WWDC 2022 Recap: Major Announcements

WWDC 2022

It's WWDC time again! This year marked yet another all-digital event, featuring a live stream of the famous Keynote and Platforms State Of The Union events.

We're going to recap the major announcements from a Developer's perspective, and give you our opinion on what they could mean for the future of Apple platforms.

iOS 16

iOS 16 is bringing a vast amount of improvements in usability, with many new features around communication and accessability. But it's also bringing a few unexpected new features that should excite users and Developers alike.

Reimagined lock screen

Apple is taking the best of Widgets and Watch complications to the lock screen, in an unexpected move that should have developers excited. We'll now have access to a new API that supports Live Activities, allowing us to present data on the lock screen in realtime with custom UI. No more relying on push notifications!

We're also very excited about the fact that Apple is opening a whole new, previously restricted area of the OS for developers. When Widgets were announced, the developer community took it so much further than what we thought was imaginable at launch, so we can’t wait to see the awesome things they will create here.

Sharing

Apple is investing heavily into new sharing mechanisms, and enabling tighter integration with iMessage and FaceTime across iOS 16. You can now stream video via iMessage, tabs in Safari, and even share digital key cards in Wallet. The ecosystem for Apple users is becoming really powerful, but it seems that we are missing some sort of new social platform to tie it all together.

CarPlay

Although there's not many of us developing CarPlay experiences, that might be about to change. Apple announced a massive overhaul of CarPlay, allowing for a much wider range of use across all in-car displays.

The new version includes a wide array of APIs for various car hardware systems, such as speed readouts, fuel gauges, AC control, and even the radio. This should open up for a much wider range of new app experiences, and we think Apple may be paving the way here for CarPlay to break out into a whole new carOS.

macOS Ventura

The new version of macOS is called Ventura, and it seems to focus on stability and incremental improvements. But we still get a couple of brand new, interesting features.

Spotlight

Spotlight has received an upgrade, and will now feature much more information about the results, include previews, and has better support for web content.

We think Spotlight is one of the most important features of macOS, so it’s really nice to see this feature get some attention.

Stage Manager

Stage Manager introduces a new paradigm for managing windows on both macOS and iPadOS (which has new multi-window support on Apple Silicon). Stage Manager works by grouping windows to the left of the screen for quicker switching, making it a effortless way to group windows by context.

We think this feature is going to become a very popular alternative to existing ones such as Spaces and third party window managers.

New Macbooks

We got to see some really nice Mac hardware upgrades in the form of a new Macbook Air and spec-bumped Macbook Pro 13". The new Macbook Air features a modern design that comes in several colors. We're definitely in love with the dark blue model 😍

M2

The new Macs now feature the next generation of Apple Silicon, the M2 processor. It brings performance improvements across the board, from memory speeds to processing and graphics processing. We can't wait to see where Apple will take this new generation in the form of a Pro or Max version.

SDK Updates

Apple announced major updates to their SDKs, with big improvements to Swift and SwiftUI. We're ready to dive in deep and analyse these changes, and we'll cover some of them in upcoming articles here on the blog!

We're super excited about the announcements so far, but there is so much more to cover. Be sure to check in on our upcoming posts for more in-depth analysis about the upcoming releases.