Maybe I’m easily impressed. Maybe I don’t set high expectations. Maybe, in the big picture, a company’s gonna do whatever they want, and they’re not going to be able to please everyone.
Regardless, I thought today’s WWDC keynote was generally pretty good!
If you pay any attention to Apple as a company, you know that every June they have their developer’s conference – WWDC – and every year nerds across the Apple-sphere get all in a tizzy over a 90 minute video announcing what’s to come to various OSes this fall. Developers and Apple fans are either overwhelmingly disappointed at ‘wishcasting’ features that went unfulfilled or pleasantly surprised at new features only Apple could dream up (or borrow from – and generally improve on – an Android idea), or sometimes both at the same time.
Either way, while I am looking forward to today’s announced changes, I generally feel pretty much the way I usually do. There are often cool ideas that don’t always work as well as the demos, minor little enhancements that end up making a big difference, and a few things in between. I’m don’t have strong feelings either way, but as always with these announcements, I feel it’s Apple’s world, and I’m generally happy to (over)pay for whatever they put out there.
So this year at WWDC 25, where everything was branded 26, things were about the same as they always are. Sure, Apple has pissed off a lot of developers, lawyers, governments and companies big and small across the world. And yeah, I think they could lower their fees and play nicer with questionable rules about the horrors surrounding linking out from an app to a website. But all in all, I generally use Apple products because they are better than anything I’ve tried, I willingly do so, and I’m happy with how everything works together.
When it comes to all this litigation and developer angst (remember, I AM a developer too!), I generally fall on the side of – it’s Apple’s ecosystem, and they can set the rules. We either like it or not, and we can always develop for Android or the Web. That being said, I do hope that some of the rules are relaxed and Apple tries to play just a bit nicer with developers over the coming years.
I wasn’t expecting any sort of ‘apology tour’ during the Keynote, and I think those that were don’t know Apple. And that’s fine. They’ll either show it slowly and surely – or they won’t – and some developers will leave and continue to get even angrier. Apple will be fine.
Anyway, all that being said – I think the announcements today are generally pretty positive. The new UI looks cool in pictures – a little less so in practice – but it’s beta 1. Things will change, and everyone flipping out about the glass sky falling just need to chill.
iPad gains some great new features, and we’re much closer to iPad being a ‘real’ computer with the free floating windows, preview, menu bar and ‘stoplight’ window management. iPhone gains a shiny new coat of paint and probably some other things (I felt the iPhone changes were the least interesting of all that was announced today). I’m excited for CarPlay to get widgets and tap-backs in messages (and pinned message conversations – finally!), and the enhancements to watchOS and visionOS seem to be headed in a positive direction.
I have the beta 1 installed on my iPad and so far, yes, there are a few rough animations and things could be a bit smoother. But overall, I think I’m going to like where it’s going. The one thing I desperately want now to come to iPad is Nova by Panic! I still use Coda (ahem Code Editor) and I think it’s still the best, well, code editor, for iPad, even though Panic hasn’t touched it in years!
I’m sure as I get brave enough to install iOS on my phone, and live with the betas over the next couple months, I will again find some big announced features to be not so amazing, some little things to really change my use of these devices, and new cool things we and other developers do with new APIs. In other words, more of the same, but now with Liquid Glass!