now move the core of iPhone OS 2.0 and 3.0 from the level of 2007's Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard into today's Snow Leopard, the latest version of Apple’s desktop OS. One of the first such changes mentioned is support for Blocks.

The report explains that Blocks encapsulate C, C++ or Objective C code and data into a single object, allowing the system to support Grand Central Dispatch, a fundamental technological improvement typical to Snow Leopard, which queues up tasks and schedules them for execution. The technology leverages multi-core CPUs.

The expanded support for powerful regular expression tools for pattern matching, search, and replacement of text content is mentioned as another core set of functionality Apple’s new iOS borrows from Mac OS X. Broad support for IPv6 addressing and DNS is a major new core networking feature, again bringing iOS on par with Snow Leopard. Finally, support for "Anyconnect" SSL VPNs from Cisco and Juniper should lead to even more under-the-hood enhancements in iOS 4, the report adds, with SSL-based VPNs seeing widespread adoption.