Apple is known to do this whenever development hits a bump in the road

Apr 3, 2013 06:59 GMT  ·  By

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber claims to have heard that Apple is moving developers from OS X 10.9 over to iOS 7, in an effort to get the new mobile OS back on track for its summer debut.

Apple generally rolls out a major new version of its mobile operating system every summer but, this time around, the launch isn’t so certain anymore.

People familiar with the company’s software development are telling pundit John Gruber that “iOS 7 is running behind, and engineers have been pulled from OS X 10.9 to work on it.”

Gruber points out to a similar situation in the past when Apple was forced to pull engineers from the development of Mac OS X Leopard and reassign them duties involving the development of iOS (then dubbed iPhone OS).

At the time, Apple released an official statement, saying, “iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team.”

“As a result, we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us,” the company said in 2007.

As noted above, Apple generally releases new iOS versions every summer. The company uses its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) as the launch pad.

The conference is mostly a software-centric event, but Apple also announces new hardware products at the opening keynote.

This year, most bets are on a summer launch of the iPhone 5S, a revision of the current iPhone model which may include biometrics technology, as well as the usual CPU speed bump, and camera upgrades.