WWDC 2026
94 points by calvin
94 points by calvin
You'd think I'd forget dubdub? (Title isn't WWDC because the site thinks I'M SCREAMING IN ALL CAPS.)
Stream?
Begin. Donut. Tim by the rainbow. We allegedly love you developers! 1000 app store submissions every hour. 20 developer academies. Did you know Apple has integrated hardware and software? Siri and Apple Intelligence improves.
Craig here. Focus on platform improvements (perf included?), trust and safety, Apple Intelligence. Crack marketing team has a new macOS name. Crazy cel shaded bus isn't cel shaded anymore. Craig bobblehead. Golden Gate.
Platform improvements. Seems to be an iterative release this time, focus on attention to detail. Stacey on that. Huge list of minor papercut features fixed. Performance improvements.
Shubham on design improvements. Liquid Glass iterations; listened to feedback. Refinements for readability, make the shader more complicated to improve more diffuse. Slider to adjust this from very transparent to fully tinted. Apps that use Liquid Glass pick this change up. The liquid glass toolbars on Mac no longer blend into content, sidebars are now full height again, icons in sidebars regain colours. Tighter corner radius. More liquid glass layers in icons for refractions and and sharpness.
Back to Stacey. Again, performance and responsiveness improvements. Faster animations. 30% launch speed improvements on iPhone/iPad through preloading; third-party apps work with this. Photos appear 70% faster via preloading, AirDropping 80% faster. 5x faster external storage on iOS. CPU scheduler improvements. Newer iOS devices have a newer CPU scheduler, but now it's faster and will also be added to older models. Support back to iPhone 11 (and this means iOS 27 will work on iPhone 11, same models). Better network transitions between cellular and Wi-Fi, smarter automatic switching. Low bandwidth situations will no longer be bunged up by iMessage. Search improvements for iOS and macOS. Spotlight indexing is faster and more immediate. Mail search ranking is improved. Feature requests from users. Shared album improvements; Windows and Android users can add photos, Full resolution sharing. Cycle tracking improvements for menopause. Custom AirPods EQ. Panoramas can now be spatial on visionOS, and used as a custom environment. Flyover improvements in Maps for better details.
Back to Craig. Trust and safety. They have a lot of these features already. Uh-oh, kids and teens... More child safety features. Sumbul about that. Based on expert health research. Real orgs I think. Online safety experts too I guess. Stop doomscrolling, children. Age based protection allegedly benefits. AAP Family Media Plan, Apple making a guide based on this for the safety features. Working with researchers about the impact of devices on children.
Raja on how to use this. Make a Child Account, it applies automatically applied restrictions for i.e. browser and app store. Existing accounts can be converted. Control access, what they can see, who they can talk to, guidance. Control access; start focused, add more over time. Setup assistant for the parent to let whem pick what they should be allowed to use.
Ann on this. App Store age ratings. Children can ask for permission to install apps in iMessage. Ask to Browse as well for the web. Works in Safari. Both on by default for under-13, can be enabled for teens. Ask who to talk to (via iMesage). Communication Safety blurs about possible nudity in iMessage and FaceTime; now applies to gore. Screen time management. Time allowances, put multiple apps in a bucket of screen time (i.e. entertainment). Based on guidance from experts like the AAP and parent feedback. Screen time can be adapted based on schedule for time-of-day, i.e. less screen time during school. Fit your routines. See how children are using device screen-time wise and quickly adjust. In-app experiences can have parental controls. Developers will need to implement these. New APIs for integrating into parental controls, i.e. sensitive content analysis or parental permission requests. Privacy preserving age range API.
Craig is back. Website to sum this up and get started. I guess all this is to get the regulators off their backs. Apple Intelligence time. Craig doesn't like these AI boosters promoting AI for the sake of it rather than making a sensible product with it. Very pointed at their competitors. Next generation of Apple Intelligence. New architecture, new Siri, app improvements. Apple foundation models; new ones now based on Google Gemini models. On-device or on trusted private cloud compute servers. Image generation and understanding models. Beefier models for speech recognition, voices, and NLP. Orchestration of models between apps? Understand user's personal context with Spotlight's semantic index, third party apps can use it. Broad world knowledge using web search and PCC to synthesize results. App actions for doing things with it. On-screen awareness. Allegedly intended to be useful for users. Privacy first; their AI competitors are very bad at this. On-device processing when possible, PCC otherwise. Verifiable, no data stored or shared.
Mike on new Siri. Siri AI. Use Apple Intelligence features that Craig mentioned. No longer helpless. More conversational. Siri app to refer to previous conversations. Visual intelligence. Writing and editing with Siri. Example usage. Ask about i.e. an artist's concert in your city, and how to get tickets, and get reminders about it, then play the artist's songs. Identify a beach, figure out when a friend moved per his old email about it, then make a custom route that includes both. Show specific photos from a specific trip, then make a shared album only including photos with specific people just by asking. For newer devices that can do more on-device, improved voice model, more customization options for the voice. Dictation improvements in every app. Accessible via CarPlay and AirPods.
Justin with more. Better conversations, more than one-shot tasks. System-wide, tweaked for each platform. Swipe down from dynamic island or say Hey Siri, or use the side button for more details, then the Siri response becomes a conversation for further elaboration. Another example. For macOS, it's integrated into Spotlight and context menus. Ask Siri a question from the Spotlight prompt. Ask about content on your Mac too. Select multiple files from Finder, pick the Siri option from the context menu, then ask Siri to do something with the files.
Back to Mike. Conversational Siri on iPad. Dedicated Siri app for conversations and summaries of your history. Private sync on iCloud. watchOS too. New App Grid on watchOS. For visionOS, movable Siri, eye contact based Siri conversations.
Seb with more. Visual Intelligence with Siri mode in the camera, press shutter to ask, and saved to Siri. Uses foundation models. Take action based on images. VisInt keyboard shortcut for Mac users Ask about what's on screen too. For visionOS, gaze based visual intelligence based on what's in an app or what you're looking at IRL. Writing Tools improvements in apps. Adapts to your current writing style. Feedback on your current writing. Automatic proofreading across system and apps.
Craig. Summarizing what they just said. English only for now, more languages later. Apple Intelligence integration into apps. Beth on that. Ai tab management. Already many tools to manage your tab horde. Ask it to organize tabs into topics, and can do so automatically. Close an entire topic, or turn it into a group. Sometimes you keep tabs open for i..e a scheduled thing. Automatically notify you about a tab's contents changing (and reload automatically), and close it while Safari manages it and then alerts you when it matters. Privacy first. Beat a website into shape by asking Safari to create an extension for you. Passwords improvements. It can automatically change passwords on sites for you, using Safari agentically. Messages now offers one-tap suggestions based on messages, like photo sharing or calendar events. Mail and Calendar offer suggestions too. Third-party apps can participate in this. Phone calls can automatically pull up relevant information based on the other party (i.e. flight info if you're calling an airline). Entirely on device.
Cecilia with more app improvements. Home and Shortcuts. Coalesce HomeKit device notifications. Analyze security recordings and summarize what happens. Stitch clips from security cameras together. Show interesting events, and search across recordings. Shortcuts improvements. Making shortcuts can be a little tedious. Describe a shortcut without code.
Leslie for expressing yourself. Image Playgrounds. Improved slop, can be done in PCC. Pickable styles, can be done via natural language. Image modification based on natural language. Select objects via touch to be more specific. Specify image dimensions for purpose. Generate for i.e. message backgrounds or lock screen wallpapers. Suggestions based on photos. API for this.
To Alok for Photos. Photos AI enhancements should respect photographers' intent. Clean up improvements, infill improvement for complex scenes. Extend tool for changing aspect ratios, straightening images, more space for portraits, etc. Spatial reframing to change framing in post. Drag to change perspective as if you moved the camera. You'll see blur that will be filled in by models. Can zoom in for adjusting framing. Done via on-device and PCC models. Only fills in the missing parts from a reframe, doesn't replace existing parts. Even older photos or from other cameras can have this done.
Back to Craig. Some features have usage limits. iCloud+ has more usage limits for Apple Intelligence including for i.e. security camera analysis. Privacy focus. Same devices will be supported. More powerful models will require M3 Macs, M4 iPads, or latest iPhone SoCs. Developers can try new Siri today, customer beta later. No EU availability for new Siri. Not yet in PRC either. APIs for Apple Intelligence? Use existing ones like Intents, it uses those. If you adopt those, you already integrate into new Siri. Use the new foundation models via the same API, including using on-device or PCC models with it. Apps should be enhanced with AI, not replaced. Agentic coding in Xcode. Custom skills, choose your preferred model (now including Gemini), integrate other services. Device Hub, which seems to be improved Simulator with AI integration. Platforms State of the Union and new sessions coming up.
Back to Tim. Summarization of the topics. Dev betas today, public beta next month, release in fall. This is his last WWDC. Sendoff.
Thank you. I’ve been reading your summary every year since 2020 and I really appreciate the effort.
I wish I'd known about calvin's summaries, it would have saved me the tedious watching of the keynote and Federighi's utterly unfunny marijuana jokes. It's not clear to me if liquid ass has been de-enshittified back to a usable state yet.
(Title isn't WWDC because the site thinks I'M SCREAMING IN ALL CAPS.)
uh, why just @calvin?
&& !(title =~ /WWDC .*\d{4}/ && (user&.username == "calvin" || user&.is_moderator?))
He’s written WWDC summaries for years, it’s a fun tradition.
I very much enjoy his summaries and look forward to them every WWDC. However, I'm not in favour of carving out a special permission just for him. What if someone else wants to do WWDC reporting next year? This kind of favouritism goes against the ethos of this site, IMHO.
You aren't supposed to spoil stories from the future in your test files. Although business news are off-topic anyway :)
On a more serious note, I wonder if showing a warning when words like "acquire" are in the title is feasible (I guess people wanting to discuss atomics would be scared away too).
So if dread pirate calvin ever decided to swap nicks with someone, new calvin would get their turn to scream about WWDC?
Also I think you might have made the space required for a bare "WWDC "
Ok this is a fun commit, but I think a better generalization would be to ignore acronyms using https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/Inflector/Inflections.html#method-i-acronym
Haha that is one of the silliest commits I've seen in a while. It has unit tests and everything!
This is one of those you should enable behind a feature flag, but then, I'm too corporate poisoned by now. :)
This new Safari that got an agent-like wrapper around it via their AI seems to be actually smart direction. I wish it had an Arc/Zen-like sidebar.
It's ridiculous that Polish is still not supported by their AI frameworks. Come on!
The Core AI framework is one of the most interesting bits to me. It was briefly mentioned that it would work with “your” local models, not only Apple Foundation models. Easily integrating models of your choice in your apps would be pretty cool!
I was hoping that Xcode would be among the apps whose performance has increased 5x…
Cloud+ subscription for increased usage limits, not available in the EU (c‘mon..! it’s not like the DMA is that new…), and basically needs a 17 Pro.
Silly me for getting a 16 pro when they teased this stuff last year.
not available in the EU (c‘mon..! it’s not like the DMA is that new…)
I mean, part of it is definitely a deliberate decision to get people to blame the DMA for it to try to get consumers to fight to repeal it. Companies have been using that playbook for about a century at this point. Usually works better though, I haven't really seen people call for the repeal of the DMA.
Silly me for getting a 16 pro when they teased this stuff last year.
As a friend of mine put it years ago: Apple giveth... Apple taketh.
I don't mind this new iteration of Snow Leopard. The AI features I would take or leave, but honestly mostly leave, but more optimisation and speed are always welcome.
That being said, the fact that my Apple Watch Ultra doesn't get WatchOS 27 feels slightly criminal.
But then again, they added a whole Feature this time, one (1), that being new Siri.
The breakdown is basically
Which means, if you leave Apple Intelligence off, it's the Snow Leopard cycle you've probably been wishing for?
Ok their first example for intelligent Siri is so dumb and not useful. Their main use case for this probably years in the making millions worth feature is taking this message:
From Aga at 9:14 AM Have you heard of Calathea? It's a patterned tropical houseplant...
And producing this so much clearer text:
Aga sent you a message about Calathea. > She described it as a patterned tropical houseplant.
Developers can run their own LLMs (with middleware) using the Apple's Engine now: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/339/
Bring an LLM provider to the Foundation Models framework
Extend the Foundation Models framework by implementing a LanguageModelExecutor for new models. Explore how to interface with the LanguageModelSession's transcript, manage session state effectively, and optimize KV cache utilization. Find out how to support custom segment types and unlock advanced capabilities for your generative AI features.
Can we tag this as vibecoding? Sure seems like hyping pro-AI shiny new capitalist tech to me, and I thought lobsters dunked on that. Maybe I am confused, and/or Apple’s just grandfathered in.
The developer conference for {Apple}OS is “vibe coding”?
Some of us use all this “pro-AI shiny new capitalist tech” for rubber-ducking and XP. Apple's playbook is aimed at making that workable on my own machine, and keeping my context out of ad tech's hands: LGTM…
Vibecoding is a nutrient-free sugar high. XP w/ an LLM that's read "all the code" is cybernetic augmentation.
Eh, major developer events contain a lot of AI right now (because of the Shareholders) but it's a bit reductive to tag the entire event because of it.
I guess the easy way to put it is, if someone has blocked the vibecoding tag because they don't want to see posts about how easy it is to make a shiny frontend with Claude, would they expect to see this post blocked? My guess is "no".
Sure seems like hyping pro-AI shiny new capitalist tech to me, and I thought lobsters dunked on that.
Lobsters isn't a hivemind, on this site you both have people who want absolutely nothing to do with it, and people who like it and want to discuss it. That's why it's a tag, and not off-topic.
Lobsters isn't a hivemind, on this site you both have people who want absolutely nothing to do with it, and people who like it and want to discuss it.
The problem is that the first group, in large part, does not want to accept the existence and/or legitimacy of the second group.
Recently so many stories were marked with "vibecoding", which were interesting and not about vibecoding, that I had to remove that filter.
Eh, major developer events contain a lot of AI right now (because of the Shareholders) but it's a bit reductive to tag the entire event because of it.
If they don't want the tag then they could always choose better topics to talk about next time.
I don't think it makes sense to give Apple special treatment because of some superposition argument between "Apple doesn't give a shit about us anyway" and "But what if we hurt Apple's feelings for tagging their talk as what it is?".
Fewer things need the vibecoding tag. This one just happens to make a great show case as to why
I don’t know about the rest of y’all, but I’m just desperately waiting for Siri to have:
On the first point it’s actually laughable how bad Siri is at understanding you. It’s like seriously a joke. It feels like they haven’t updated the model they use since 2013. Why they do not just use whisper I have absolutely no idea.
In terms of actual assistantness, hopefully that’s coming now but I feel like we’ve been waiting forever for one of these assistants to actually nail LLM usage well and start giving a sense of true intelligence when speaking to them. I don’t understand why they’ve waited so long to integrate LLMs better.