WWDC Quick Look đź’“ By SwiftGGTeam
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Keynote

Keynote

Fundamentals
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Highlight

The Keynote covers the core 2025 updates across every platform, in the order of iOS, watchOS, tvOS, macOS, visionOS, iPadOS, and developer tools.

Core content

Over the past year developers have faced a pile of scattered problems. Custom controls have grown clunkier under the design language inherited from iOS 7. Reaching a large model required going to the cloud, paying per token, and breaking offline. The visual vocabulary across Apple’s three surfaces (iOS / macOS / visionOS) was not unified, so cross-platform products had to be drawn three times. Craig Federighi put these pain points front and center in the Keynote — nearly twelve years have passed since iOS 7 without a major design reset. The hardware is no longer the A6, but the software still sits in the layered structure of that era.

Apple’s answer pushes two main lines forward at once. The first is Liquid Glass — the first cross-platform unified design material. It simulates the refraction, reflection, and dynamic deformation of real glass, with the physical feel of visionOS feeding back into iOS, macOS, and watchOS. Every native control inherits the new look on a recompile; developers do not need to change a line of code. The second is the Foundation Models framework — it opens the on-device large model that powers Apple Intelligence directly to third-party apps, with zero cloud cost, offline support, and data that never leaves the device. The Keynote demonstrated both lines with two concrete examples: Kahoot! generating quizzes from notes, and AllTrails recommending hikes in the wild.

At the same time Apple unified version numbers across all platforms — every system released this fall is called 26 (lining up with the year 2026). iOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, and visionOS 26 are all aligned, ending the mismatched era of iOS 18 / macOS 15 / watchOS 11.

Detailed content

Liquid Glass: a system-level material swap (09:57)

Liquid Glass is a new “expressive material” with the optical properties of real glass:

  • Refraction and specular highlights: colors adjust dynamically to the content underneath, and the material adapts to light or dark surroundings on its own.
  • Deformation: when more options need to expand or views need to switch, the material morphs rather than cuts hard.
  • Concentric rounded corners: control geometry is redesigned to be concentric with the hardware corners, freeing screen space for content.
  • Scope: Lock Screen, notifications, Control Center, Dock, App Icon, and Widget all share the same material.

App icons are also rebuilt in layers, with four render modes: light, dark, tinted, and fully transparent clear. The new tool Icon Composer ships inside Xcode and is built for designing multi-layered icons.

Foundation Models framework (06:00)

Apple opens the API for the on-device large model to third-party apps. Key properties:

  • Direct access to the on-device LLM: calls hit the local model, never the cloud.
  • No cloud API costs: “this happens without cloud API costs” is the exact line from the Keynote.
  • Works offline: planes, underground parking lots, and remote campsites all run it.
  • Privacy by default: data does not leave the device, and no extra consent prompt is needed.

It fits “everyday intelligence” tasks like summarization, classification, and generative assistance. It does not fit scenarios that need fresh world knowledge or very long context.

Concrete iOS 26 changes (13:08)

  • Lock Screen: the digits in the San Francisco font now adjust weight, width, and height based on the wallpaper, dodging the subject of the photo. 2D photos pass through the Neural Engine to generate a spatial scene, and tilting the phone produces 3D parallax.
  • Camera app: trimmed down to two main modes, Photo and Video. Other modes swipe in from left or right, and settings pull up from the bottom.
  • Photos: the Library / Collections two-tab layout returns, addressing the backlash from iOS 18 dropping tabs.
  • Phone app: Favorites, Recents, and Voicemails merge into a single view. Two new features: Call Screening (unknown numbers are answered automatically and asked to state their reason before the user decides to pick up) and Hold Assist (the system detects hold music, keeps the line in queue, and calls the user back when a live agent picks up).
  • Messages: new backgrounds, group polls (Apple Intelligence suggests a poll on its own when it detects a thread like “who’s free this weekend”), group Apple Cash, group typing indicators, and on-device spam detection.
  • Live Translation: integrated into Messages, FaceTime, and Phone. Messages translates as you type. FaceTime shows translated subtitles while keeping the original voice. Phone reads the translation aloud in real time, and it works even when the other side is not on iPhone. Developers can plug Live Translation into their own communication apps through an API.
  • CarPlay: the new design extends to the car. Widgets and Live Activities are supported for the first time, and they reuse the same Widget / Live Activity already built for iPhone.
  • Image Playground: Genmoji supports “emoji + emoji” mixes (sloth + lightbulb), and emoji + text descriptions. It also taps into ChatGPT styles (oil painting, any style), and the user must give explicit consent before anything is sent to ChatGPT.

Apple Music / Maps (30:24)

  • Lyrics Translation and Lyrics Pronunciation: lyric translation plus pronunciation guidance, so you can sing along in another language.
  • AutoMix: smart song-to-song transitions with automatic time stretch and beat match.
  • Music Pins: pin artists, albums, or playlists to the top of the library.
  • Maps learns the user’s daily routes and remembers visited places.

CarPlay Ultra

The first cars shipped last month. CarPlay Ultra extends the experience to every driving display: users pick the layout, and vehicle controls like climate and radio are built in.

Naming alignment

All system version numbers merge into 26, lined up with the year 2026.

Key takeaways

  • What to do: recompile your existing app on Xcode 26 and look at the default Liquid Glass result first

    • Why it pays off: standard controls inherit the new material with no code changes, which is the highest-return path for a visual upgrade. The Keynote states explicitly that native frameworks adapt automatically.
    • How to start: install the Xcode 26 beta, build the old project, take screenshots and compare, list which custom controls “fell behind”, and replace them with native SwiftUI / UIKit components in priority order.

  • What to do: move lightweight scenarios that used to call the OpenAI API onto the device with Foundation Models

    • Why it pays off: no token cost, zero latency, offline support, no need to ask the user to ship data out. Kahoot! generating quizzes from notes and AllTrails recommending hikes are the model scenarios.
    • How to start: list every place in the app that “calls an LLM once and gets a structured result back” — summarization, classification, extraction, generation. Check whether each one needs fresh world knowledge. The ones that do not move to Foundation Models.

  • What to do: bring the iPhone Widgets and Live Activities you already have to CarPlay

    • Why it pays off: CarPlay is used over 600 million times a day, and Widgets / Live Activities are entering the car for the first time. Existing code reuses directly, so you get exposure on a new screen for free.
    • How to start: check whether your WidgetKit / ActivityKit work meets the simplicity bar of a driving context, then verify the glance experience in the CarPlay simulator.

  • What to do: wire Live Translation API into communication apps

    • Why it pays off: cross-language communication is a high-frequency pain point. The system API runs on-device for free, with lower cost and lower latency than rolling your own translation service.
    • How to start: add a “translate to my language” toggle to your chat or call surfaces and call the system API. Watch the visual weight balance between the translated text and the original in Messages.

  • What to do: redraw your App Icon in all four modes with Icon Composer

    • Why it pays off: iOS 26 adds the clear mode and reworks the tint mode, and old icons look bad in the new modes. Icon Composer designs the multi-layer structure once, and all four modes reuse it.
    • How to start: split your existing icon assets into 2–4 semantic layers (background, subject, accents), assemble them in Icon Composer, and check each in the light, dark, tint, and clear states.

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