While Apple is trying to convince its employees to return to the office, it’s also that time of year when the fruits of their labor are shared with the rest of the world. This year, there is a special event: the unveiling of the Developer Center. This may be a sign that next year that the event will be in person, but, I think that outside of the talks (those can still be prerecorded), Apple should focus on having the week just be labs and hands on time with their engineers so that those who cannot afford the trip can still enjoy what has been a good conference experience remotely (thanks COVID).
tvOS
There are rumors of a lower cost Apple TV (perhaps even a TV stick like the Chromecast) and I think that would certainly help adoption of the hardware. However, Apple has already spent time making the Apple TV+ app available on consoles and other smart TVs, so I don’t think this will lead to a large boost in sales outside of those who are already in the Apple ecosystem. For the existing 2nd generation Apple TV 4K, perhaps this is the year when tvOS enables the Thread protocol for more smart home devices. It’ll be interesting to see though if this is bundled with Matter as the full specification was delayed until Fall 2022 (which coincides with tvOS’s release date). I still don’t have the features I’ve been looking for though: call notifications or the ability to use an iPhone or iPad as the camera and output a FaceTime call to the TV. A surprising move might even be if Apple added Chromecast support to lure byers away from the cheaper devices as Android apps don’t support AirPlay 2.
Outside of content consumption, Apple Arcade still isn’t producing results on the Apple TV platform, so I don’t know what Apple can do to add more apps outside of the media category to this platform.
watchOS
More rumors exist of additional health features being added to watchOS as the 2021 Apple Watch faced production issues getting those integrated, so I guess we’ll see if new sensors arrive this fall. In the meantime, I suspect (and hope) that Apple has been working on further separation efforts to unpair the watch from the iPhone so that it can act as a standalone device (e.g. OS updates). Outside of health and fitness, I still don’t view this as a meaningful development platform (especially considering the developer experience), so it should be interesting to see what Apple can offer this year to entice more developers to the Apple Watch platform.
iOS
I’m not really looking for any new features here whereas I really want them to fix what they did to notifications. The new focus modes took a perfectly simple concept of Do Not Disturb and made it overly complex and unintuitive. Other than that, how about some built-in app refreshes to make them more useful and an optimization pass on reducing iOS’s install size as well as the amount of disk space it uses for logs and other data (aka the two categories that show up under storage that you cannot manage).
iPadOS
With the iPad Pros and now the iPad Air having M1 CPUs (and 16GB/8GB of RAM respectively), iPadOS feels out of place on that hardware. Updating iPadOS to act more like macOS on those devices would be great: window tiling, more than three apps working at a time, and perhaps even a real filesystem would go a long way to making these devices act like a computer. Now, I suspect that Apple doesn’t want to go quite that far as it would “alienate customers who don’t use a typical computing setup” but the Pro-ness of these devices and the marketing Apple is doing is trying to sell these devices as a computer. It’s time to make the devices fit the marketing image or I think people (with professional workloads) are going to start going to 2-in-1s en masse as competitors have caught up or just use a MacBook.
macOS
Monterey has been ok, although there have been some nasty bugs that needed to be squashed in the earlier releases. However, it took until 12.4 for the tent-pole feature to be released as GA (Universal Control). I hope that this year is just an optimization year as macOS sorely needs attention paid to its internals.
Xcode
Xcode 13 has been a mess. With each release, performance regressions have been introduced (just look at app startup time) and the editor experience has been inconsistent with the editor breaking syntax highlighting, code completion, and more. From a feature set perspective, I suspect that new diagnostic tooling will be added for Swifts concurrency features, but I hope that, just like macOS, this year is a focus on optimization and bug fixes so that developers can use Xcode without running into problems as well as reducing the amount of space it and its auxillary files take up.
As an aside, VS Code has been hard at work adding very competent Swift support via the Swift LSP. I wouldn’t be surprised that once this is fleshed out a bit more, we find more people writing Swift code on the web via vscode.dev as you wouldn’t even need a Mac yourself to build the code as you can integrate with the macOS GitHub Action runners. This, of course, is why Apple is trying to standup Xcode Cloud (other than $$$ for another service they can charge for). However, the beta of that service has not received that many positive reviews and, over the past two weeks, App Store Connect and its APIs have seen long outages.
Considering that Apple has a new individual in charge of Developer Relations (since last year), it’ll be important for them to show investment in the developer experience of their tooling as the comments they’ve been making in regard to anti-trust investigations have not been received well. As a start, they should fix their documentation: have easily consumable diffs and actually provide method and symbol documentation (with usage guidance) rather than “No Overview Available”.
Safari
Safari has been a hot topic in the anti-trust investigations and comments due to Apple not allowing non-WebKit browsers from existing on iOS and iPadOS (and watchOS too I suppose). With their current focus on adopting passwordless sign ins (via FIDO), they are still lacking behind on feature implementation compared to Chrome, Edge, and FireFox. Given the push to break the walled garden down, I think it is inevitable that different browser engines will come to the locked down devices and Apple will realize that their slow progress won’t stand up to competition.
That aside, last year’s presentation about the UI design did not go over well and was pretty much completely removed (with a toggle). Here’s hoping that this year they’ve realized that a different UI and experience for a browser needs to not follow Jony Ive’s minimalist approach.
Since there is only one Mac left to transition to Apple Silicon (the Mac Pro), I suspect that this year will be the last proper year for Intel support in macOS and we’ll see Apple start to encourage dropping Intel support with more vigor.