Another year, another WWDC anticipatory waiting time. Uncharacteristically, Apple has somewhat telegraphed what to expect from the big event this year: The Augmented Reality Headset.
As Project Titan continues to not come to fruition, Apple’s next big thing is xrOS (leaked way back in 2019 as StarBoard) and xrOS runs on a headset similar to the Oculus Rift and Valve Index. What we expect to see is how it is controlled (gestures and/or Siri). However, the software needed to make this happen has been in the wild for quite some time in order to evolve to a usable point: UIWindowScene (allowing for apps to have multiple windows) and Stage Manager (allowing devices to interact with and show multiple apps at the same time).
Unfortunately for Apple, Stage Manager has not been a great success. Every iPadOS reviewer has said the same thing: it sucks. Developers, too, have been complaining as there are minimal APIs for interacting with Stage Manager (like detecting its use) or weird behavior with views when it is active and the keyboard is in use (or PencilKit). Hopefully, with an additional year to bake, iPadOS will take advantage of improvements needed to make xrOS a success as the two OSes are quite similar in their target usage of interacting with multiple applications (though navigation will be different to a degree).
However, the addition of yet another platform is what worries me as iOS 16, macOS 13, Xcode 14, etc have been plagued by issues that have taken (IMHO) too long to address and Apple’s commitment to focus engineers on “the next big thing” has taken a toll on software stability. Customers and developers have been praising the new hardware and criticizing the software as the lack of focus on the details has led to more and more deaths by a thousand cuts. Realistically, many resources have been poured into xrOS to ensure its successful launch as well as continued improvement of iPadOS to bring more Pro-like apps to market (like Logic and Final Cut). That focus, though, is not on stability and it shows. According to the latest internal reports, iOS 17 and macOS 14 are supposed to have less new features due to the resourcing shift. Whether or not that means capacity was spent on fixing bugs (à la iOS 12) is yet to be seen (my hope is yes).
The other surprisingly visible issue is service reliability. Over the past months, the Weather service and a few others have had multiple prolonged downtimes. Additionally, this month has been many outages across developer and customer services (probably new feature deployments for the new OSes) and they’ve been uncharacteristically disruptive. This leads to an interesting set of questions: Has Apple outgrown Akamai, does it now have more usage of the services as expected, and/or has Apple’s software quality taken a nosedive on the service front as well? Given the impact and desire to minimize disruption to customers, I would have expected a more passive rollout to changes in addition to much quicker responses to resolve the issues. I’m not saying competitors like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are perfect, but they tend to have fewer disruptions and when an issue occurs, resolve the issue much faster.
There’s also been rumblings of more regulatory consequences. This likely means new changes that would allow for installation of applications outside the walled garden. The big question is whether or not this feature would be geo-locked to countries where Apple has lost their legal battles. This has had a positive effect though in terms of Safari’s features. Within the past 3 minor releases, Safari 16 has gained a lot of features which have started to make it more competitive with Chrome and Firefox. I suspect this is in anticipation of governments requiring Apple to allow full 3rd party browser engines on iOS. Competition is good.
Developer tooling still seems to be where we as developers have been lacking any major new advancements. Swift is turning 10 soon and the resource shifting to get feature parity with the older tools has slowed down progress in the ecosystem as a whole. VS Code and Android Studio have continued to evolve at a rapid pace and Xcode has not kept up. Additionally, Apple’s continued approach of very few releases of a monolithic IDE mean that we don’t see improvements outside of the major releases and the spring release. My hope is that they begin to modularize the ecosystem such that teams within Apple can innovate and release much more frequently.
Lastly, whether or not macOS 14 will fix the much maligned System Settings redesign is on the top of my wish list. The community has shifted more to the opinion that macOS is tertiary to iOS and iPadOS and I agree with that sentiment. macOS’s evolution continues to go down the path of homogenization to the lowest common denominator (less privileges and fewer power user options) and Windows continues to make advancements (window management, WSL, & WSB).
Given the (presumed) focus on a whole new platform, I suspect a lot of the things I want to see won’t be present this year and my overall enjoyment will be muted.