Even with a pandemic, the yearly major release cycle must continue. This year Apple is building upon their Catalyst project, Swift UI, Combine, and iPadOS. There is also a chance that ARM-based Macs make an appearance (or at least the transition is announced) and the announcement of a unified service bundle (Music, News, Arcade, and TV).
tvOS
With Apple Arcade, Apple is still pushing the gaming aspect of the iPhone, iPad, and TV. However, the TV aspect still does not have seemed to have taken off (plus Sony and Microsoft are releasing new consoles this year). I suspect that this year will be a quiet year for tvOS just like last year as the platform is pretty much complete. This is in addition to HomeKit and AirPlay 2 now being in Samsung, Vizio, Sony, and LG TVs.
I still want my announce incoming calls and Picture-In-Picture features.
watchOS
watchOS made a lot of progress last year with some functionality being decoupled from the paired iPhone (e.g. dedicated App Store). Presumably, this year will complete the process and allow Apple Watches to operate completely independent from a paired iPhone. However, I’m not sure what this gets us. Apple’s focus has been to make the watch health focused and hasn’t been focusing on the developer experience (leading to continued watch app deprecations and removals). The screen space, hardware limitations, and poor API availability has lead to very low interest in the platform. If Swift UI is massively improved this year (and more core frameworks made available), maybe we’ll see a resurgence of apps for the watch.
iOS and iPadOS
iOS has reached a good point of maturity, so a lot of innovation is driven by the apps included with iOS. I think this year we’ll see more improvements to Shortcuts and possibly a redesigned home screen with more widgets. For iPadOS, it’ll be interesting to see what “pro”/“desktop” features will be added to continue Apple’s path of replacing the MacBook with iPads. However, that needs to include a redesign of the multi-tasking UI as nearly everyone has said that it is clunky and confusing.
The rumor mill has stated that being able to assign default apps is coming (which is a very welcome feature) to preempt any monopoly lawsuits as well as new features for Messages like tagging, editing messages, and retraction. Finally, there is a new rumored AR app that I’m not sure how it will be used. Apple is focusing on AR with LiDAR sensors being added to devices and large investments in ARKit, so we’ll see what their vision of the AR platform is this year.
macOS
macOS is in a bit of a predicament as Catalina was not well received. This was due to a large number of bugs, performance problems (also related to disliked security changes, i.e. notarization), and the removal of 32-bit support. It also served as a warning indicating that Ruby, Python, and Perl would be removed in a future major release alongside the shells that aren’t ZSH as well as kernel extensions. So this year’s release is either going to ruffle more feathers or maybe Apple takes a step back and reexamines their choices around security and usability and makes things better.
Now we do know that more iPad apps are being ported to the Mac with Catalyst, so we’ll see how good they are as people have complained about certain design choices in the existing Catalyst-based apps. Honestly, I think stability needs to be the focus this year as many macOS updates have required supplemental updates and there has been many kernel crashes and T2 chip related issues.
Xcode
This year I want Apple to optimize Xcode. Xcode takes nearly 9 GB to download, then 15-20 minutes to unzip, and then almost 11 GB of space installed. Then you take into account the dyld cache for the simulators (around 3 GB) and then the space used by Interface Builder support files (1-2 GB). Please Apple, reduce the download and install size and make it faster to install.
Since Swift UI is the new hotness, I suspect there will be improvements to the preview system as Xcode 11 has been consistently improving Swift diagnostics so that Swift UI is more debuggable. I would still like a network debugger a la WireShark. The other thing I would like is a more reliable remote debugging experience as there are rumors that the portless devices are coming.
Safari
I’ve noticed that Safari has begun to lack behind many browser features as Firefox, Chrome, and Edgium are all now on 4-6 week release cycles whereas Safari only receives major updates twice in an OS cycle. This is due to Safari being embedded into the OS. If Apple were to decouple Safari, it could ship updates more frequently which I think will be better for end users.
Ultimately, I would like to see WebKit support the camera and microphone in WKWebView and not just Safari as that will allow apps to add more features. However, apps are still limited to being required to use WebKit for web content and I foresee more legal pushes to allow Gecko/Chromium to be used on Apple’s mobile devices since competition is being stifled in the name of security.
This year should be a good one with Apple focusing on improving their frameworks they revealed last year in a push to modernize the architecture of all of their platforms. If ARM-based Macs do make an appearance, it should lead to an interesting next couple of years as developers figure out of x86-64 emulation will work on ARM or if everyone needs to port to ARM and how easy that will be.