WWDC 2024 has arrived! We were eager to see what Apple had instore for us this year. Our iOS Team had predictions for the announcements, from AI integrations to the arrival of iOS 18, with hopes for greater customization tools. We caught up with our iOS team to see if their expectations were met and what the announcements will mean for our clients, future projects and development!
Application Features
Aidan: This year, Apple has announced some fun new features coming to iPhone, iPad and Mac. Notably, the customisation of apps, emojis and widgets for greater personalisation. Being able to recolour and rearrange your apps to suit you is an update I’m looking forward to.
MacOS 15 means we are now able to cast our phone screens to our Macs. Without having to go through the difficulty of jumping through Quicktime. When we build apps, we need to see what we’re building on a device, but the downfall comes when trying to give demonstrations through Quicktime or a simulator. Now we will have the ability to cast straight to our Macs, to easily share our phone screens to colleagues and clients virtually!
VisionOS 2 is also progressing! I’m excited to see the possibilities of where the Vision Pro is heading and how it can be more integrated with everyday and working life.
Apple Intelligence
Ben: Artificial Intelligence will be coming to the iPhone 15 Pro. The updates will see even greater feature personalisation as AI will learn what is a priority to you and how you communicate to help you form emails and texts, but also upgrading Siri for greater interactions and more complicated tasks. It is disappointing that it will only be available on the iPhone 15 Pro, but the announcement is very cool, and it will be fun to use and see how your phone uses AI to develop to you as an individual as you use it!
From a developers’ point of view, Apple Intelligence has some interesting new AI features for our code system, Swift, with Swift Assist. At the moment we have Xcode, which has an AI feature that learns off your codebase and offers prompts, similar to that of ‘autofill’ we often see in messaging systems. The drawback is that, due to how it learns, its main application is in large code bases. In smaller code bases it doesn’t pick up errors as easily and doesn’t provide support, which is the gap Swift Assist should fill by being able to answer questions and provide possible solutions!
Developer Tools
Robbie: Apple’s coding language, Swift, has evolved too. We have known for a while the changes were coming, now Swift 6 has been released. The upgrades have provided developers with long-awaited support, which will really improve our efficiency and the effectiveness of the apps we build. The biggest improvement is in concurrency, which is how code is handled when running on multiple threads. New Swift 6 features add checks to make it harder to create “race conditions” where multiple lines of code are trying to modify something simultaneously, causing unexpected behaviour. Swift 6 introduces stricter checks that help us to keep our code more thread-safe and prevent these race conditions. This is helpful to enable us to create cleaner code and reduce bugs, but also, in large codebases we won’t lose time trying to find the problem. Ultimately, the integrations ensure that the code we build will be more stable which means we will create better apps!
Another great feature of Swift is that we have been enabled to write Swift code across other platforms, meaning we are no longer restricted to just Apple products. This is great for if we are working across multiple devices, such as Windows or an Internet of Things (IoT) project.