iOS 10 is the tenth major release of iOS, released on September 13, 2016, ahead of the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. Its center of gravity was Messages: bubble and full-screen effects, stickers, inline rich previews, and a dedicated iMessage App Store turned Apple's messenger from a texting app into a platform — Apple's answer to the messaging-as-OS wave led by WeChat and Messenger.

The release also retired one of the platform's founding gestures. "Slide to unlock," on every lock screen since 2007, gave way to press-home-to-open, with raise-to-wake and rich lock-screen notifications rebuilding the phone's front door around the widget-and-notification layer.

Messages effects and apps; the Home app for HomeKit; Siri opened to third-party developers (ride hailing, messaging, payments); Photos with on-device face and scene recognition and Memories; redesigned Music and News; deletable built-in apps (finally answering a decade of clutter complaints); multilingual typing; bedtime alarms; and voicemail transcription. The 10.3 update migrated devices to the APFS file system in place — a billion-device filesystem swap executed silently by a point release.

iPhone 7/7 Plus back through iPhone 5, iPad 4th generation and later, and the sixth-generation iPod touch — dropping the iPhone 4s, iPad 2/3, the first iPad mini, and the fifth-generation iPod touch.

iOS 10's Messages platform entrenched iMessage as a social lock-in force (the "green bubble" era dates to these effects), Siri's opening began the assistant's slow decentralization, and deletable stock apps conceded that the platform had grown past its fixed sixteen-app origins. The APFS migration remains one of the largest silent infrastructure swaps in computing history — and the template for how Apple ships plumbing: invisibly, in a point release.