[WWDC 2025] Platforms State of The Union First Impressions.
My hot takes from WWDC 2025 so far.
I just finished watching WWDC 2025 Platform State of The Union and here are some of my first raw unfiltered thoughts:
New Design. Liquid Glass.
The new design, in my opinion, looks nice and clean, despite the jokes on Twitter comparing it to Windows Vista's 2006 design.
I think the most important thing here about the new design is unification of it across all Apple platforms and making it even more divergent from Android. This will make it even harder to build cross platform applications with tech such as React Native because mobile platforms will diverge more and more incentivising developers to build native iOS applications more and more.
New sheets and menu presentations are nice. We’ll see how easy or difficult they are to customize.
The new tabBarBottomAccessory looks very nice too. Will be handy for time tracking applications. Hopefully it’s highly customizable and flexible in its presentation.
It seems like Xcode 26 is going to be the only release of Xcode where developers will be able to opt-out of the new Liquid Glass UI. Effectively it gives us about a year + some to migrate to the new design.
Icon Composer
This is great! I know it’s a small thing but having a nice little app that helps you create app icons with different variations is such a big help trying to publish your own app. Especially if you’re on a budget haha.
I’ll definitely be using it for my own projects.
Apple Intelligence
There is so much to cover about Apple Intelligence just from the Platform State of The Union video let alone from the other Apple Intelligence specific videos that I don’t think I’m going to do it justice. But here are some of the highlights/thoughts of mine:
Apple's approach to implementing its Foundation Models appears to be very well-thought-out. The way to use LLMs in your code is just by importing it like yet another framework in your app. And it runs on the user's device!
I especially liked the choice between a single response result from the model vs a stream.
@Generatable is also a very clever and great way of annotating and structuring the output you want to receive from LLM. I wonder what the accuracy and hallucinations would be??
Tool calling is also done via interfaces (protocols)! Finally someone at Apple thought through API design and did it well!
Because Foundation Models runs on device it can be available offline which is a distinct feature from Android.
VisualIntelligence and Intents integration via deep linking seems interesting too but I need to look into it more closely to figure out how it actually works. (I believe Intents is not a new API but integrating it with LLM things seems to be a great addition)
Xcode
Many new great things are coming to Xcode. ChatGPT and other LLM codegen models are finally coming to Xcode. I think this is the only wish that came true from my WWDC wishlist this year :)
The UI seems nice at the first glance but what I couldn’t see is the approve/reject style of UI to accept or reject the changes that LLM makes in your codebase. Kind of like what Cursor does. The new Xcode UI reminds me more of V0 or Figma Make more than Cursor or Intellij.
Another new nice addition is #Playground directive to test code inline. It will be very handy to try things out quickly.
Also, it looks like developers will be able to add their own custom models to be used in Xcode which is great (I personally don’t think chatgpt’s models are the best for coding anymore, go google!)
Swift
And the last one that caught my interest was all Swift changes. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like I’ve got my protected keyword wish haha.
InlineArray - meh, great but it doesn’t seem like it would be very useful since iOS devices are so powerful these days you rarely need this level of optimization
Span type - meh, probably is very useful for low level development and interop with C but I don’t think many app developers will be working with it day to day
Interop of Java and Javascript seems to be very interesting! I’ll be digging into it later.
It still puzzles me why Apple keeps introducing more improvements to race condition catching with things like the @concurrent. Concurrency issues are a solved problem if you architect your code properly. Just don’t use Singletons :)
Conclusion
These were just some of my first impressions, thoughts, and musings on what I saw in the Platform State of The Union video of WWDC 2025.
What piqued your interest? Leave a comment. And let’s see what Apple has in store for us tomorrow.