WWDC 2016: the latest news from Apple’s big developer conference – The Verge

This is what Apple’s differential privacy means for iOS 10

2016-06-17T07:59:48-04:00

It was probably the most bewildering part of Apple's WWDC Keynote: in the middle of a rundown of fancy new products arriving with iOS 10, Craig Federighi stopped to talk about abstract mathematics. He was touting differential privacy, a statistical method that's become a valuable tool for protecting user data.

The details of the system are complicated (there's a more detailed explanation here) but in essence, it means adding randomized data to mask individual entries without changing the aggregate result. That way you could have a good idea of how many people are using a particular emoji without being able to pin down any specific user to a …

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Apple’s new facial recognition feature could spur legal issues

2016-06-16T08:11:02-04:00

This week at WWDC, Apple announced a new facial recognition system - although if you weren't watching closely, you might have missed it. It came as part of an upgrade to Photos, which will soon catalog your pictures according to the faces in them. "The big news in Photos this year is Advanced Computer Vision," Federighi told the crowd. "We're applying advanced deep learning techniques to bring facial recognition to the iPhone."

In some ways, Apple is playing catch-up. The new Photos system is a less cloud-heavy version of the system Google Photos first unveiled last May, which in turn drew heavily on Facebook's long-standing system of auto- …

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Siri’s big upgrades won’t matter if it can’t understand its users

2016-06-14T11:47:03-04:00

Apple announced some sweeping changes to its software this week, including major updates to iOS and its newly named macOS desktop operating system. The company also overhauled Siri, announcing that the voice assistant will finally be available on the desktop and - more importantly - opening up the service to third-party developers. That's an important step that Apple needed to take in order keep up with the competition, and to pave the way for Siri to become less of a novelty and more of a powerful platform.

What Apple didn't talk about was solving Siri's biggest, most basic flaws: it's still not very good at voice recognition, and when it …

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Swift Playgrounds sells coding as simple and fun — just like rest of Apple’s products

2016-06-14T10:50:17-04:00

Apple announced its Swift Playgrounds app at WWDC yesterday, which will teach kids to code in Swift. Interwoven between CEO Tim Cook's talk of freeing kids' minds with code and setting them up for successful careers was a familiar storyline and business blueprint. Apple's efforts to market Swift mirror its selling strategy for the rest of its technology. Swift and Swift Playgrounds look like any other Apple product, function like the rest of its devices, and fit in with the company's established business model.

Functionally, Swift Playgrounds fits in with Apple's technology lineup. "Swift is powerful but it's also simple and approachable," …

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Apple TV games will no longer be crippled by the Siri Remote

2016-06-14T05:01:05-04:00

The Siri Remote isn't a great TV remote, let alone a game controller, so it was an odd last-minute decision for Apple to mandate that developers make all their games work with it on the Apple TV. Fortunately, that decision has been reversed again, according to new guidelines posted during the company's ongoing Worldwide Developers Conference.

Apple's Game Controller Programming Guide now states the following: "When designing a tvOS game, you may require the use of an MFi game controller, but where possible you should also support the Siri Remote." iOS and Mac App Store games still cannot require a game controller, though of course they can …

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iMessage will let you turn on read receipts on a per-person basis

2016-06-13T19:33:46-04:00

Apple's iOS 10 update doesn't come out for another three months, but we've already started parsing the laundry list of new features the company is including its next big mobile refresh. One of the more useful ones that stands out is per-person read receipts for iMessage.

Up until now, read receipts for iMessage have been optional, but could only be activated for every conversation all of the time. So no matter who you were chatting with, the recipient would always see when you viewed a message. Now, with iOS 10, you'll be able to toggle the feature on and off by conversation, similar to how you can currently toggle "Do Not Disturb" on and o …

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Apple’s WWDC 2016 keynote in 10 minutes

2016-06-13T18:11:17-04:00

Apple used the WWDC 2016 stage to reveal some huge new features coming to iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. Siri's moving to the Mac. iMessage is getting stickers, bigger emoji, and third-party app integrations. Apps on the Apple Watch will actually open right away now! And you'll only have to sign in once to stream from a bunch of apps on the Apple TV.

The list of changes and improvements coming to Apple's operating systems and devices is rather long. But you don't have to slog through the entire stage show to see the most important stuff; we've cut down today's WWDC event to cover only the biggest announcements and coolest new developments. …

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Aw thanks, Apple, I can’t wait to never interact with voices and words ever again

2016-06-13T17:58:02-04:00

Apple announced today at WWDC that iOS 10 devices will transcribe voicemails. You'll never have to listen to an annoying pharmacy phone call, sales pitch, or maybe even anyone's voice ever again. (Google already does this.) The company also announced that it'll be revamping its Messages so that certain words are suggested to be changed to an emoji. It's called "emojify." Craig Federighi, senior vice president of engineering at Apple, joked that the next generation of kids will have "no understanding of the English language." LOL. Some people probably shuddered at this idea, thinking it means society's collective doom. In reality, Apple gets …

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Apple promises to deliver AI smarts without sacrificing your privacy

2016-06-13T16:14:51-04:00

Artificial intelligence tools like deep learning have come on in leaps and bounds in recent years, powered by two main resources: cheap processing power, delivered by the cloud; and stacks and stacks of user data. For a company like Apple - which has banged the drum of user privacy like no other - this presents a problem. How does it deliver deep learning smarts without constantly sending your data to the cloud? And how does it get that data in the first place?

"We're doing it on your devices, keeping your personal data under your control."

At this year's WWDC, the company promised that it can square the circle. New deep learning-powered fea …

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Apple’s Bozoma Saint John is my hero

2016-06-13T16:06:33-04:00

Despite being one of the premier events in tech, WWDC isn't traditionally known for being a bastion of diversity. That's changing somewhat these days, as Apple, right along with the rest of the industry, continues to respond to calls for inclusion. But up on stage, WWDC is still mostly ruled by the white dads.

Who can forget Eddy Cue's brief but beloved performance last year?

So let's take a moment and thank the heavens above for Bozoma Saint John, Apple Music exec and a clear badass born for the job. Saint John took the stage this morning to unveil an Apple Music overhaul that promises to make the app's media ecosystem easier to use and u …

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