MartianCraft on WWDC26: What Caught Our Eye

WWDC has come and gone again, with its typical overwhelming amount of information. Siri AI has captured most of the headlines, but WWDC is about a lot more than just the marquee features. We asked some of the folks at MartianCraft what stood out to them from this yearʼs announcements — and they had thoughts. Hereʼs what some of our team had to say.

App Store Improvements and Expanded Surface Area for Apps

“I’m evaluating the OS 27 generation through a dual lens: expanding our clientsʼ App Store footprint and equipping our senior engineering teams to build smoother, frictionless user experiences.

“The sessions Enhance your presence on the App Store and Whatʼs new in Apple In-App Purchase outline exactly how the new subscription suites and rich media asset placements offer practical marketing frameworks to scale organic discovery right out of the new Asset Library.

“On the technical side, the updates detailed in Explore advanced App Intents features for Siri and Apple Intelligence and Discover new capabilities in the App Intents framework push intent architectures much deeper into iOS 27 and macOS 27. By leveraging these new App Schemas, our developers can ensure a clientʼs core app experience seamlessly handles background execution and surfaces context via Live Activities. Navigating these concurrent storefront upgrades and mandatory system intents will be the key to keeping our clientsʼ brands visible, discoverable, and highly effective this cycle.”

— Jana Allen, Project Manager

Laying the Groundwork

“WWDC26 brought a lot of quality of life improvements to all the Apple platforms. While those are great, it did lend itself to smaller feature improvements compared to previous years. A lot of things that I’m excited about relate to Xcode 27 updates and the stability and improvements to the various operating systems.

“I think this year provides a lot of ‘delayed excitement’ for users and developers alike. It seems like Apple is laying the groundwork for foldable devices, touchscreen Macs, and many more niceties that will be announced in the coming months and years — and those devices provide a lot of excitement for us and how we’ll build and deliver apps.”

— Cory Bohon, Team Lead and Senior iOS Developer

Quality of Life Improvements

“As is always the case, I find myself most excited about the small quality of life improvements Apple has made across language, tool, and library updates. There are too many to list, and Iʼm sure I’ve missed many of them, but here’s a sample of the ones I’ve seen so far.

“Swift adds support for memberwise initializers that take private properties into account, removes the requirement to wrap any/some optional types in parentheses, allows async calls to be made from defer blocks, provides more concise availability attributes, and finally gives us a clean way to specify modules when there are naming collisions.

“Iʼve written an implementation of Dictionary.mapKeyedValues more than once. Foundation now provides this out of the box.

“Similarly, I’ve written numerous custom collection and list view reordering implementations over the years. Figuring out how to re-create jiggle mode and handle drag previews in the early days of UIKit was fun, but it will be nice to have this built in to SwiftUI. The updates to AsyncImage might actually make it usable. The improvements to toolbar item creation and positioning will simplify a ton of fiddly code.

“Xcodeʼs revised layout looks to be well thought-out to reduce the number of clicks required to perform common actions. The device hub, too, looks to be the result of deep thinking about how we actually use simulators and devices during development and streamlines a lot of interactions. Subtler predictive errors and warnings will reduce distractions that break coding flow. Even something as seemingly trivial as the new project creation flow will be helpful for those times that I want to try out an idea on a clean slate and donʼt want to lose my train of thought to configure project details that will ultimately be unnecessary.

“These changes (and many more like them) will smooth out innumerable small, daily points of friction, allowing me to focus on what Iʼm building. The best of them will quickly become so automatic that I’ll forget the old ways ever even existed.”

— Beau Bolle, CTO

Swift Beyond Apple Platforms

“I’m sure most of the big platform changes and AI stuff is drowning out some other, more subtle announcements. What I find fascinating is the improvements and expansion of the Swift language driven by the open source community. It’s easy to associate Swift with Apple-specific platform development, but thereʼs so much going on with other platforms (Linux, embedded) and enhancements for C/C++ and Wasm interop. Super cool to see the adoption of Swift continue this path.”

— Brian Buck, Senior iOS Developer

Design Iteration

“Many designers will likely welcome the new slider in Settings to adjust the Liquid Glass effect, a big win for accessibility. There were also other refinements to last yearʼs design revamp that didnʼt get as much attention, but which surface some interesting UX tradeoffs:

Uniform toolbar: The floating actions often separated controls from the content surface, creating additional visual layers and fragmentation in the UI. While this approach can look great in static mockups, it sometimes competes with the primary content rather than supporting it. The new updates suggest a move back toward more cohesive, integrated toolbars that prioritize hierarchy and content clarity over visual embellishments.
No more floating sidebar: To follow the same theme, the floating sidebar appeared to be designed more as an added ornamental layer to the UI. As a structural component, it adds visual complexity without a clear benefit.

“Overall, itʼs encouraging to see Apple iterating on these design decisions and responding to usability feedback. Even small refinements signal an important reminder: Strong UX is built on clarity and hierarchy first, not just novelty.”

— Meghan Dever, Designer

New Siri and AI Tooling

“AIʼs greatest strength emerges when it has access to rich, detailed data. The new Siri — powered by Gemini — will finally be able to leverage the vast amount of personal data on-device, delivering truly magical experiences and insights for everyday tasks and whatever life throws at you. This will be the moment that convinces iOS users that AI is an indispensable tool.

“I havenʼt watched any sessions yet beyond the general Xcode and Swift ones. Even so, the improvements around AI tooling are a strong indicator of how central AI is becoming to almost every aspect of software engineering. Swift continues to mature and is gaining meaningful traction beyond Appleʼs personal device ecosystem.”

— Philipp Kinschel, Senior iOS Developer

SwiftData Improvements

“What stood out to me are the changes to SwiftData. Although the session was relatively short, the improvements are exciting.

“Most notably, ResultsObserver will allow developers to decouple SwiftData from SwiftUI by allowing observable types to handle store changes. This should reduce or eliminate the need to perform awkward synchronization between SwiftUI Query results and types used for manipulating that data.

“@Query now supports sectioned fetches via its sectionBy parameter. This allows developers to more easily structure sectioned views, such as List, according to a grouping requirement.

“Finally, developers can now store types that conform to Codable via @Attribute(.codable). However, this should be used carefully because such attributes are not supported when it comes to filtering, sorting, and migration. This allows developers to store external types like MKMapItem.Identifier, a type owned by Apple.”

— Nick Kohrn, Senior iOS Developer

AI Tooling and Agentic In-App Features

“The thing that stands out the most to me this year is just how much Apple is leaning into AI for developers, both to build apps and to implement features inside your apps. Xcode 27 picks up right where Xcode 26.3 left off in terms of agentic coding functionality. Itʼs no longer just a feature relegated to a sidebar, but front and center with major improvements.

“Probably my favorite announcements are the improvements to the Foundation Models framework and the new Evaluations framework. Implementing LLMs inside your app today probably requires a third party framework or rolling your own agent loop to support tool calling. Itʼs not particularly challenging to build, but it is a significant amount of work. Apple has greatly simplified this process by building support for third party models right into the Foundation Models framework. Once I’m able to work these new changes into my apps, I’ll be able to rip out A LOT of code.

“The Evaluations framework was also a welcome surprise. When using LLMs it can be a bit tricky to get your prompts and context just right to get the output youʼre looking for. The Evaluations framework lets you automate testing of these results in the same way you create unit tests. It helps you evaluate whether your results are getting better or worse when you make changes to your prompts or model. For one project, I even vibe coded a helper app for just this sort of evaluation. Iʼm delighted to soon be able to throw all that out and implement the much more robust Evaluations framework.”

— Josh Levine, Senior iOS Developer

CarPlay Improvements

“The Rev Up Your CarPlay App session is of particular interest to me for my recent work on a CarPlay-enabled navigation app. A challenge I faced was working within the narrow confines of the allowed CarPlay UI. CarPlay under iOS 27 adds the concept of Navigation Panels, which give more fine-grained control over what you can present and how it is presented. Another interesting feature is the Route Sharing option, which allows you to share the current route information with a more sophisticated vehicle system, allowing for a richer experience and more pervasive integration with the vehicleʼs available screens and driver assistance awareness.”

— Josh Nozzi, Senior iOS Developer

Steady Improvement All Around

“Two themes that stood out to me from WWDC26 were stability and plumbing. Last year, Apple introduced ambitious ideas like Liquid Glass and Apple Intelligence, but they werenʼt quite ready for prime time in practice. This year feels like a more complete implementation of those ideas, with progress in both polish and capability. The refinements to Liquid Glass address usability issues that showed up early on, and Appleʼs Foundation Models on-device and on Private Cloud Compute are more capable in how they can be used across the system.

“More importantly, Apple isnʼt just improving the user-facing features; itʼs building the infrastructure layer for developers to depend on. App Intents continue to evolve into the interface between apps and the system, making app content and actions available across Siri, Spotlight, Shortcuts, and Apple Intelligence. The natural language shortcut creation demo showed how this is being used. Overall, WWDC26 feels less like a flashy release and more like a stabilization and enablement year, where the focus is on making last yearʼs ideas usable and exposing the right primitives for developers to build on.

“A few things stood out beyond the core platform themes:

Swiftʼs reach continues to expand, now reaching into the kernel.
Dynamic Profiles allow models, tools, and instructions to be swapped mid-session while maintaining a single continuous transcript.
Core Spotlight tools can be used to support LLM-based search within apps.

“Some of the sessions at the top of my list:

— Hardik Patel, Senior iOS Developer

Unified Design Direction

“Appleʼs refinement of Liquid Glass at WWDC26 highlights an important UX principle: Visual innovation should never come at the expense of usability. Liquid Glass was met with mixed responses when it first was revealed. This feedback included concerns about legibility issues and excessive visual noise caused by the new transparency effects. WWDC delivered a response to said feedback by adjusting the system to improve readability and by introducing controls that allow users to customize the level of Liquid Glass transparency. This shows that Apple has their finger on the pulse of their consumer base, showcasing their understanding that clarity and comprehension are more important than purely aesthetic trends like simple glassmorphism and layered visual effects.

“The update also reflects a broader shift in UX design philosophy. Rather than delivering a single, fixed experience, designers are increasingly expected to produce flexible systems that adapt to individual user needs and preferences. Features such as accessibility settings, Dynamic Type, motion reduction, theme customization, and even AI-centric personalization — all of these point toward a future where users have greater control over how interfaces look and behave. As a result, modern UX design is becoming less about designing static screens and more about designing adaptable experiences that focus on consistency, accessibility, and personal choice.”

— Jacob Rems, Designer

Names Matter

“If you’re going to watch any of the WWDC26 videos, you must also watch all 15 minutes of Craft clear names for features and labels in your app.”

— Trevor Squires, Senior iOS Developer

“This year I am excited to see that Apple has seemingly focused deeply on overall refinement across its platforms. These are platforms I spend the majority of my waking hours using, and every bit of friction creates discomfort throughout the day. For me, Appleʼs platforms provide the best overall experience, so improvements are always welcome.

“To get a sense of how much refinement has been made, check out this article by Jonathan Reed at MacStories: WWDC 2026: Small Details and Compatibility Lists. I’m confident it’s not a complete list of enhancements, but there are a ton of valuable callouts to paint the picture.

“On the new feature side of things, I am very excited to see Siri become more capable and human-like. While watching the keynote this year I had a flashback to 2011 when Siri was first introduced. Back then we saw some really cool interactions, like creating calendar events, setting reminders, and sending messages all with voice commands.

“These were absolutely amazing features at the time, but over the years it really became obvious that you had to know how to use Siri. Completing some of these tasks requires a subset of language in specific arrangements, and it is both limiting and frustrating when you fumble it. With Siri AI we should be able to speak to Siri like we speak to a human and anticipate that it will do the thing you asked, regardless of nuanced phrasing and taking into account context around the request.

“To see the extent that Apple has furthered the story with regards to Siri and App Intents, you can check out the session Explore advanced App Intents features for Siri and Apple Intelligence and the doc Adopting App Intents to support system experiences. I really hope we see widespread adoption of these features!

“As always, thereʼs so much packed into WWDC, and this is just scratching the surface. I am excited to continue learning more.”

— Chris Wagner, Team Lead and Senior iOS Developer

Wrapping It Up

WWDC26 delivered a lot of refinements and a heavy dose of AI tooling for building apps and app features. Apple has continued to refine the experience for users and developers alike. Our team is already hard at work digging into these technologies and figuring out how they can help our client projects. If you’re as excited as we are about what’s next, reach out — weʼd love to help you take full advantage of everything Appleʼs latest platforms have to offer.