Apple is playing catch-up at WWDC

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference kicked off Monday with an apology of sorts. Instead of jumping straight to the main news about a revamped, AI-powered Siri, Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, spent the first part of the keynote listing fixes.

For the past two years, Apple has been racing to catch up with artificial intelligence, while frustrations with its core software have quietly mounted: a comprehensive design overhaul that users hate, a search function that barely works, a file sharing feature that routinely fails, and a Health app that ignores half its user base. Apple didn’t say any of that on Monday. But Heckel’s keynote at WWDC told them so, presenting fixes before features, and framing Siri best as one item on a long list of improvements rather than the main event. At the very least, the sequence suggests that Apple believes its organization needs support before it can credibly ask users to trust it with something as important as artificial intelligence.

“Instead of just introducing a bunch of new features, we also take the features you already rely on and make them better, because we believe the best operating systems aren’t built just on big accomplishments, they’re built on sweating the details,” Federighi said. It’s the kind of statement that would be standard from most companies, but from Apple, it was as close as it came to admitting a mistake. (Sweating over the details is exactly what critics said the company stopped doing.)

Federighi did not have to wait long to prove that point. The first item on the list was the company’s controversial Liquid Glass design language, which first arrived in iOS 26 and immediately sparked consumer backlash over readability and usability concerns.

Although it’s visually impressive, Liquid Glass’s glass-like aesthetic made some on-screen elements more difficult to see. Users pointed out several ways the update didn’t go well, especially on Macs, and begged Apple for tools to restore the more frozen look.

The company handled the moment carefully, saying it “really appreciates” the user feedback it has received about Liquid Glass over the past year.

“While we think this is a great new default look, we also know that some users want Liquid Glass to be clearer, and others prefer a more colorful look,” Shubham Kedia, Apple’s director of human interface design, said during the keynote. (For the record, no one is asking for this to be clearer.)

Apple, which had already tweaked the design before today, is allowing users to dial it all back with a new slider up to “Full Color.”

A few other small but important updates followed. Apple showed off a “more consistent” toolbar in macOS designed to better distinguish controls and text from the content underneath, in another usability improvement. App icons have received additional improvements to Liquid Glass to make them “clearer and more defined,” even when set to clear mode.

Then came the performance improvements. iPhone and iPad apps now launch up to 30% faster, new photos appear up to 70% faster in your library, and files transfer up to 80% faster when using AirDrop, an unstable file-sharing system.

In a subtle acknowledgment that people are holding on to their phones longer these days, Apple said it has extended the performance improvements for all models to include the iPhone 11, a phone released in 2019.

Apple has also addressed several long-standing points of friction: smoother transitions between Wi-Fi and cellular, a new indicator that lets you know when your messages are taking longer (useful when you’re on low bandwidth or sending a large file), and a rebuilt search experience that the company describes as “more stable, more efficient, and more comprehensive in content.” New content will be indexed almost instantly, and Mail’s new ranking system will display the most relevant results first. (The fact that this needs to be fixed at all indicates how far behind Apple’s research is.)

Apple’s Health app — which has gone years without meaningfully supporting half of its user base — has added support for perimenopause and menopause tracking. It’s a long-awaited move that comes as the menopause care market is hitting big strides: Earlier this year, menopause telehealth startup Midi Health surpassed a $1 billion valuation, and committed investment in the category topped $294 million between 2022 and last year.

Shared photo albums on iCloud can now accept contributions from Android and Windows users, making the feature even more useful for shared trips and group events.

Apple also rolled out improved screen time controls for parents before moving on to the main event: announcing AI-enhanced Siri.

Sequence was intentional By compiling a long list of smaller improvements upfront, Apple recast its Siri update as one part of a broader effort, rather than the AI ​​moment the industry had been watching.

Perhaps this framing is clever. Siri will launch in consumer beta later this year, but not in the EU or China, where Apple still has regulatory hurdles to overcome. For a feature that was supposed to define Apple’s AI strategy, “beta, comes later, not everywhere” is a noteworthy hedge.

Apple has outlined other smaller AI developments, such as how Apple Intelligence will be able to organize your web page tabs, analyze web pages for information, check pages for updates, and more. You can also quickly create a custom Safari extension using AI, which sounds interesting.

Passwords and Safari can now work together to automatically suggest and apply stronger passwords. Apple Intelligence also adds helpful reply suggestions in messages based on the context of the conversation. For example, if someone asks you for photos, Apple’s AI can direct you to the right photos. Calendar can now generate events from natural language commands — something third-party apps like Fantastical have offered for years, making this a catch-up feature.

The AI ​​will be able to display basic information when making a phone call, such as a confirmation code when calling the airline.

Meanwhile, the Home app will use artificial intelligence to summarize events, catching up with companies like Amazon and Google, which have moved into more advanced areas, such as fire detection and facial recognition. (However, we’d like to thank Apple for moving away from the latter.)

Image Playground – Apple’s AI image generating app – appears to have finally crossed the threshold from novelty to useful. Previous versions produced images that were comical and difficult to apply in practice; The updated template can create something practical like a business flyer or a clearly edited photo. Apple also announced that it will open up photo creation to developers via an application programming interface (API), a move that turns the consumer feature into a potential platform.

AI can now also edit images more fundamentally, removing distracting elements from the scene or expanding its edges using generative models, similar to what Google Photos offers. The standout feature is spatial reframing, which lets you adjust the composition of an image after the fact using Apple’s on-device spatial models. It even works retroactively on photos you already have in your library, meaning years of existing photos are now fair game.