As an exciting WWDC 2025 week wraps up and the buzz settles, things at MartianCraft are anything but quiet and settled. We’re still deep in the implications of what Apple just dropped.

As one of the longest-running native Apple development studios, we don’t just watch the keynote, we live with the aftermath for the entire year and sometimes beyond. Our developers are elbows-deep in Xcode and OS betas. Our designers are tearing apart the Liquid Glass UI. Our Slack is a stream of side-eyes, screenshots, and serious architectural debate.

Here’s what’s still holding our attention, what we’re excited to build with, and what we think is more flash than function.

What We’re Still Talking About

Swift Assist in Xcode: The AI Upgrade We Actually Want

This is the most useful AI Apple’s shipped in years. Swift Assist is clean, contextual, and surprisingly fast. From inline completions to on-device suggestions that don’t phone home, it’s already changing how we write Swift.

Add in compilation caching, Playground macros, and a long-overdue SwiftUI performance profiling tool, and you’ve got a release that actually improves our workflows instead of just changing them.

Xcode 26 may not headline hardware events, but it’s a developer milestone. A lot of years, Xcode announcements at WWDC have fallen kinda flat and haven’t garnered much of our interest. This year, however, it was one of the top items of discussion among the team.

Liquid Glass UI: Visually Stunning, Practically Divisive

Apple’s new Liquid Glass design language is equal parts nostalgia and risk. It’s gorgeous in a demo. It’s also everywhere—macOS, iOS, even watchOS and visionOS. Translucency, movement, light, color—all dancing over your content.

But here’s the issue: It’s not always legible.

We’re seeing:

• Navigation titles vanishing over spatial wallpapers.
• Rounded corners breaking container logic.
• Scrollbars and list edges that suggest “design over usability.”
• Font-size bumps and heavy weight hacks just to maintain contrast.

Our design team has been parsing every WWDC session and screenshot like a CSI lab. The consensus? The system is trying to look futuristic without quite sticking the landing—yet.

That said, the potential is real. The spatial depth, new shape system, and motion curves suggest where Apple wants to go. This is iOS 7 all over again: a visually jarring beta 1 that might become something elegant by public release—if they listen.

None of these issues is a show stopper, and most likely we will see a plethora of minor tweaks and adjustments to get over any of the growing pains. It’s always best to remember this is a first look and likely was shipped right before the keynote. Plenty of time to fix those rough liquidy corners.

Spotlight, Shortcuts, and Automation Dreams

Spotlight search is smarter. Shortcuts are deeper. You can finally use shell scripts, AppleScript, and deeper system hooks in a meaningful way.

But it’s still not replacing Alfred, Raycast, or even your homegrown internal scripts. The problem isn’t lack of features—it’s trust. Spotlight still fails basic app lookups. Shortcuts is still a guessing game when debugging complex chains.

We want to be excited about it. But for now, we’re cautiously watching. Our internal tooling team is experimenting, not migrating. Still, we remain cautiously optimistic for how everything will shake out over the next few months.

Package Tracking in Wallet: The Quiet Ecosystem Killer

Apple added email-based package scanning to Wallet. No login, no Apple Pay required—it just scrapes your inbox and builds a tracker.

That sound you hear? It’s third-party apps like Parcel and Deliveries falling off a cliff. Sorry guys, but it’s a long standing tradition to be “Sherlocked” in the Mac community.

It’s a minor feature, but it shows Apple is continuing to subsume entire categories by defaulting functionality into native apps—with better security, better integration, and a UX that’s (mostly) frictionless.

Design System Logic: Still Half-Baked

The new corner radius behavior? The rounded list clipping? The three types of container layouts?

All of it looks clean when executed perfectly. But most apps aren’t full-screen demos with perfect contrast.

In the real world, we’re seeing:

• Navigation bars that blend into backgrounds.
• Footers with uneven shape logic.
• Lists with “top and bottom edge” cues that confuse more than they help.

Our design team has this playing on loop: “It looks incredible … in Apple’s screenshots.”

It’s not hate—it’s critique. This system could evolve into something great, but right now it’s inconsistent, and applying it well is going to burn dev hours across the industry.

visionOS: Still a Toy, but a Better One

Persistent windows, better gesture tracking, and smarter multitasking make visionOS 26 a real platform leap.

Hand tracking at 90Hz feels better. AVP users noticed a difference immediately—games like Synth Riders finally click. But for most of us, it’s still a novelty. The price point, lack of serious productivity tools, and dev effort required all keep it on the back burner.

We’re watching it. We’re not betting the roadmap on it—yet.

What We’re Not Talking About

“Apple Intelligence” as Branding

Yes, Apple went all-in on their own flavor of AI. Yes, it’s mostly well-implemented. But outside of Swift Assist, nobody on our team is still talking about the term “Apple Intelligence.” We’re focused on what it enables, not the name.

Voice summaries, better voicemail, smart replies—they’re fine. But they’re not moving our architectural strategy. The first year of Apple Intelligence has left many of us a bit disappointed, to say the least, so we are hopeful we will be seeing real improvements.

iMessage Polls and Shared Backgrounds

Cool for consumers. Irrelevant for us. It’s not going to change how we build messaging apps or UI components. This feels like filler—something to round out a feature slide. It’s a nice-to-have on our phones, and we might use it from time to time, but we likely just aren’t the target audience.

What We’re Watching Closely

• Backtrace APIs for Swift 6.2: This has huge potential for better debugging in SwiftUI.
• Windowing model convergence between iPadOS and macOS: We’re inching closer to a true shared UI architecture.
• Liquid Glass tuning: If Apple listens to developer feedback, this could be an iOS 7-style glow-up over the summer.
• Spotlight and Shortcuts integrations into dev pipelines: We think this is still a long shot, but the pieces are there.

Final Thoughts

WWDC 2025 didn’t have a jaw-dropping “one more thing.” But maybe that’s for the best. This was a builder’s year—focused on tools, polish, and foundational shifts in how we design and ship software.

At MartianCraft, we’re already using Swift Assist. We’re already adjusting our design review process around Liquid Glass. And yes, we’re complaining about corner radii in 4K screenshots. Because this is the work—and this year, the work got interesting.

We’ll take that over a new iPad any day.