Dub-Dub 26 Manifestation

Introduction

Everyone in the Apple developer community is currently posting and buzzing about Apple’s big event, WWDC26. It happens once a year, dropping massive updates across all Apple platforms, and I just hope I am not joining the conversation too late.

Oh, and by the way, Apple recently released their official All Systems Glow wallpaper collection for Mac, iPad, and iPhone. I have already downloaded and set it on my MacBook, but if you haven’t grabbed it yet, you can download it here.

Preparation

Now, even though I say “preparation,” don’t stress out. I am just sharing this based on my own past mistakes. First, make sure to download the latest Apple Developer app to watch the upcoming sessions. And please remember that you have at least a full year to absorb all the information they are going to present, so don’t feel like you’ve already missed the boat.

The second thing I would prepare for is updating my macOS version. I saw Antoine van der Lee share his thoughts about this in a recent article, and while I completely share his frustration with the yearly update cycle, it is a necessary evil.

Finally, a golden rule you likely already know, never install beta software on your work machine. I only install betas and run my WWDC experimentations on a personal laptop. Doing so on a machine you rely on for your day job is a terrible idea for obvious reasons.

How I See Things

Hype is just hype, but what matters is reality, what does this actually mean for us as developers?

If you are an indie developer, your approach is going to be a little different. If you are a student, hey, take your time and just enjoy the show, and keep trying things out, learn how they design those APIs etc. But if you are like me and work full-time, your company or your squad has a dedicated goal to achieve and product promises to deliver.

So, all the cool announcements aside, we still have to deal with our day-to-day responsibilities. The way I approach this influx of new tech is through a specific lens, What does it mean for my team, or for the product I am actively building?

• If something is genuinely cool and immediately useful, I take notes and dig deep.
• If something looks shiny but lacks an immediate return on investment (ROI) — or is just a fancy gimmick — I throw it into my “revisit later” bucket.
• If something is going to break our existing app, change our architecture, or require immediate refactoring, I take serious notes and raise it with the team right away.

AI-Agnostic Xcode

Without a shadow of a doubt, Artificial Intelligence is going to be the dominant topic again this year. It is no secret that Apple has lagged behind in the AI-assisted coding era, so I am expecting a much more ergonomic AI workflow inside Xcode.

On a day-to-day basis, I personally prefer the command line, using TUIs like lazygit or gh-dash alongside tools like Claude Code. I am perfectly fine with a terminal-driven workflow. That said, we desperately need first-class agentic support from Apple. Last year, when the community discovered Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools buried deep inside Xcode’s internal file hierarchy, I was highly surprised. It would be incredibly cool if Apple provided an upfront, native way to leverage MCP skills and tooling.

Foundation Models

While I don’t personally rely heavily on Apple’s core foundation models, I expect them to improve, fine-tune, and introduce more frameworks that revolve tightly around local and cloud-based AI.

Better CLI Support

Whether you prefer a command-line interface or a GUI, CLIs are proving to be the most effective way to interface with AI engines without blowing through context windows. There are endless discussions right now about GUI-based MCP tools eating up context and spiking API costs, whereas lightweight CLIs let you pinpoint exactly what you need to feed the model.

Tuist is a perfect example of a tool I wish Apple had built natively a long time ago. I want to see Apple give us more robust, official CLIs to interact directly with Xcode, its platforms, and its internal AI capabilities.

Build Tooling

Whenever I sit down with other iOS developers, the number-one topic of conversation is always reducing build times. We have seen news about Xcode experimenting with compiler optimizations to enhance incremental builds, alongside ongoing open-source progress with the Swift Build and Swift Compiler Driver initiatives. I want to see how these under-the-hood changes will practically improve build times for Swift Package Manager (SPM) and Xcode projects in general.

SwiftUI Improvements

Apple continues to pour resources into SwiftUI. It would be amazing if new features were more reliably backward-compatible, but regardless, it is worth keeping an eye on data flow improvements and concurrency safety. I am particularly curious to see if there are any major updates on the Observation framework.

I really appreciate patterns like UIHostingConfiguration, which lets us smoothly embed SwiftUI views directly inside UIKit collection view cells and handles self-resizing elegantly. I actually built an experimental demo recently that leverages custom result builders to mimic a SwiftUI-like declarative API for composing UIKit UICollectionViewCompositionalLayout. My goal was to maintain classic cell reuse/recycling behaviour rather than relying entirely on lazy loading. However, a custom solution is never as intuitive as first-party design, so I am highly hoping to see native, cleaner support for this kind of structural bridging.

Final Thoughts

WWDC is the moment where Apple’s engineers get to show off what they have been cooking behind closed doors for years. I can only imagine how proud they feel standing on that stage, sharing what their teams have poured their lives into.

There will inevitably be a mix of positive and negative feedback from the community, but let’s remember that no platform or tool is perfect on day one. We are all trying to improve our craft. Let’s stay open-minded toward the innovations, figure out what genuinely works best for our products and teams, and share that knowledge with each other.