Apple's developer conference 2025: lots of small cattle

Contents

The dark clouds will not go away over Apple: following an antitrust lawsuit by the US Department of Justice against Alphabet, Apple is likely to be prohibited from continuing to sell Google the default search engine on iDevices. Experts estimate the deal at 20 billion US dollars a year (the equivalent of around 17.4 billion euros). Regulators around the world are demanding that Google open up its operating systems to competitors, which will also reduce revenue from Apple's App Store. And the US government's import tariffs on Apple products manufactured abroad are likely to put additional pressure on revenue.

Major projects have swallowed up billions of US dollars, but bring in nothing (such as the discontinued car project) or only cents (the Vision Pro computer glasses). And Apple's ongoing failure to implement major AI functions has been depressing sales figures for the iPhone, the best horse in the stable, in China for months.

This makes it all the more bitter that the company failed to deliver the AI coup expected for this year: in April, it had to postpone its AI-supported assistant Siri indefinitely. Apple is now lagging the AI trend for the third year since the release of ChatGPT in 2022. Against this backdrop, developers, users, fans, and the media are all the more eager to see how Apple can save itself from the shores of AI after all. If it succeeds, investors hope that all will be well. The new AI iPhones would attract customers in droves and fuel a years-long phase of device renewal.

But for now, Apple must first halt the downward trend. At the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), the home trade fair for developers held at the beginning of June, there were unusually humble announcements: perseverance and diligence – are not enough, according to some critics.

The ultra-short summary: it will still be a while before Siri finally responds in an AI-tuned way, and Apple wants to bridge the time until then with several small AI additions, many detailed improvements and a renovated user interface for iPhones, iPads, and Macs: Liquid Glass.

By Liquid Glass, Apple means control elements such as icons, buttons and menus, some of which are transparent in the new operating systems, but at least appear more vivid and somewhat richer in contrast than before. All of this is intended to make it easier to see the important things, and therefore easier to use the operating systems. The news company Bloomberg believes that Liquid Glass is even an anticipation of the anniversary iPhone expected in 2027 and other devices that will be made largely of glass.

The company also reported the minor detail that in future it will designate operating systems by the respective year. From the fall, this will apply to iOS (iPhone), iPadOS (iPad), macOS (Mac), tvOS (AppleTV), visionOS (Vision Pro) and watchOS (Watch).

Critics see both the revised look and the changed numbering as a maneuver to distract attention from Apple's AI failures. However, it doesn't take much imagination to think that both topics, together with a Siri that thinks for itself, would have been cheered rather than attacked.

Apple received approval for a number of small but substantial improvements, the most important of which we have summarized below. Two comments to start with: three decades after the release of Windows 95 and its “dialer”, Apple is adding a similar telephony tool to its Macs: The Phone.app becomes part of macOS 26 and uses an iPhone logged into the same WLAN to make calls via the Mac speakers and its microphones. The question arises: Why so late, Apple?

Almost the same question could be asked about multitasking and iPadOS: As of iPadOS 26, users have free rein over how many windows are where and in what size on the iPad screen. However, the company probably only hesitated to do this to prevent cannibalization of Mac sales. Now it could apparently no longer withstand the user pressure.