WWDC25 Keynote and PSOTU Impressions

The Captain's Initial Thoughts on What Apple Shared on Day 1

Jun 10, 2025

WWDC25 is here and both the Keynote and Platform State of the Union are officially behind us. The time for (most) speculation is over as we enter a time of processing and (as we go through the week) digging deeper into all the new goodies.

Here's a rundown of some of things I took away from the sessions, with a promise to share more of my thoughts as the week progresses...

Rumors Were On Point

Majority of rumors I had seen circulating proved to be true. In fact, it was almost too many things that proved to be true. It almost makes me wonder if they were leaked on purpose or, at the very least, guarded with lax security. But the things we now know were true leaks were:

All OS versions (and Xcode) will adopt an annual-based versioning system (e.g. iOS 26 for 2026)
The UI re-design is official and dubbed Liquid Glass (see below for more details)
Apple Intelligence was discussed at length, but (as expected) Apple punted most new features until "later this year"
Conversely, Apple did announce the new Foundation Models Framework and significant App Intents improvements, exposing apps to more AI services and tools both on-device and off (see below for more details)
The gap between iPadOS and macOS narrowed significantly more than in past years with new Windowing and File systems

While rumors gave us possible insight, it was interesting to see these come to life during the talks.

Liquid Glass

It wasn't much of a surprise that the new UI design system would be glass-based. Seeing it in it's glory, however, was pretty awesome. Keeping it high-level for now, what I'll say is that almost every native component has been altered. And there are a ton of navigation and micro-interactions changed or added.

Apple shared that the guiding design principles at the core of the redesign were Hierarchy, Harmony, and Consistency (you know, HHC). At first glance, they seem to have achieved that very well and in intuitive ways.

What is abundantly clear is that every development team will have its work cut out for it this year. While it all looks very cool and impressive, it will certainly send many teams into a frenzy trying to figure out if it breaks any existing UX.

Apple offered an approach that the developers should consider when tackling the redesign:

Recompile: the re-design will automatically take affect once recompiled
Refine and Tailor: in other words, refactor and adjust accordingly to restore UX flow and harmony
Liquid Glass Effects: once stable, consider diving deeper into Liquid Glasses new features and applying them to your app

Documentation on Adopting Liquid Glass is already posted and is a must-read.

SwiftUI: No Longer The New Kid on the Block

When you look at the SwiftUI Update page and compare the June 2025 list to June 2024, it is significantly smaller. I'm sure this is disappointing for many devs who had specific SwiftUI items on their wishlists this year.

Given the scope of Liquid Glass, I'm really not that surprised. Apple made it abundantly clear that a lot has changed with the redesign and given that we still have a week of sessions ahead of us, I don't think we should underestimate how that may alter our wishlists, as well. I mean, just look at this "subset" of areas Apple said was altered:

For better or worse, we will need to reexamine majority of components, modifiers, interactions, and customizations to understand what problems still exist, have been solved, or have emerged.

Performance and Instrument Gains

Apple stated that SwiftUI performance has improved, specifically for macOS which has now adopted idle pre-fetching. It was specifically called out that Lists and Tables (note: not Scrollviews or other containers) have been optimized, with macOS claiming Lists with 100K items loading 6 times faster and updating 16 times faster.

While briefly mentioned, one of the most exciting new things to me was a new SwiftUI Performance Instrument which promises to dig into specific/suspected views that could be hindering performance. This is a tremendous win for SwiftUI as majority of performance issues I've come across are really the result of unoptimized code.

Xcode: Pleasant Surprises

In my pre-game article, I expressed that I didn't mind if no new AI tools or fancy features made it into Xcode this year, I just wanted more stability. I still want the stability, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited about some of the new things they showed today.

The new AI Chat is not only an built-in solution to Copilot's extension, it takes it much further by having better interaction with the IDE, itself. Some key highlights were:

Swapping generated snippets in and out
History Slider so you can revert or cherry pick generated changes you made over time
Automatic bug fixing (not that I believe it will work every time, but gets you a head start)
Sketch-to-SwiftUI
Ability to choose LLM Model/Service

I also cannot wait to use the new Playground macro. Think SwiftUI Preview but for your logical Swift code.

This could be a more direct way of testing your code and inspiring better unit tests.

Foundation Models Framework

The introduction of the new Foundation Models Framework was very exciting. It promises private, on-device generative capabilities for your apps (and Shortcuts). The framework looks really simple, yet powerful to adopt in your app.

Getting a model spun up and testable with the Playground macro takes only a few lines:

Preparing structs to receive generated data is as simple as using the @Generable macro. Guiding responses is also made easy using the @Guide macro:

I really can't wait to play with this new framework more. I'm sure there will be limitations, but on-device and privacy make this very appealing as a dev.

And Many More...

There were a number of other goodies that were announced that I look forward to diving into throughout the week (and, really, the rest of the summer). And I can't wait to write more articles and code exploring these topics beyond WWDC!

For now, the Sessions page provides a list of our daily dose of introductions and walkthroughs. And new this year is a Guides page. This collates the topics and sessions very neatly with great little summaries and list of related links. The best part is for categories such as Swift and SwiftUI, they also link to their respective update pages that list out their new associated documentation pages.

As promised, I will be posting a few more articles this week as sessions release and goods are digested more. And don't forget that next week will be a very special Office Hours where we'll discuss WWDC at-length!