WWDC 26

Week 450 was posted by Charanjit Chana on 2026-06-10.

Platform improvements look like they will give older devices in particular, a new lease of life. Improving speed launch times by 30% is no small feat for a device as old as the iPhone 11 (almost 7 years old). In fact there were over 200 improvements announced.

App Icons / Liquid Glass

Jump to 09:21 in the keynote.

In general, Liquid Glass looks more refined. Just trying the iOS 27 build in Xcode offers a clear improvement to the way it all looks on device. Clearer definition of elements and it does feel more polished in appearance.

App Icons specifically look crisper. That has been my biggest issue when creating Liquid Glass icons, they have soft edges that look too big. This evolution brings tighter edges and refractions with higher contrast. Both very welcome.

The move back to a consistent corner radii and fixing the sidebar and toolbars will go a long way to making Liquid Glass feel like the right move forward than it currently might for some. The sidebar in particular was poorly implemented and I look forward to some common sense coming back into the world of Apple's GUI.

Optimisations

Jump to 10:00 in the keynote.

Back to optimisations, nothing was too small and these are all very welcome:

Lock Screen consistently stays awake while scrolling notifications
More distinct active windows
Better battery efficiency on Apple Watch
Filter photos and videos in Shared Albums
Faster loading of new captures in Photos
More reliable search indexing in Mail

Apple Maps

Jump to 16:10 in the keynote.

Flyover gets a boost in quality, which is very welcome. Google Maps is no better than Apple Maps currently, but it makes a huge difference when the Street View or Lookaround features aren't available.

The Siri Orb (visionOS)

Jump to 46:50 in the keynote.

I thought the Siri orb in visionOS was delightful, just place a little oracle in your space and you can talk to it when you need to. I won't talk about Siri specifically as my phone won't support it and we've been here before. I hope it does live up to expectations, but Siri often fails to do the basics for me even today.

Shortcuts: Describe an extension

Jump to 54:18 in the keynote.

Shortcuts is such a powerful app, but it can get cumbersome and complicated very quickly. Being able to describe a shortcut and for it to build it by itself is a game changer. I've not had the time to dig into agentic AI as much as I'd like but this could be the step I need to make a few simple ideas come to life.