WWDC 2025: all the news from Apple’s annual developer conference

Apple recently announced iOS 26, the next major software update for iPhones, and it’s packed with a whole bunch of new features. The biggest change is a new design, but there are lots of smaller improvements and additions as well that could make a difference in how you use your iPhone every day.

If you want to kick the tires before the update’s wider release this fall, you can try it now in a public beta. Here’s a bit more detail on what you can expect from iOS 26 when you install it on your device.

Apple announcing Android features years after Google shipped them is a tale as old as time, but that doesn’t make it any less fun to point out whenever it happens. This year’s WWDC felt especially Android-y — not helped by Siri essentially sitting this year’s announcements out while Apple put its new Liquid Glass design language front and center.

The imitation goes both ways: Android is launching its version of iOS’ Live Activities and is following Apple’s lead by adding more customization options to quick settings tiles. Still, I couldn’t help noticing a string of new features from Apple’s the keynote that I’ve definitely seen somewhere before. Not that Apple would ever admit to borrowing them.

Apple is introducing a suite of updated child safety features, including one that will give parents more control over who their kids can communicate with. The features are set to arrive with iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, visionOS 26, and tvOS 26, which will launch this fall.

Children will now be required to get parental approval when they want to communicate with a new phone number. Requests will appear in the Messages app, and parents can tap a button to approve or decline. Apple is also launching a “PermissionKit” that will let developers fold a similar feature into their apps so that kids can “send requests to their parents to chat, follow, or friend users.”

For several months, my Slack avatar was a screenshot of my incredibly cursed Vision Pro persona. My virtual avatar’s head was cocked back, cackling into the pixelated void, her hair one solid unmoving block. It wasn’t good — but it also wasn’t the end of the world. Everyone else’s Persona looked just as horrible, and honestly, it was funny. So I was skeptical when, at the WWDC keynote, Apple announced that visionOS 26 had improved the system’s floating avatars.

And then I got to make one.

In March, Apple delayed its upgraded Siri, saying that “it’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver” the promised features. At WWDC this week, Apple’s SVP of software Craig Federighi and SVP of worldwide marketing Greg Joswiak shared more details about the decision to delay in an interview with The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern.

As part of its initial Apple Intelligence announcements at WWDC 2024, Apple said that the improved Siri would have awareness of your personal context and the ability to take actions for you in apps. While Apple was showing real software at that show, Siri “didn’t converge in the way, quality-wise, that we needed it to,” Federighi said. Apple wanted it to be “really, really reliable. And we weren’t able to achieve the reliability in the time we thought.”

At WWDC, Apple announced its new Liquid Glass design language, which is coming to all of its devices, including Macs. I’ve been tinkering with the macOS Tahoe 26 developer beta on the M4 MacBook Air for about a day. So far, the aesthetic changes range from slick to slightly overwrought, but the new Spotlight search features are nifty and useful.

There are new touches of glassy transparency all over macOS 26, including the Dock, Finder, widgets, and built-in apps. It’s more subtle than on the iPhone, mostly because the Mac’s much larger screen real estate makes the Liquid Glass elements more like accents than whatever this mess is supposed to be. I’m not very fond of it just yet, but maybe it will grow on me, like UI changes tend to.

Apple’s WWDC 2025 had new software, Formula 1 references, and a piano man crooning the text of different app reviews. But one key feature got the short end of the stick: Siri.

Although the company continuously referenced Apple Intelligence and pushed new features like live translation for Messages, FaceTime, and phone calls, Apple’s AI assistant was barely mentioned. In fact, the most attention Siri got was when Apple explained that some of its previously promised features were running behind schedule.

Apple’s next major software updates are getting a huge new feature for playback speed sickos like me: you’ll be able to listen to shows on the Podcasts app at as much as 3x speed, Apple notes in a press release about new services features. Previously, the maximum was 2x.

You can move to super speed from the podcast play screen in the Podcast app, but you’ll have to do a little bit of work to get there, based on my testing in the first iOS 26 developer beta. When you tap the playback speed button, a small popup appears that shows buttons for a few different speeds: 0.8, 1, 1.3, 1.5, 1.8, and 2. To more finely adjust playback speeds or access ones faster than 2x, you need to swipe on the buttons to get to a dial.

I genuinely never expected to say this: it appears Apple finally figured out multitasking on the iPad. With iPadOS 26, the company hasn’t completely taken off the guardrails for how you can use and place apps on your tablet, but it came awfully close. With a couple of clever iPad-specific tricks, and better support for a mouse or trackpad, the whole system just makes sense in a way it never has before. I’ve been running the very first developer beta for less than a day on an 11-inch iPad Air, and I can already sense a change in how I use my tablet.

The new multitasking system is mostly pretty easy to understand. You unlock the iPad and you’re dropped onto the homescreen full of app icons, same as always. When you open an app, it opens full-screen by default; at WWDC, Apple executives were careful to note that if you don’t want to encounter the new multitasking system, you never have to, and I think that’s true. (You can even turn the whole windowing system off in settings, if you want to.) But as soon as you tap and drag the little icon in the bottom right corner of the window, the app starts to shrink. You can make the app any size you want — any size the developer supports, at least, which does vary pretty widely — and put it anywhere on the screen. If you grab the top bar of an app and sort of toss it off to one side, it’ll automatically fill half the screen. Tap the new stoplight menu, and you can either close the app or make it full screen again.

The tech world is full of cycles. Things are always bundling and unbundling, going from minimalist to maximalist, embracing nostalgia before diving head-first into the future. And right now, it appears, we’re doing glassy again.

On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay and David are joined by The Verge’s Allison Johnson and Victoria Song to talk about all the news from Apple’s annual WWDC software extravaganza. There’s no place to start, of course, other than with Liquid Glass, the new design system that Apple is rolling out across all of its platforms. We talk about why Apple made the change, what it looks like so far, and whether this is the right way to approach the future of on- and off-screen digital design.

After two years as an iPhone exclusive, Apple’s Journal app will soon be available on Mac and iPad. Apple announced at WWDC on Monday that its latest macOS 26 and iPadOS 26 updates will support the Journal app, which helps users track their daily activities and experiences with images, videos, and voice memos.

“Journal comes to Mac, making it easy to capture and write about everyday moments and special events when inspiration strikes,” Apple said in the macOS 26 press release. “On Mac, it’s easy to type long, thoughtful entries and view them on a map. Users can keep multiple journals for various aspects of life, which are all synced across Apple devices.”

After staring at, scrolling through, and puzzling over Apple’s new Liquid Glass design language on my iPhone for the better part of an afternoon, I don’t hate it. But I also think it needs a little more time in the kiln.

Apple announced Liquid Glass on Monday for all of its devices at WWDC 2025. Perhaps the most noticeable thing about it is that app icons, tab bars, and even the text magnifier you’ll see when you hover over words feel, well, liquid-y and glassy.

Apple packed a bunch of major updates into its annual Worldwide Developer Conference keynote. During the event, the company showed off the sleek design refresh coming to its operating systems, as well as a mix of new features for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, AirPods, and more.

Here’s a roundup of some of the most exciting changes Apple announced during the keynote — you can watch our edited version that cuts it down to under thirty minutes right here.

Macs equipped with an Intel chip will no longer receive major software updates after the release of macOS Tahoe this fall. During the WWDC Platforms State of the Union keynote, Matthew Firlik, Apple’s senior director of developer relations, announced that macOS Tahoe “will be the final release for Intel Macs.”

After launching its first in-house processor in 2020, Apple completed its transition away from Intel with the launch of the Mac Pro in 2023. Intel-based Macs compatible with macOS Tahoe, such as the 16-inch MacBook Pro released in 2019, will continue to receive security updates for three years, according to Apple spokesperson Lauren Klug.

Design, to quote a wildly overused Steve Jobs-ism, is how it works. And if that’s the case, Apple’s new design language, which the company is calling “Liquid Glass” and just announced at WWDC 2025, is really nothing new at all.

The Liquid Glass look comes largely from visionOS, which shipped with a particular constraint: it had to layer digital information over your physical world, without occluding that physical world. That’s why everything in visionOS is translucent and glassy, so you can both see it and see through it. Everything is layered and three-dimensional, an effort to make digital experiences feel more like objects in space than objects on a screen.

The first developer betas for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26, visionOS 26, and macOS Tahoe are now available if you’re eager to try the updates that Apple just announced.

Everyone will have early access to the new versions of the operating systems when the public betas are released next month, but only developers have access to the betas starting today. As of 2023, Apple no longer requires you to pay for Apple’s developer program to download and install them right away. You just need to enroll your devices in the Apple Beta Software Program by signing in with your Apple account.

This year’s WWDC is shaping up to be surprisingly focused on power users. There are lots of new personalization ideas, plenty of new ways to move things around on your device, and some new ways to get things done. But Mac power users in particular are going to really fall for two things: the new Spotlight, and the new Shortcuts.

In macOS Tahoe, Spotlight, the universal search and launcher feature you open with Command+Space, can now do more than just open stuff. It can do stuff. Apps can provide access for Spotlight to execute all kinds of actions, from playing music and podcasts to creating notes or adding to files. You can find actions with search or with short keyboard shortcuts — onstage at WWDC, Apple’s Craig Federighi demonstrated using “sm” to quickly send a message.