WWDC25: Apple's New Design, Smarter AI, and iOS 26 Across All Devices
WWDC25: Apple's New Design, Smarter AI, and iOS 26 Across All Devices
Apple opened its annual Worldwide Developers Conference on June 9, 2025, with a keynote that announced three main themes: a redesigned visual look called "Liquid Glass" coming to all Apple devices, the next generation of Apple Intelligence features rolling out to iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watches, and Vision Pro headsets, and a set of new features in iOS 26 that touch everything from your car's display to a brand-new games app.
The conference runs online through June 13, with videos available on the Apple Developer portal.
Liquid Glass: A Fresh Look Across All Apple Devices
The most obvious change in this cycle is "Liquid Glass," Apple's new design language rolling out to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and visionOS. The approach uses see-through layers and depth effects, with the device's graphics processor creating real-time light effects and surface reflections rather than using static blurred backgrounds or flat colors.
For app developers, this matters. A design system overhaul this broad means checking how buttons, menus, and custom-built interface elements look and work with the new visual style, and making sure text remains easy to read, especially when it sits over transparent or shimmering backgrounds. Apple typically provides tools and guidance to help developers migrate their apps during major design shifts like this.
This timing echoes something we've seen before. In 2013, Apple moved iOS to a flat design — stripping away the shiny, beveled look of earlier versions — and it took roughly a year to 18 months before most third-party apps fully caught up to the new aesthetic. Whether Liquid Glass follows the same path will depend on how much of the work Apple automates in its developer tools. If SwiftUI — Apple's framework for building interfaces — handles Liquid Glass effects automatically for standard buttons and menus, adoption should move faster. If developers have to redesign custom elements by hand, the rollout will take longer.
Apple Intelligence Expands to More Devices
Apple Intelligence — Apple's family of AI-powered features for writing, image generation, and smarter Siri — is now coming to Apple Watch and Vision Pro, in addition to iPhone, iPad, and Mac. That means every major Apple device now gets some form of AI assistance.
Here is how it works. Apple doesn't run all AI tasks the same way. Simple tasks — like analyzing text on your device or generating suggestions while you type — happen directly on your phone or watch, where processing is fast and your data stays private. Harder tasks, like creating images or understanding context across multiple apps, get sent to Apple's special servers (called Private Cloud Compute) that run the same chips as your iPhone. Apple has made privacy a core part of this architecture from the start: the servers are built so that Apple engineers cannot see what you're doing, and the company publishes the code so independent experts can verify it.
Adding Apple Watch and Vision Pro to this system is challenging because these devices use less power and storage than an iPhone. Apple has likely either made the simpler on-device AI tasks more efficient, or made the system smarter about deciding when to send work to the servers — possibly both.
New AI features announced include writing assistance, image creation, smarter voice commands that understand what you're doing in an app, and the ability to chain actions across apps — for example, asking Siri to find a contact in one app and send a message in another. That cross-app reasoning is where power users will see the biggest productivity boost.
I have watched my own children experience multiple waves of voice assistant promises — from early Siri to Alexa and Google Assistant — and I have seen how often the announcements sound more impressive than the real-world experience. The fact that Apple Intelligence runs partly on your device and is tied to Apple's tightly integrated hardware design addresses some of the reasons earlier assistants underwhelmed. Whether it executes at scale, though, we'll only know once people start using it.
iOS 26: A Numbering Change and New Features
iOS 26 moves to calendar-year version numbers — a small but clarifying change — and brings a meaningful set of new features across system apps.
CarPlay, Apple's interface for cars, gets enhancements that Apple hasn't fully described yet, but the direction points toward deeper integration with your car's systems and richer displays on your dashboard. Maps and Wallet are adding features too. Wallet updates likely include more tap-to-pay options and new kinds of digital credentials — a path Apple has been building since it first let you add a driver's license to your phone.
Apple Music is in the update cycle, though Apple's keynote didn't go into detail — more specifics tend to emerge across the conference week.
The item that matters for game developers is a new standalone Apple Games app. iOS has never had a single hub for discovering games the way Xbox or PlayStation do — Game Center existed for that purpose but never fully caught on. Apple Games appears to consolidate game discovery, achievements, and social features. For developers already selling games on the App Store, the question is whether this new app makes it easier for players to find their game, or if it mostly reorganizes existing features in a new wrapper.
Developer Tools and Technologies
Apple announced new tools for developers including new APIs, updates to Xcode (Apple's development environment), and expanded frameworks across the platform. The full details emerge over the conference week, but the overall direction is consistent with recent years: deeper integration of Swift concurrency (a system for managing multiple tasks at once), more ready-made interface components updated for Liquid Glass, and more on-device AI capabilities through Core ML.
For development teams running automated test pipelines, even "minor" Xcode changes can affect how quickly your code builds and tests run. The safest approach, as always: test against the early developer beta before you assume your pipeline is still fast.
What This Adds Up To
The WWDC25 keynote is not a single product announcement but a direction-setting moment for Apple's entire platform. Liquid Glass resets the visual look across all Apple devices at once — an ambitious move that, if it works smoothly, should make it easier for developers to build apps that feel at home on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Apple Intelligence extending to Apple Watch and Vision Pro signals that the company sees on-device AI as a core feature for every device, not just phones.
The iOS 26 updates — CarPlay, Maps, Wallet, Music, and Apple Games — are each a small addition on their own, but together they fill in features that have been missing for years.
For developers, the immediate work is what it always is at WWDC: download the beta, run your apps through their paces, and start experimenting with the new design system. Liquid Glass is the kind of change where early adopters who get it right will stand out, while apps that haven't updated will start to look dated by fall.
The full session schedule and technical documentation are available at developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc2025/.
