Unlike last year’s WWDC where the development was interrupted by the pandemic, this year’s development was done entirely during the pandemic, so it should be interesting to see whether or not things are going to be scaled down. Well, the production of the conference will not be scaled down as Apple has demonstrated that they will spare no expense for their virtual events over the past year.
tvOS
Since the new Apple TV remote does not have the hardware for gaming, I’m not sure if there is going to be an Apple Arcade push for the TV this year. There will probably be more HomeKit related stuff since the TV is being positioned as the home hub, but I still do not have Picture-in-Picture call notifications or the ability to use an iPhone or iPad as the camera and output the FaceTime call to the TV.
watchOS
Perhaps this year is the year that the watch breaks free of the phone and becomes a true standalone platform. We did get unit test bundles for watchOS with Xcode 12.5, so chances are good that we’ll be able to write more complex apps. There will likely be some more health features (or those will be hidden until the reveal of the new model later this year).
iOS
Next to macOS, this is the second most mature platform that Apple has. We’ll probably get full HTTP/3 (QUIC) support this year and new WebKit APIs for media (audio/video) to expand upon what was introduced in iOS 14.3. Of the things that are on the top of my list, I am still waiting for UX adjustments to ASWebAuthenticationSession.
iPadOS
iPadOS is going to be the big one to watch this year since iPads are now using M1 chips. This means that Apple needs to fix multitasking and begin offering more APIs for more professional focused apps (e.g. and IDE). Since it has an M1, it may be possible to pull a reverse Catalyst and run macOS apps on the iPad (potentially through the hypervisor). To make this happen, I suspect that there will be even more SpringBoard (and other Boards) changes and that should include alignment with iOS to have widgets on the home screen.
macOS
With Big Sur “stabilizing” with 11.3, this year should be a polish year for macOS as all of the big changes landed with Big Sur’s visual redesign and architecture changes for the M1. However, I would like to see performance improvements regarding updates and the Sealed System Volume. There will likely be more changes involving Catalyst (including more rewrites/features brought to Apple apps). Based on Twitter feedback, it looks like SwiftUI has the most problems on macOS compared to using AppKit, so hopefully Apple has dedicated some focus there.
Xcode
Since this year does not require the Xcode team to have their focus on porting their tools to the M1 as well as creating all of the tooling to move macOS apps to arm64, we should hopefully get some cool new developer tools. Personally, I’m still hoping that they add some comprehensive network debugging features. But, if I had to sacrifice that for performance and optimizations, I would gladly do so. Xcode takes so long to download and install now and then eats up tons of disk space that it is getting unwieldy. I would hope that they can start implementing delta updates and perhaps split the IDE into plugins so that components can be updated separately. Xcode also seems to take more time to launch nowadays, so I would like to see overall performance improvements and editing stability (please fix source code highlighting).
Safari
There was a great blog post done recently explaining why Safari is essentially the new Internet Explorer. Apple takes so long to make updates that other browsers are doing (Safari releases like 2 feature updates a year compared to Chromium and Firefox which release every 4-6 weeks). Not to mention that Apple does not implement (or waits an extremely long time) features that would make web-based applications more feature rich and aligned with native application counterparts. Last year’s focus on privacy was well received, but not a whole lot was added for developers. Let’s see what they add this year (but I don’t expect much).
To me, it would be fine if Apple took this year to focus on stability and performance (other than iPadOS) since we’re still not out of the pandemic as all of their major projects (again, except iPadOS) landed last year with Big Sur’s visual redesign, the M1 architecture shift, and iOS’s SpringBoard redesign. We’re only a month away, so we’ll see what is in store soon.