Zoom in / The image that Apple shared with the WWDC 2022 announcement.
June 6 marks the start of Apple’s annual WWDC Developer Conference. The one-week event will begin with a 10:00 PST presentation on Monday loaded with announcements about new software features on Apple’s various platforms.
For the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began, there will also be a major face-to-face hearing for WWDC. And there will be countless sessions during the week on programming APIs, Swift features, and more. But for most people around the world, new operating systems and hardware ads are the main attraction, and we’ll see some of them during Monday’s presentation.
It’s important to note that WWDC does not typically focus on product ads for consumers. It’s a place where Apple introduces new technologies and tools to developers.
Over the years, there have been a few exceptions, and while new developer announcements are often about software, sometimes they’re also about hardware.
Any new hardware will likely be desktops or Mac laptops or new categories that Apple wants developers to start supporting.
So what exactly do we expect? Let’s start with operating system updates.
iOS and iPadOS 16
As has been the case in recent years, we hope that the next major release of iOS will be the star of the program at WWDC.
Last year, we knew a little bit about what to expect from iOS 15 before it was announced, but now there’s less. The best source we have is a recent email newsletter from Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, who claimed to know about some of the upcoming changes. He wrote that the iPhone could have a lock screen always activated as a Samsung Galaxy (or Apple Watch, of course). It would dim the screen and limit its update to 1 Hz to save battery while displaying essential information.
Announcements
Gurman also wrote that iOS 16 would include updated health apps and messages, as well as general improvements to the user experience, but did not go into much detail. In another newsletter, Gurman wrote that Apple plans to renew notifications on iOS and iPadOS.
We also know that several new accessibility features will come to iOS, thanks to a blog post that Apple released last month. This includes machine learning-driven features, such as door detection for blind or visually impaired users and live subtitles for FaceTime calls.
As for the iPad, a Bloomberg report has added to a stack of recent claims that Apple will review multitasking on the iPad to try to make use more comparable to the experience of a laptop . This supposedly includes resizable windows like Mac in one way or another. That said, the limitations of multitasking weren’t the main reason we noticed that the iPad isn’t ready for productivity resistant to our recent iPadOS revisions. Rather, it’s all the little things, like managing audio sources.
But Apple can also address these issues in the new version of iPad. If Apple does, we’ll hear a lot next week.
macOS 13
Apple will definitely announce a new version of macOS at WWDC, but we don’t know much about the update. Again, the best source we have is the Bloomberg Journalist Mark Gurman’s bulletin, which states that Apple will revise the System Preferences panel on macOS to make it more similar to what is seen in iOS, one more step in a long series of changes that align more macOS. closely with the iPhone software.
We’ll probably also see several updates and redesigns of built-in apps like Notes or Safari, as well as several new accessibility features. Beyond that, your guess is as good as ours, but we don’t expect this to be a particularly noticeable update compared to some others.