WWDC 2025

Apple held their annual WWDC conference starting Monday, June 9th, where announcements touched on every platform across the entire Apple ecosystem. New features build greater platform parity, Apple Intelligence continues to grow and expand, and a radical design update promises to deliver a joyful and delightful content-focused experience across all Apple devices.

Here’s a quick list of the top-priority takeaways that clients and developers should be planning for in their roadmaps for the coming year:

iOS 18, iPhone 16, watchOS 11, visionOS 2, tvOS 18, macOS Sequoia, Xcode 16… and the list goes on. If you’ve had a hard time keeping track of which version number is which, you’re not alone!

Thankfully, life’s about to get easier. This year, Apple is rolling out a simplified year-based OS naming scheme across all their platforms. This will kick off with ‘26 and the debut of iOS 26, iPadOS 26, tvOS 26, watchOS 26, visionOS 26, macOS 26, and Xcode 26.

The biggest design overhaul since iOS 7 debuts this year. Dubbed “Liquid Glass”, this is a wide-reaching visual update that emphasizes fluidity, dynamism, transformation, and translucency. It’s heavily inspired by the design style that debuted with visionOS and creates the sensation that user interface elements are imbued directly into the glass screen.

And this new design paradigm is rolling out to every platform in the Apple ecosystem, and not just iOS, ensuring a consistent and fresh user experience across every device.

Designers and developers should plan on spending a fair amount of time updating your app designs to comply with the new Liquid Glass paradigm. Apple emphasized that every control within the system has been updated, with especially noteworthy functional updates to core components including the tab bar, navigation bar, popover menus, and search bars.

App icons will also need to be updated for the new Liquid Glass style, and Apple is releasing a new tool called Icon Composer to help designers craft these icons with support for multiple layers, styles, and color combinations.

Cross-platform apps written in frameworks like React Native and Flutter will likely require additional updates to their core frameworks and third-party components before supporting the new Liquid Design system, so keep an eye on their respective timelines for a sense of when they’ll be updated for your apps to use.

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Apple also announced a set of new Apple Intelligence integrations that developers can leverage to build robust AI-powered experiences within their own apps.

The new Foundation Models framework gives app developers the ability to tap directly into Apple’s own large language model to develop AI-powered features that run directly on the device, offline, and with no usage costs. Foundation Models can be used to generate content, transform data, and even invoke actions within your app.

And the App Intents API remains the core integration path into Apple Intelligence experiences, allowing developers to expose actions that other apps can take within your app, and to surface contextual app content that other parts of the system might find useful. And a well-structured App Intents implementation can also power other features including App Shortcuts, Widgets, Spotlight integrations, and Action button activities.

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Widgets and Live Activities are expanding into CarPlay, macOS, and visionOS.

CarPlay Widgets and Live Activities will give users quick access to app shortcuts and bits of information while keeping their focus on the road, offering a capable but safe experience in the car.
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iPhone Live Activities can now appear on macOS 26, giving users the chance to easily track real-time events from the menu bar. They’re also interactive when tapped, presenting the mirrored screen of the user’s iPhone right on the macOS display and allowing users to take action from there.
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Widgets can also be placed within the spatial environment in visionOS 26, where they can be tweaked and positioned to appear hung on a wall, embedded into a picture frame, and even offering a glimpse into another place through a virtual portal.
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iPadOS 26 even leverages Live Activities to let users track the progress of long-running background tasks. This is a great example of how Live Activities can be used to integrate helpful insights into the user’s multi-tasking experience and as a fundamental user interface component for getting things done.

Developers can look forward to a trove of enhancements coming to Xcode. Excitingly, the long-awaited Swift Assist is making its first appearance in the beta release of Xcode 26. Swift Assist promises to deliver impressive efficiencies to the development workflow, allowing developers to write code using natural language prompts like “build me a table view for this content”, “write me a controller to fetch data from this endpoint”, “help me refactor this view to SwiftUI”, and “write me some high-level documentation for this class”.

Apple also announced support for integrations with third-party model providers, including ChatGPT, built right into Xcode. These will give users the flexibility to choose the right provider and model for their needs while leveraging the powerful, deeply-integrated environment provided by Xcode.

The beta version of Xcode 26 is available today.

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Much like the “Privacy Nutrition Labels” that debuted in 2020, Apple announced the upcoming arrival of “Accessibility Nutrition Labels”. These will give users quick glimpses into the accessibility features your app supports, including VoiceOver, Voice Control, dynamic text sizing, and dark mode.

Rolling out as a voluntary feature to start, these accessibility reports will eventually become mandatory for app submissions.

This is a perfect opportunity to review your accessibility feature implementations in preparation for reporting in the App Store. And if you’ve fallen behind, there’s never been a better time to update your apps to ensure you’re providing best-in-class accessibility experiences to the wide audience of users who want to love your app.

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Developer betas of the ‘26 versions of each OS are available now, with public betas scheduled for release next month in July, and the final public releases scheduled for this fall.

We’ll be tuning in throughout the week for the remaining sessions, and we look forward to following up with additional insights and deeper dives into the new features being announced!

Image credit Apple