WWDC Favorites (2025 Edition)

I’m back for another year with a grab bag of my favorite announcements from this year’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference. It was a great week with lots to be excited about from Apple. Here’s what I’m looking forward to most.

  • Liquid Glass: The design of Apple’s operating systems developed iteratively from iOS 7 to the point that it felt like it had reached its logical end point – that is, until visionOS showed up and brought something totally new. I’m excited to see the other platforms adopting the nicest visual cues from visionOS, and I’ll be interested to see how the new design language develops over the beta period. It’s very pretty and has the potential to be an amazing next step for Apple design.

  • Widgets on Vision Pro: One of the low-hanging wishlist items I had when reviewing visionOS 2 last year was for the platform to add widgets. I love having glanceable information on my phone’s Home Screen and in the Smart Stack on my watch, but extending that capability to the real world with visionOS makes so much sense. I’m going to be spending a lot of time with these widgets over the summer to see what they can do and how developers implement them in a spatial setting.

  • iPad Multitasking: iPad fans have had our hearts broken one too many times to believe that this could actually be the year iPadOS gets a fully baked multitasking solution, but the folks at Apple really did it. The new multitasking framework is intuitive and powerful, and it even works on my fifth-generation iPad mini. We’re in the best timeline, people.

  • Spatial Scenes: It’s no secret that I adored spatialized photos when they debuted on visionOS last year. Spatial scenes take that technology up a notch and expand it to all of Apple’s platforms. I can already tell I’m going to be tearing up at new perspectives on old photos in no time.

  • Apple TV Profile Picker: Getting someone else’s watch queue mixed up with mine is one of my pet peeves, so I’ll definitely be enabling the profile picker by default when waking up my Apple TV from now on.

  • Live Activities and Widgets in CarPlay: I’ve long wished for these glanceable bits of information to carry over from the phone to the car, and now they’re here – no CarPlay Ultra required. Having my day plan from Structured on my dashboard is going to be awesome.

  • Order Tracking in Wallet: If Apple Intelligence can automatically track all of my packages for me, the AI boom will have been worth it.

  • Third-Party Controls on Apple Watch and Mac: The expansion of Control Center to include third-party apps on the iPhone last year led to a lot of fun tinkering and, ultimately, utility for me. Now, the Apple Watch and Mac are set to get the same third-party app support, and I think I’ll find them just as useful.

Those are my favorite announcements from WWDC. As you can tell, I’m really happy about them. My colleagues and I are going to have a busy summer testing and reviewing these updates before they release to everyone this fall.

What were your favorite new feature announcements from WWDC? I’d love to hear what you’re looking forward to!

WWDC 2025 Coverage

I feel like I’m just now coming up for air after a busy week of WWDC news, events at the church, and trying to squeeze in some family time. It’s been exhausting but a lot of fun, and I’ve really enjoyed keeping up with all the discussion around Apple’s announcements.

I had the privilege of helping cover the conference over at MacStories. These are the stories I was able to write:

I also got to edit a bunch of great stories from my colleagues, including Jonathan’s overview of iOS and iPadOS 26, Niléane’s overview of macOS 26, and Sigmund’s overview of tvOS 26. You can find our full written coverage over on the site.

Sigmund and I released the latest episode of Magic Rays of Light yesterday discussing the tvOS and visionOS announcements especially, in addition to a fantastic film that debuted on Apple TV+ this weekend. And the week of coverage will wrap up with tomorrow’s issue of MacStories Weekly, which I’ll have the pleasure of editing.

It’s been a great week. I feel like I’m still absorbing all of the information as I’m trying out several of the betas myself, so I’m sure I’ll have more to say about all of them before too long. But right now, I’m just happy to be a part of such a fun community of nerds who care enough about this stuff to read and talk about it. And of course, I’m forever grateful to be a part of MacStories, where covering all of this stuff as a team is just a dream come true.

Sound Therapy

I was slightly terrified when Federico asked me to cover Apple Music’s new Sound Therapy feature because music isn’t a topic I write about often. Trying to explain and test scientifically enhanced songs that are supposed to help you focus was certainly a new challenge. But I enjoyed diving into the feature and actually found it to be beneficial; I might even stick with it now that my testing is over.

You can read my full impressions of Sound Therapy over at MacStories.