WWDC 2025 Preview
The 2025 Worldwide Developers Conference is just a few days away, with the keynote event set to take place on Monday, June 9. Ahead of Apple’s big software debut, we’ve rounded up all of the rumors that we’ve heard so far about iOS 26, macOS 26, and Apple’s other updates.
Today, Apple announced the winners and finalists of this year’s Apple Design Awards, celebrating 12 standout apps and games that set a high bar in design.
Congrats to all of this year’s Apple Design Award winners! Sad that there’s no ceremony this year, though :(
New for WWDC25 — online group labs! Register now to join Apple engineers online to ask questions, get advice, and follow the discussion about the week’s biggest announcements in real time, Tuesday, June 10 through Friday, June 13!
So, a number of us decided to start this repository to host links to various WWDC events, news, and tutorials from around the community. That means this repo will contain links to events being organized around our community, plus content from SwiftUI Lab, Hacking with Swift, Donny Wals, Swift with Majid, and many more – and we would love to share your articles too.
WWDC25 is nearly upon us, and it felt only fitting to release a new wallpaper to decorate your desktop for the occasion.
Today, I’m proud to give you the eleventh annual Swiftjective-C W.W.D.C. Pregame Quiz featuring Apple Intelligence, Jony Ive and more!
It’s time for our 10th annual competition regarding what will happen at Apple’s WWDC keynote! What will be announced? Will there be a major redesign? What will the AI story be? We predict it all!
My big question for this year’s WWDC is: Will Apple apologize, or even acknowledge, the fact that it announced numerous AI features at this same event last year that are still not shipping? Even after having attended a couple of dozen WWDCs, I really don’t know which way Apple will go.
A WWDC that is rumored to promise major iPad UX updates, sweeping OS redesigns, and built-in LLMs I can build new features atop? Honestly, that could be a dream WWDC. It could spur me on to ship major new versions of all my apps with tons of new things.
It could go very wrong, too — we had to live with the consequences of the iOS 7 redesign for a long time before apps started to approach looking nice again.
The reason I titled this post “Thoughts and Prayers Heading into WWDC 2025” isn’t that I’m offering up good vibes for Apple as they try to work out of the messes they’ve mostly created for themselves. I’m actually hoping — most likely against hope — that Apple will finally clean up some of the annoyances they’ve neglected over several generations of iOS and macOS.
In so many years past, developers have entered WWDC disgruntled and generally left pretty enthusiastic and hopeful. I’m having a hard time picturing this happening in a couple weeks without some massive changes. (And even then, we’ll only be cautiously trusting.) I guess we’ll see.
Apple can give a fresh coat of paint to all their operating systems but unless you fix the buggy state of everything Apple… well, if you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig.
I don’t know if the news media or even Apple engineers understand the existential dread that developers can feel about WWDC. The latter are excited to show what they’ve done, the former to report it, and we’re excited too, but also terrified.
For developers, WWDC is like an annual employee performance review, from which we could get a big raise (new features and platforms), or we could get fired (Sherlocked, deprecated), although none of that actually depends on on our past performance.
I’m not excited at all. It’s become more a “what are they going to screw up this time” vibe
The first 12 or so years that I was writing Mac OS X apps, it was always exciting to anticipate what new features or frameworks would be announced and how I could leverage them to improve my apps. The last 12 or so years, Apple has given speeches about how much they love developers and then gone on to make changes that felt like they were meant to kill my apps, make them harder to use and harder for customers to discover, and drown us all in rising sea of bugs.
Previously:
- WWDC 2025 Wish Lists
- The Talk Show Live, Without Apple
- Apple Operating System Version Years
- Rumored Redesign in iOS 19 and macOS 16
- WWDC 2024 Preview
Update (2025-06-09): Andy Park:
mindblowingly on point.
But his closing thoughts really sting as an Apple fan. As my grandma used to say: quien se pica, es porque ají come, which closest translation might be: If the shoe fits, wear it..
I have the same sentiment as your last paragraph
I have come to accept that WWDC is an annual ritual of getting new drop of Apple half-hearted efforts and bugs on top of previous half-hearted, unfinished and unfixed efforts and bugs
The pile just keeps growing every year and there is never any closure to anything any more
The older technologies had a beginning and end, they were somewhat focused and stable
But anything from the past ten years feels like an unstable shaky mess
new things used to seem unfinished but conceptually solid. Now they feel like proof of concepts that haven’t been thought through. The only exception I can think of is Combine but that was quickly abandoned in favour of Observation and Async algorithms, both of which are a mess.
We’re at the point where a big change is putting a new coat of paint on our creations. Sure, it looks nice, and customers will love it. But it’s a lot of work and none of it sparks our imaginations.
But what is exciting these days?
Large Language Models: a huge body of statistical data that can be leveraged to solve problems that have heretofore been intractable. It’s the most exciting technology in decades because it lets our imaginations run wild and create new things.
And that’s a problem for developers in Apple’s ecosystem. Because while the company has done a significant amount of research with these models, and includes one on every iPhone, iPad, and Mac, the core capabilities of the mechanism are out of reach.
[…]
Instead of building our own ideas on top of an LLM, we’re supposed to provide the internal details of our apps to Apple so they can do it on our behalf.
Allison Johnson (Hacker News):
Apple is on defense at WWDC. Tim Cook’s in the pressure cooker.
I am enmeshed in the Apple ecosystem so, in some ways, it should be exciting the company has to try a little harder. I am not. I do not think anyone expects Apple will sell dramatically fewer iPhones this year, nor will it lose subscribers to services, its increasingly important recurring revenue printer. Apple was a more interesting company when it could not be certain its customers would buy more stuff. I hope, after the Vision Pro’s release, it is also understanding it cannot take its developer base for granted, either.
[…]
I am, as ever, looking forward to seeing what is being announced tomorrow, albeit with the understanding I will be watching a slick infomercial possibly containing concept videos. It is hard to see how one could be a fan of a multi-trillion-dollar company. I am just a customer, like a billion-plus others.
We had a good mix of people from all across the Apple community attend my Pre-WWDC25 Gathering in downtown San Jose.
[…]
With the Pre-WWDC25 Gathering behind me, I’m looking forward to the rest of the week at WWDC25. I’ve read most of the rumors and I’m especially curious about the new design direction—and how it might affect the apps I currently have on the App Store. Automation is near and dear to my heart, so I’ll be keeping a close eye on any updates to Shortcuts and App Intents.
We all have our wishlist of what we hope to see at WWDC, and today, I am presenting my 5th Annual WWDC Bingo Board of my hopes, prognostications, and stagecraft predictions at this year’s event!
Previously:
12 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
š everyone seems to be dreading it..(me too)
IMO it all started going downhill when WWDC became the Swift propaganda show.
Force Swift adoption at all costs. Whatever bugs the forced rewrites cause does not matter.
I think even people who like Swift probably want Apple to chill out. Storekit 1 is deprecated for StoreKit2. Nobody enjoys rewriting this type of code and getting nothing for it (users donāt know or care about your Storekit rewrite it is completely invisible to them). They could have improved Storekit in a more backward compatible way.
SO whatās next CoreData? I donāt even like Core Data but how could they possibly get rid of it without blowing up the world? But who knows they let these Swift people put their filthy fingers on everything. What about the diff types of app extensions? Whatās going kaputz? Whatās going to be reintroduced as a ānew featureā in SwiftUI? Are they going to throw out my entire storyboard file!?!?
This is not how you want your developers to be feeling. Not healthy. Everyone would jump ship in a second if another company makes a compelling hardware product and opens with a development program
@ObjC4Life AppleScript and Core Data are what Iām most worried about. Two former crown jewels that tons of stuff is built on but which they donāt seem to care about anymore. Shortcuts and SwiftData are supposedly the future but are extremely disappointing.
-- I like using Swift, but understand how frequent changes to it are a pain. Still haven't upgraded to 6.0, much less 6.2. Hopefully won't need to this summer. As for OpenGL, it's been deprecated since 2018 - or 2019, too far away to recall. At least Apple gave me a way to squelch the build warnings. But after 2 years of *not* upgrading to the new Xcode until months after release, I feel a need to upgrade one of my MacBooks to Xcode beta - note, not macOS - sometime this month. Too many things may break in my apps.
-- My apps also do not use SwiftUI. I refuse to move to it. The upgrade from Swift 3 to 4 was painful enough, and SwiftUI for me means I'll simply retire. If they haven't figured out a way to get rid of GLKit yet, I figure it'll be at least 10 more years of UIKit. Too many production apps depend on it. But yeah, sometimes it feels like Apple thinks "where the puck is headed" is actually a few miles down the ice.
Iām still developing with Obj-C and AppKit. Bugs aside, its a stable environment. Though presumably an eventual dead end. When that day comes, Iāll move to Electron (yuck) over staying in Apples walled garden.
There's very little that's beautiful or admirable about Apple's tech stack or direction anymore. Even if they fixed every bug, their vision of computing is a locked-down console for their services and a tollbooth for everyone else. I am not interested in contributing to that, especially when every year piles on more problems and friction just to tread water.
@ObjC4Life @bob I feel you.
@Dave Apple lost sight of the puck on Oct 2011. They're skating to where the shareholders are.
UI revs always make feel bad for developers who are expected to adopt the new bright shiny but probably can't really charge for an update that is just a 'to keep current' thing. Lots of work for not much return.
Given that Apple's apps are all over the place makes it even weirder.
I am still waiting for the swap of Craig Federighi with Scott Forstall. But then the remaining problem would be the CEO. Thereās only so much you can do with outstanding procurement, manufacturing and logistics to assist product development. An even bigger problem is nowadays the much larger IT customers base with disposable income, and even larger disposable time, spend it on platforms watching videos, posting something and burning joules for nothing.
@Michael Eagerly waiting to hear your opinion the redesign, macOS in particular š¤£š¤£š¤£ but also overall.
Strange, I'm mostly excited.
-- SwiftUI felt like it was muted, relegated to the last half of the Platform State of the Union.
-- Very surprised at everything - windowing in particular - added to iPadOS. Need to see how close to macOS it really is.
-- While I like the UI changes to iOS, not so much when they said older UI/UX will not work next year because of Liguid Glass. (I really hope I misheard that.)
-- Surprised that so many WWDC sessions were available immediately after the SoU. Downloading betas seem better too.
-- Wonder what apps this Icon Composer may have Sherlaoked.
-- While no apologies for promises not kept last year for AI (your choice of what the AI stands for), huge downplay in the keynote. And they opened up their API for it.
After (1) the last 6 months politically, (2) the last few years with Apple... I came into today with what I'd call "guarded hope". Now I'd say simply "hope". Please note, I'm not ObjC nor SwiftUI, while I used to do Windows, never AppKit. So considering how muted things were, I'd qualify my opinion as hope.
Muted is a good summary. Maybe they realised there are limits to what they can achieve and a complete redesign of all UI is enough for one year.
@Kristoffer even that would be progress. Seeing the slightest bit of humility out of them about anything is encouraging.
Most of the consumer facing stuff completely leaked. But other than the redesign it did seem to be largely improvements to basic apps and a lot of "omg finally" on the summary card.
The bar was set pretty low this year, but it seems they managed to mostly clear it.