At WWDC 2025, Apple played to its strengths
Another Worldwide Developers Conference is in the books, and after a week of keynotes, briefings, and travel, I’ve finally had a chance to sit and zoom out to the 35,000-foot view of the company’s latest announcements.
The Apple of 2025 has definitely learned some lessons.
In hindsight, last year’s event has seemed even more rocky, with the company hustling to unveil Apple Intelligence, including showing off features that still have yet to ship. To its credit, it avoided doubling down on those mistakes with this year’s announcements without fully repudiating its previous steps. Instead, the company went back to focusing on the assets that make it the best at what it does. In other words, the ones that let Apple be Apple.
A return to platform
WWDC is a time for Apple to talk about its platforms, and those platforms are one of the company’s biggest competitive advantages. Not just in terms of size, which reaches into the billions of devices, but the ardent ecosystem.
Or, as Steve Ballmer might put it…developers.
Apple’s 2025 announcements play to this strength, most prominently in the choice to open up access to on-device foundation AI models for third parties. Previously, developers’ only options were either to make a (probably expensive) deal with a third-party AI provider such as OpenAI, to pack in a third-party on-device model (a real can of worms), or to spend a lot of money and energy building their own model. While Apple’s on-device models might not be as powerful or cutting edge as those from competitors, they do have the benefit of being free, both in terms of cost and in terms of being part of the platform.
And that opens up so many opportunities for developers to enhance their apps or even create new types of apps, which in turn bestows benefits on Apple’s platform: reminding developers that it’s the best place to build their app.
That’s just the most prominent example, too. Apple also announced that Live Translate will be available as an API for developers of other voice communication apps, that the new animated lock screen for Music will also be available to other media apps, and that authentication codes can now be autofilled from other messaging apps. All of these features make third-party apps more useful by offering features that aren’t just restricted to Apple’s own software.
Sher-unlock
Speaking of third-party developers, one claim that often gets leveled at Apple is its tendency to “Sherlock” apps: that is, provide functionality in its OS that’s already offered by third-party apps, thus arguably making it harder for those apps to survive.
However, that phenomenon has always been more nuanced, thanks to the fact that Apple more often than not implements only the lowest common denominator version of these pieces of functionality.
For example, take the new Clipboard History feature of macOS.1 It does only what its name suggests: keeps a history of things on your clipboard. That’s useful enough in and of itself, but what it doesn’t do is any of the features offered by the slew of third-party clipboard managers. Myself, I’m a longtime user of Tapbots’s Pastebot, which not only provides a clipboard history but also lets me store snippets for frequent use or apply filters to text on the clipboard, such as converting it to plain text or turning Markdown into HTML. Those are features Apple’s not about to build into its own Clipboard History feature because they don’t really deal with the stated purpose: keeping track of items that were on your clipboard.
Moreover, you can make the argument that Apple’s approach can actually be a boon for third-party developers. For one thing, most customers of these apps are likely not about to give them up simply because Apple has implemented part of the feature set. For another, the existence of Apple’s own approach actually clues users into the fact that such features exist. A user who had never before thought of having a clipboard history might find themselves wishing the feature went even further, and as a result seek out more capable alternatives.
The same can be said for Apple’s improvements to Spotlight, which would seem to position it directly in competition with popular third-party launchers like Alfred, Raycast, and LaunchBar. But those apps provide a ton of features not available in Spotlight and the people who start using Spotlight’s new features and enjoy them might be inspired to check those out.
Quality of life, not quantity
This brings us to one of the best moves from Apple in this year’s platform updates: a focus on features that people actually use.
In tech parlance, we often call much of what Apple showed off this year “quality of life” enhancements. Sometimes that term gets deployed with a negative connotation, as if to contrast to big marquee feature announcements, but to be honest, these are my favorite type of features. Because who doesn’t want their life to be a little higher quality?
A lot of these quality of life features are underpinned by some form of AI—or, to use the preferred term from the pre-LLM gold rush, “machine learning.” These are the kinds of things that Apple’s been doing for years, like making it possible to search through your photos by describing what’s in them, or even to copy text in columns.
And that’s a win for Apple, because it’s not just about throwing up your hands and saying “AI can solve this!” or assuming that LLMs are the answer to literally any computing program. It’s about tactically deploying the right tool for the job, whether it’s automatically categorizing reminders or providing summaries of voicemails.
The end result should always be about computers doing the tedious work that we don’t have to, not replacing the things that we really enjoy doing. And Apple this year seem to have remembered that its core business is making products that people like.
Real artists ship
In recent years, Apple’s annual platform updates come with a raft of footnotes about these features being available “later this fall” or sometimes “later this year” or occasionally “¯\_(ツ)_/¯”.
Having learned its lesson from last year’s enhanced Siri features that never arrived, the company has apparently decided that it’s going to show off only what it plans on shipping. That’s why almost all the features announced in the keynote this year are available, right now, in the developer beta and, to my knowledge, all the features are intended to be available when the updates ship in the fall.
Obviously, that’s good from a marketing perspective, since it prevents Apple from running afoul of those issues like having to pull commercials that feature unshipped features. It also just bodes well for company watchers who are worried that Apple is getting over its skis by overpromising and underdelivering.
And, as a bonus, it means that Apple has the opportunity to roll out new features throughout the year in subsequent updates. That means more opportunities for them to capture the attention of the press, and, more importantly, more chances to, in their own oft-repeated words, surprise and delight their customers. Something we could all use a little more of these days.
- Is it too much to hope that it might show up on iOS and iPadOS some day? Next year? ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the sci-fi spy thriller The Armageddon Protocol, is out now.]
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