WWDC 2025 First Impressions: As Expected, Yet Unexpected

WWDC 2025 arrived right on schedule. Apple released all session videos at once, allowing developers to dive into the new features and APIs they care about without delay. After skimming through them over the past two days, my initial takeaway for this year’s conference is: as expected, yet unexpected.

I say “as expected” because many of the headline features had already leaked in rumors, and the advancements in the frameworks I follow directly addressed pain points developers have been voicing for years. Seeing those changes, I wasn’t immediately surprised.

However, as I dug deeper into the design and usage patterns of these new APIs, I found their polish and elegance far exceeded my expectations. In a way, this helps explain a long-standing question I’ve had: why does Apple often ship solutions to problems that don’t seem that complicated so much later than other platforms? At least this year, many of the new APIs felt beautifully designed and remarkably forward-looking.

Below, I’ll share my thoughts on several frameworks and features that caught my attention.

Liquid Glass

I’m neutral on the Liquid Glass aesthetic—not opposed, but not head-over-heels in love, either. On one hand, many details still need fine-tuning; on the other, achieving the intended full-screen effect will require deep adaptation by numerous apps. Although Apple provides convenient APIs (in SwiftUI you can practically flip a switch), the dramatic shift in visual style means simply toggling an existing UI into Liquid Glass rarely looks right. That presents a significant design challenge for developers.

After two days of hands-on, here’s my verdict:

• Real-device demos look far better than screenshots
• Motion effects trump static visuals
• iOS support is much more polished than macOS

In short, to truly embrace the Liquid Glass look, developers may need to adopt design techniques they’re less accustomed to—such as vivid, full-bleed image backgrounds.

SwiftUI

Compared to previous years, SwiftUI’s new APIs are modest in number this time around, and a good chunk of them tie into Liquid Glass support.

• TabView: After last year’s overhaul on iPadOS, TabView on iPhone has received a major UI and interaction refresh. Some visual details still invite debate, but the immersive experience is undeniably improved. The real challenge will lie in adapting existing apps.
• macOS: Beyond boosting list and scroll-container performance, Apple has strengthened SwiftUI–AppKit interop. It’s clear the SwiftUI team has adopted a more pragmatic stance, acknowledging that, for the foreseeable future, SwiftUI will need to collaborate with AppKit (and UIKit) to deliver a complete user experience.
• 3D Charts: A fantastic upgrade—if this had shipped sooner, it might have been a big win for Apple Vision Pro.
• Rich Text Editor: A long-awaited feature, and the final result is stunning. The heavy lifting wasn’t so much in TextEditor itself but in the dramatic enhancements to AttributedString. I’d even go so far as to say AttributedString now has a real shot at supplanting NSAttributedString, with an API that feels natural to Swift developers. The upgrades to AttributedString (even though it lives in Foundation) are the biggest SwiftUI surprise of the year for me.

One regret: I tested several reproducible SwiftUI bugs I’d encountered over the past year, and they remain in beta 1. I believe that addressing stability issues and improving performance will need to remain SwiftUI’s top priorities for some time to come.

SwiftData

SwiftData added only one feature this year—model inheritance—which isn’t widely used by most developers. Other highly requested capabilities, such as additional sync options (shared, public) and dynamic predicate adjustments, didn’t materialize in this release. That said, this update isn’t a failure. By fixing several critical bugs from previous versions and filling in some long-overdue functionality, SwiftData in Xcode 26 has become increasingly viable for real-world apps.

• A bug preventing view updates when mutating data under @ModelActor has been resolved.
• For model properties conforming to Codable, you can now use those properties in predicates.

Remarkably, both fixes remain backward compatible to iOS 17. To me, this is the closest SwiftData has come to fulfilling the vision Apple had at its inception.

In Xcode 26 beta 1, model inheritance and enum-typed properties still exhibit some bugs, but I expect those to be ironed out before the final release. It’s also highly likely that enums with RawValue will be queryable directly in predicates.

Once Xcode 26 ships, I believe SwiftData can genuinely be a primary choice for persistence in most apps.

Foundation Models

It’s no surprise Apple delivered on-device model APIs, but the usability of the Foundation Models API genuinely impressed me. The @Generable macro for declaring structured outputs solves the formatting headache that often comes with large-model responses, greatly simplifying development.

I predict Foundation Models will spark a flood of AI-powered applications across Apple platforms. Even though Apple isn’t leading in large-model training, its ecosystem advantage could very well secure its leadership in AI-driven app experiences.

The Era of Macros

Browsing the new API docs, I noticed nearly every framework includes multiple Swift macros. With the Swift community’s prebuilt Swift-Syntax, the overhead of developing or using third-party macros has dropped significantly. Macros have truly become an essential and indispensable part of the Swift ecosystem.

Other Highlights

AlarmKit

A feature developers have long desired finally arrived this year. We can now build timer and alarm apps natively.

Playground

Although Xcode itself received substantial upgrades, the most delightful surprise was the ability to embed Playground code blocks directly within regular projects, enabling live interactions akin to Previews. This idea was still in community discussion on the Swift Forums just months ago—now it’s a polished reality in Xcode. This feature not only lowers the barrier for learning and testing APIs but also lets library authors integrate richer demos right alongside their source code.

This is arguably the biggest update to Xcode Playgrounds in years, leveraging Xcode’s strengths and reinforcing its position as the premier IDE for Apple development.

Conclusion

Before WWDC kicked off this year, I consciously lowered my expectations and approached the event with an open mind. In hindsight, Apple delivered a very satisfying result—for me, at least.