Apple’s first fully in-person WWDC in five years was an absolute firehose of software news. In a brisk two-hour keynote, execs Craig Federighi and Alan Dye sprinted through renamed operating systems, a shimmering new design language, and enough AI buzzwords to make a marketing team blush. Here are all the most important announcements you need to know about.
26 Is the New 19
Apple finally did the thing bloggers asked for a decade ago: it lined up all its OS version numbers with the calendar year. Starting this fall, you’ll install iOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, iPadOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26, and visionOS 26.
No more mental gymnastics trying to remember whether macOS 16 shipped the same year as iOS 19. Developer betas went live moments after the keynote, with public betas slated for July and general release in the usual September / October window.
Beyond the branding win, year-based numbering gives Apple a handy narrative: “new year, new OS suite.” Expect that to become an annual marketing drumbeat, not unlike the way Tesla names its Full Self-Driving builds.
Liquid Glass Everywhere
Alan Dye calls it Apple’s “broadest design update ever,” and he’s not exaggerating. Liquid Glass slaps real-time translucency and parallax lighting onto buttons, bars, sliders, everything. Inspired by visionOS, the effect reacts to your phone’s tilt, shifting highlights as if UI chrome were literal glass catching studio lights.
It’s gorgeous in demos, but also a big test for third-party devs. Apple is shipping updated APIs so indie apps can adopt Liquid Glass without murdering battery life. Expect a transition period where first-party apps look like a Swarovski showroom while your bank app remains stubbornly flat.
That said, public reaction hasn’t been very good, and Apple may have overdone it with the transparent backgrounds. The design is bold, yes, but it might also be a readability nightmare.
Core Apps Get a Facelift
Safari now goes wall-to-wall, ditching the top and bottom grey bars for a fully immersive canvas, great for reading, maybe less great for accidentally closing the tab with your thumb. The Camera app simplifies itself down to two chunky “Photo” and “Video” modes; swipe the toolbar to surface slow-mo, portrait, and other pro stuff. Meanwhile, the Phone app merges Favorites, Recents, and Voicemail into a single feed, so you spend less time hunting for missed calls.
Small tweaks, sure, but they add up. Safari’s edge-to-edge approach frees real estate on the smallest iPhones, and the simplified Camera UI finally feels accessible to relatives who still ask “which mode takes a normal picture?”
iPad Finally Gets Real Windows
iPadOS 26 no longer apologizes for being “not quite a Mac.” You can freely resize windows, toss them into a Stage-Manager-style strip, and even pull down a classic menu bar for app-specific commands. Apple also ported macOS’s Preview app, meaning you can annotate PDFs without weird third-party workarounds.
During the demo, Federighi flicked four overlapping apps around like they were on a 14-inch MacBook, highlighting another attempt from the company to brand an iPad as a laptop replacement. The big question: will all this windowing mojo trickle down to A-series iPads, or stay gated to Apple-silicon models?
Group Chats Level Up
Messages finally lets you set custom chat wallpapers, create in-thread polls, and shows group typing indicators. Spam texts from unknown numbers get shunted into a separate inbox so your birthday wishes aren’t buried under courier scams.
Apple’s late to features that Telegram and WhatsApp have had for years, but the iMessage network effect is real. Adding polls alone will save countless “thumbs-up if tacos” threads in family groups.
Press Play: A Dedicated Games Hub
Instead of burying titles across the App Store and Apple Arcade, the new Games app corrals everything into one slick launcher. Tabs track your entire purchase history, Arcade catalog, and even a “Play Together” social space that shows friends’ activity.
Game Center’s bones were never designed for modern mobile gaming. By spotlighting events, leaderboards, and cross-platform cloud saves, Apple is nudging Arcade toward something closer to Xbox Game Pass, minus the AAA catalog, for now.
Apple has been trying to get Mac users into gaming for a while now, and its latest attempt still managed to miss the main problem: a lack of games. Mac gaming has gotten a lobby, now it just needs the games to arrive for people to start considering their Macs as gaming machines.
macOS Tahoe Gives Spotlight Superpowers
Spotlight no longer just finds stuff; it does stuff. Thanks to new action APIs, you can send messages from within Spotlight, complete with recipient autofill. Apple claims results are ranked by personal context, so “play” surfaces your most-used playlist, not some random app you opened once.
Coupled with Liquid Glass making the menu bar fully transparent, Tahoe feels less like an incremental macOS release and more like a stealth productivity overhaul. If it works as advertised, Alfred and Raycast may finally have real competition from the default search box.
Vision Pro Grows Up with PS VR2 Support
Gamers, rejoice: visionOS 26 now pairs with Sony’s PS VR2 Sense controllers, instantly expanding the headset’s library of serious VR titles. Apple also added “spatial widgets” that hover in your environment and a clever gaze-scrolling trick, look up or down, and the page follows your eyes.
The move signals Apple’s willingness to embrace external hardware to kick-start Vision Pro’s content drought. Expect developers to flock if the install base spikes, especially with “windowed iPad apps” now running beautifully in the headset.
Screenshot Buttons Summon Apple Intelligence
Press the usual screenshot combo and, instead of a shutter animation, you can trigger a contextual overlay that lets ChatGPT explain what’s on-screen or hunt Etsy for similar products. Apple calls the feature Visual Intelligence, and devs can plug into the same on-device model for custom workflows.
Because the inference runs locally, Apple gets to brag about privacy while dodging cloud GPU bills. For power users, it’s basically command-click-lookup on steroids, imagine long-pressing a UI element to see a quick “what’s this font?” prompt.
Flicks, Clicks, and Stems
On watchOS 26, a quick wrist flick dismisses notifications, handy when you’re mid-deadlift. A new AI “Workout Buddy” analyzes trends and barks custom encouragement like a less-annoying Peloton coach. Meanwhile, AirPods owners can snap a photo by double-pinching the stem, and voice-isolation updates promise “studio-quality” vocals even when you’re recording TikToks in a windy street.
It’s the little things: remote shutters and gesture controls make Apple’s ear-wear feel closer to a heads-up remote than simple earbuds, nudging the ecosystem toward true ambient computing.
Talk in Any Tongue, Live, on the Call
Using the same Apple-silicon neural engines that drive Face ID, Live Translation pipes real-time subtitles into FaceTime or converts speech during regular calls. Apple swears the entire pipeline is on-device, meaning your awkward attempts at Italian never touch a server.
Early demos looked fluid, but latency will make or break the feature. If Apple nails sub-half-second turnaround, the iPhone could become the instant translator Star Trek promised.
Opening the AI Toolbox
Perhaps the sleeper announcement: third-party devs can now invoke Apple’s on-device LLM directly, with no per-token fees and the same privacy constraints that govern Siri. That could give rise to a new wave of AI-powered, offline-capable apps, imagine Lightroom presets generated locally or a writing app that edits prose without sending drafts to the cloud.
It’s also a hedge against criticism that Apple’s proprietary AI work lags behind OpenAI and Google. By seeding the SDK, Cupertino hopes the dev community will surface killer use-cases before October’s iPhone launch.
Apple’s fall hardware events often steal the spotlight, but WWDC ’25 makes a strong case that software is the bigger story this year. The company has unified its version numbers, re-skinned its entire UI, and doubled down on device-side AI, all in one shot. If half these features land as smoothly as the demos, upgrading in September will be a no-brainer.