Initial thoughts on WWDC26

Now that WWDC26 has kicked off, here are my early and initial thoughts so far:

Aside from being one of the shortest keynotes in recent memory, it had strange vibes this year. I like that they focused on themes rather than individual platforms, but they spent a long time talking about parental controls (MDM anyone?) which seemed to be an attempt to placate governments around the world for which social media and tech overuse is currently a hot topic.
It feels like perhaps Apple were hoping to announce hardware during the keynote, but had to pull the announcements due to the ongoing chip and component shortages?
No sign of incoming CEO John Ternus in the pre-recorded keynote or state of the union, but he has been spotted floating around other in-person WWDC events. Letting Tim enjoy his final WWDC as CEO?
It’s disappointing that there don’t appear to be any online 1:1 labs with engineers this year, just group labs and forum discussions
This year all session videos dropped on day one again, as soon as the state of the union finished. Love this, and it helps prep for group labs!
Apple sadly still haven’t added back the functionality to diff framework changes between iOS 26 and iOS 27 on the developer docs website. This continues to make it difficult to see what’s changed at a glance (FB18143168)
Great to see a strong focus on improving performance and stability across all platforms. While not as sexy as new features and functionality, after a rough cycle last year the focus on stability is a welcome change
Looks like developers - small ones at least - can now access Private Cloud Compute as a managed capability! Note the restrictions though - you can’t have an app that’s received 2 million or more downloads and you must also be enrolled in the App Store Small Business Program. If you exceed 2 million downloads, you’ll have 6 months to find an alternate option according to Apple
Liquid Glass has seen some refinements this year - most notably on the Mac, which is looking much more refined now in macOS 27. A new slider has been introduced to control the level of glass & refraction - perhaps data from this will be used to refine the default design for next year?
Speaking of the slider, at the moment you can drag to precise values and there are no steps. Hopefully this gets fixed in the beta period, as it feels like there’s too much control here at present. It also makes it difficult to get back to the “default” value if you accidentally change the value