Archive for June 3, 2026

Wednesday, June 3, 2026

WWDC 2026 Wish Lists

Daniel Andrews:

If that’s true, here’s what I’m hoping for: fix Liquid Glass on the Mac where it’s genuinely bad. Not a cosmetic tweak, a real rethink of the parts that trade usability for novelty. Bring back some intentionality to the design. Focus on human interaction, stability and speed as primary goals, not footnotes in the release notes. Do small, meaningful things for developers. It’s just one cycle so my hopes are pretty low. But just directional progress and iteration.

Brian Webster:

It’s insane that there’s no way to programmatically create/modify a shortcut. I’m really hoping this gets fixed at WWDC this year. 🤞

[…]

I wish for a headless, agent-first Xcode Server in the menu bar — exposing every UI-only operation as MCP (including the .xcodeproj-mutating ones), queueing builds across projects, and running nightly maintenance on sims and derived data.

Cihat Gündüz:

Here are five things I most want them to ship — the gaps slowing me down most in the era of agentic engineering.

Jordan Morgan:

Consider this — each dub dub session which presents a new API comes packaged with a skill.

[…]

Depending on who you ask, MCPs are amazing or terrible token wasters on their way out. Regardless, I’d love a direct, official line to Apple’s docs.

Krishna Sadasivam:

Apple made no secret that it will be dropping Intel support with macOS 27. Does this bode well for a “Snow Leopard” type release? I really hope so. Renewed focus on software quality would be a strong overture to developers and users alike. Fix bugs and improve performance!

My wishes from last year still stand. I’m not holding my breath for a better designed Systems Setting panel. I also think that Liquid Glass is here to stay, despite the backlash it’s received. I’m hoping Apple will include more options for users to customize the color for both the windows and the Dock.

While I am excited about potential software quality improvements, I remain ambivalent about Apple’s AI push. I see some beneficial value in AI, but I don’t want it to be rammed down my throat.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

I wouldn’t mind some qualitymaxxing at WWDC.

Antoine Van Der Lee:

While I already mentioned an MCP example and we already have an Xcode MCP and CLIs, I just wish for Apple to continue supporting agentic development.

[…]

Similarly, I think they can further open up developer tooling. Apps like Icon Composer and Xcode Instruments don’t work well with agents today and can be further optimized for integrations. Updating App Store Metadata, archiving, and publishing a new release: to automate these, we still have to do a lot of work ourselves. Yes, there’s Xcode Cloud, but I believe this process can be optimized even further with agents.

Majid Jabrayilov:

We already have on-device image generation using the ImagePlayground framework. Why not have image analysis as part of Foundation Models? I think it is the most expected feature along with increased context size.

[…]

Layout protocol is great and allows us to build super custom layouts from flow layout to hexagonal layout. One thing it is really missing at the moment is the option to make it lazy, like LazyVStack or LazyHStack.

[…]

Another important feature I expect almost for three years is the recycling view in SwiftUI. At the moment, all views are displayed eagerly or lazily, but there is no reusing mechanism like in UITableView or UICollectionView.

Joel Breckinridge Bassett:

As outlined years ago, the history of Apple’s text layout architectures has been very convoluted and without any long term vision for some time now. When I ran across Artem Loenko’s post, ‘Native all the way, until you need text’, my first reaction was ‘that’s what happens without a unified vision’. Nobody at Apple seems to be asking ‘where can we take customers and developers?’ The difference in Apple Pay Wallet and text teams is striking. Loenko outlines the basic problem of using TextKit 2[…]

[…]

This is the state of Apple Pay Wallet since the arrival of iOS 18.1 NFC & SE Platform. The only real change needed for 2027 is the expansion of UWB support in CCC digital car keys to include recent UWB FiRa Consortium spec developments in Mobile FeliCa, Mobile MIFARE and Aliro. This would allow UWB Express Mode use with transit cards, hotel keys, home keys, office keys and ID badges.

Fatbobman:

But this year, at least by the time I was putting together this issue, there seemed to be noticeably fewer such posts than around the same time last year. […] Perhaps the issue isn’t a lack of anticipation, but rather that the traditional format of a wishlist is no longer quite sufficient. […] We hope to see updated features, more stable frameworks, and a clearer platform direction.

Sarah Reichelt:

I had not noticed the vanishing WWDC wish lists until you mentioned it, but I had felt no desire to write one this year. We haven’t even got stability in the OS 26s yet and within a couple of weeks we’ll get betas of OS 27s which cannot be any better unless Apple has scrapped 26 and built 27 on top of older, more polished versions. This sounds incredibly unlikely, so they will be piling bugs on top of bugs and hoping nobody notices.

Helge Heß:

I think my top wish for #WWDC would be ways to properly integrate the SwiftNIO event loop into the concurrency runtime (so that async/await can be used w/o hopping threads all the time). Or maybe just make the NIO event loop part of the concurrency runtime in the first place.

Tony Arnold:

My WWDC wishlist? A new, simpler, directly editable Xcode project file.

I’m duplicating a target today for an AppStore vs Direct Distribution variant, and Xcode crashes when I try to duplicate the target via the UI.

So yeah, easier to maintain project files would be a very welcome addition.

Howard Oakley:

It’s now almost a year since we got our first glimpse of Tahoe at WWDC 2025, and eight months since it was released to the public. Despite widespread outcry and detailed criticism, it has changed remarkably little. If you were unconvinced of its merits last September, I see little here that’s likely to persuade you otherwise. The only remaining question is whether, in the razzle of WWDC, Apple will do anything substantial to relieve the dazzle on our displays. I fear I already know the answer.

Warner Crocker:

iCloud syncing. Just make it reliable and give us Sync Now buttons. We get one is Messages. How about the rest of the core apps?

Perpetual Betas: I know, and respect that Apple is continuing to work on each new operating system throughout the year. Kudos. It can’t be easy. That said, find a way to keep from mucking things up on the backend for users who don’t participate in betas. Perpetual beta weirdness is hell for normal users.

[…]

Error Messages. Tell us more. Yes, I know something failed. Tell me more about what failed and point to a solution or information that can help me find out more. 

[…]

App Store. For a company that spends untold amounts of money on its brick and mortar stores, I remain shocked at how they can be proud of the software versions of any of its App Stores. 

Codenter:

I can deal with ugly UI, missing features, whatever. Xcode is different because it constantly makes me waste time on problems that feel completely detached from my code.

[…]

Some days it’s SwiftUI previews: change one harmless view and suddenly previews stop loading, or you get some useless wall of diagnostics that disappears after nuking DerivedData. Some days the simulator decides it doesn’t want to boot after an update. Sometimes indexing eats the whole machine, autocomplete gets drunk, fixed errors keep hanging around, or debugging from Xcode is mysteriously way slower than running the same thing normally.

Helge Heß:

My secret bet for WWDC is OpenSource SwiftUI. Why? Because it’s kinda inevitable that someone else does that otherwise using the current tooling. Just imagine a working List! 🙈

Confidence level: 0.1%. Probably won’t happen because of ignorance(/arrogance?), but would likely be the right decision for that specific project.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

The best kind of WWDC is the WWDC that gives me a big grab-bag of tools to make my apps better along several axes, and doesn’t burden me with a huge amount of needless churn just to tread water.

My favorite WWDCs are the ones where iPad gets a lot of love — there aren’t many of them, and no signs whatsoever that this year will be one of those years.

(A GOAT WWDC would be one where they introduce a true cross-platform successor to UIKit and AppKit and back away from the SwiftUI dumpster-fire)

Previously:

When Dropbox Spawns a Million Folders

Mike Bombich:

The two numbers at the end of that path are the file and folder count for this folder. That “Base.lproj” folder has no files in it, but 1 million subfolders. That’s absolutely bonkers! That really can’t be sane. The app, MenuClock (not the real name), looks like it’s just a simple digital clock, so it really shouldn’t have many items in that folder at all.

I offered my best guess: I suspected that some conflict arose in that application’s bundle specific to Dropbox, and Dropbox ran amok, creating lots of folders (perhaps remotely, then locally, like an echo chamber).

Finder had trouble emptying the trash with so many files, and the customer had to do this separately on each Mac connected to the Dropbox account.

We never did determine the exact underlying cause for the propagation of folders in that application bundle, but the reappearance of the item on various devices after removing it elsewhere suggested that the cloud-syncing software was likely (errantly) recreating the application and its subfolders. With a lot of persistence, John was finally able to eradicate them.

Previously:

macOS Needs Its Spaces Grid Back

Christian Inkster (Hacker News):

With the release of macOS Lion, Apple introduced Mission Control, its new take on virtual desktops that inexplicably restricted them to a horizontal line only. I remember thinking at first that I just hadn’t seen the setting somewhere, Apple wouldn’t just completely change how I used my computer right? right?

[…]

I wasn’t alone in my frustration. Alternative solutions popped up but the best of them Total Spaces caused me weird slowdowns and relied on modifying the system dock which was a no go once that eventually required bypassing system integrity protection.

[…]

That was until a couple of months ago, when I saw that someone had managed to remove the animation from macOS when you move from one space to another, without needing system edits. This animation clearly annoyed some people but never really bothered me. However as soon as I saw a space move without an animation I instantly realised I could solve my complaints.

[…]

I like the idea of a lightweight wrapper around the native spaces, with support for desktops or fullscreen apps. Just with a grid to navigate. But there is a reason pretty much all solutions that controlled native spaces died out. macOS keeps most of the mission control apis locked down. Its not simply a matter of calling a documented api to add a new desktop, or re-arrange them around. But the ability to move to a space instantly meant I could just create a model that took the single row native spaces and presented them like a grid.

He wrote an app called GridLion—and of course ran into lots of problems with permissions for accessibility and screen recording and is excluded from the Mac App Store.

Previously:

WhisperPad Rejected From the Mac App Store

Rene Zelaya (Hacker News):

In April, Apple rejected an update to my Mac dictation app, WhisperPad, under Guideline 2.4.5. Their position was that I was using the accessibility API in a way that wasn't an accessibility use. The app exists because I have a hand injury. Apple had approved earlier versions doing the same thing. This time they did not.

I had used Apple's built-in dictation first, and the experience was a particular kind of frustrating. The transcription was close but rarely right, and every correction meant going back in with the keyboard, deleting, retyping. I was hurting my hands to fix the tool that was supposed to be saving them.

[…]

They responded that they would take a closer look. They told me not to reply in the thread, and said they would come back with a decision. That was April 21st.

Then it went quiet. By May 21st I had heard nothing[…]

Finally he heard back and was rejected again. He didn’t want to “sacrifice the reach of the App Store” so he made a “compromised version” for the store and is also selling the full version via Paddle.

Previously:

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