Apple Is on Defense at WWDC
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The reasons for Apple Intelligence's relative lackluster abilities are numerous and, from everything we hear, primarily political - but I'm certain some executives are questioning whether initiatives like Private Cloud Compute [0] were holding them back. And with app store revenue under siege, some must be questioning whether Apple could get a larger cut of the advertising market to make up for their losses... and such a push would come with all the cross-app tracking implications that are necessary to be competitive there.
IMO this would be a foundational mistake, and a massive tragedy. So many of us choose Apple products not only because of the silky-smooth interactions that flow from their long-standing intentionality in hardware and software design, but also because of the implicit promise of security, privacy, and stability that comes from the lack of hodge-podgeness that's somewhat inherent to the Android and Windows ecosystems. Take away that brand promise, and it's a downward spiral. But bigger companies have made worse choices before.
I've heard this in Apple's PR campaigns a lot. How is forcing users to upload the private files to iCloud through UX dark patterns a "privacy-first design"?
Me as a tech-knowledgable person fell for it while actively trying to not enable iCloud. Apple devices, never again.
Techie people on HN adopt a “no true Scotsman” attitude, and assert that anything is not enough. People who know nothing don’t understand enough to understand the nuances, see the obvious abuses of privacy on the web, Facebook, etc and assume it’s bullshit.
That is the genius of it the tech industry writes the laws. How much money did Apple donate to Trump?
This isn't a no-true-scotsman attitude. This is a rational reaction to security theater when nobody can prove that Apple is doing what they claim to be doing.
Even if it was E2EE - trusting Apple with proprietary crypto is like trusting Microsoft to not backdoor Bitlocker. It requires a specifically-qualified moron who doesn't respond to technical arguments and only understands marketing language.
> All they'll do is give us whitepapers on how things should work, which we know has been fabricated at least once in the case of Push Notification backdoors
I’m asking for evidence of your own claim. Apple do not claim that everything is encrypted, they specifically call out various aspects as being unencrypted.
They don’t exhaustively list all risks and perils, but that risk was known to me personally and documented by Apple at least circa 2020 — I worked with some third party developers to provide options to keep potentially high risk data out of APNS messages. Similar risks exist for Google’s platform. I’m not some genius with access to arcane knowledge, but if you’re doing your job it’s part of your risk assessment.
Judging by your very technical closing comment, this has no weight on your opinion, but I appreciate your taking time away from auditing Veracrypt or LUKS to read this.
if they cared, they would "allow" you to firewall your phone.
Their only commitment is "apple-first to put their hands on user data, everyone else second"
As with most big corporations, Tim and company have an insatiable appetite for your money --- and they have shown an obsessive willingness to restrict free enterprise itself in defiance of court orders if that is what it takes to get it.
The fact you nevertheless refer to this software as "dodgy" really shows how well Apple's messaging works to deter people from using it, even when their main argument against it is security (from what?).
Funny, considering that without Apple's draconian restrictions on user freedoms, IOS security is basically nonexistent even when compared to the low standard set by Android. It is true that the inside of Apple's jail feels safe, but in truth, there is much less keeping attackers out than users in.
WWDC 2025 Wish Lists: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/06/06/wwdc-2025-wish-lists/
WWDC 2025 Preview: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/06/07/wwdc-2025-preview/
> Danny Bolella: > In all sincerity, I would of course love for many of the AI goodies we see with IDE’s like VS Code and Cursor make it’s way (natively) into Xcode.
I think instead it's time for Apple to acknowledge developers moving out of the Xcode ecosystem and Apple should instead embrace development in VSCode, etc.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s possible. It’s just what you’d get at the end wouldn’t really resemble VS Code. Even though I spend a lot of time writing web app code in VS Code, my hope – wearing my iOS developer hat – is that they have a skunkworks project to replace Xcode with a new native IDE, not that they embrace VS Code.
I remember when the Cocos framework (a 2D and later 3D gaming engine) was found to be a popular binary that iOS apps were linking against, Apple suddenly saw fit to push their own game engine. I am not sure how many developers came aboard though. Cocos was, shhh!, cross platform and that was likely a problem from Apple's point of view; a boon from the developer's point of view.
I’m not sure you can point to Cocos as a motivating factor for Apple, and it certainly wasn’t sudden. It got popular very early on and plateaued. I remember building apps with it for iPhoneOS. SpriteKit didn’t come along until years later.
A new framework like SpriteKit requires at least a year (an iOS release cycle) before it sees WWDC ... and then a shipping iOS. My recollection is that this is pretty close to the timeline I described where Cocos starts to show up in abundance in the iOS apps submitted and as a result a team is spun up at Apple to create what ends up being SpriteKit.
You'll have to educate me on the plateauing of Cocos. If it did plateau pre Sprite-Kit, what replaced it?
It’s not. Cocos got popular in the iPhoneOS 2.x days. SpriteKit came along in iOS 7. We’re talking about a period of five years, not one or two.
> If it did plateau pre Sprite-Kit, what replaced it?
Plateau means it stayed flat, not that it went away. Nothing replaced it. It just didn’t keep getting more and more popular.
The minute you can put an iCloud email on your corporate domain, REALLY manage your Apple fleet centrally from a web portal without Jamf, and properly use iCloud for business, Apple wins on every front.
Spending years collaborating with Microsoft over platform SSO was a train wreck and a waste of time (we waited years and nothing works, all the Microsoft stuff is full of bugs).
And why does this make sense? Most of Microsoft’s profit is Office 365, and a decent chunk of Google’s revenue is Workspace; Apple has a chance to go after it all.
Rather, Apple played to their strengths and made corporate IT come to them. I was there in the early 2010s when they tried to force everyone to leave their iPhones at home and carry a blackberry for work email. Where is blackberry today?
Microsoft tried to have it all once, too. What happened to the windows phone?
You’d see nearly every small business and tech bro startup switch to the Apple corporate ecosystem within a few months.
As loopy as the news of the purchase of Jony Ives company (?) that made the rounds lately, I am pretty sure that what I want to carry around in my pocket from here on out is an AI assistant that rivals OpenAI's or Anthropic's. Whether it can be feathered in to Apple's existing xOS and put into the iPhone, or it requires writing a new platform is yet to be seen. But it's clear to me at least that this is the future.
In fact, if a new AI initiative required a new chip from Apple (A19? A20?) it would make a wild selling point to get some of us to buy new hardware just so we could get the new AI features (Yep, still on my iPhone 12 Mini I bought just before I retired).
(And here I didn't even use the word "agent" — whoops, I just did.)
This is the beginning of their decline.
The agent part may be important — but that's also the thing most likely to land in a future xOS.
Apple themselves published a recent paper pointing out that LLMs are very bad at sticking to algorithms (similar to how they're bad at arithmetic.) So if you want an agent to do anything complex it needs to generate a program to do it.
You can do that on a Mac today as well:
Well, good thing you bought a phone from the genius minds that brought us Siri!
It's time for Cook to retire. Let a visionary take his place.
I suspect instead that Apple, knowing they fucked up w/ regard to devs, want to completely control their own mea culpa and not risk a slip-up/soundbite coming from a talk show.
I do expect an apology during the Keynote. How sincere an apology, well that's up to the developers to decide.
> They’ll keep pretending that the Vision Pro is a beloved innovation and not just collecting dust on the shelves of early adopters.
Will they? Or will they instead just artfully not talk about the VisionPro at all. Perhaps quietly pull it sometime later this year. I don't think Apple will want to die on the VisionPro hill.
> Apple executives would do well to remember that it was apps that made the iPhone what it is today.
Are apps still what make the iPhone what it is today? And here I am speaking as a user. The "joy of discovery" when installing new apps died a long, long time ago. Installing a new app is cause for anxiety. If it even works and does not spy on me (or charge me for basic functionality "in app" — or worse yet, require an account or subscription), is it going to become an important addition to my "lifestyle" or another icon buried on some screen or folder in SpringBoard?
To be sure though, this is WWDC and Apple is catering to developers. I'm just saying out loud what I feel about the state of iOS apps these days.
They’ve been doing victory laps about his story about AI for a couple of months now. It’s weird and out of character… I’d guess Apple lied to him.
I have watched many of “The Talk Show” post WWDC episodes, but I don’t think John Gruber actually asks (or has asked) tough questions at that event. This time though, it would’ve been extremely awkward not to ask any questions at all about the state of Apple Intelligence and where it’s heading. For Apple, it would be difficult to focus on other topics that it wants to advertise to the audience.
> I do expect an apology during the Keynote. How sincere an apology, well that's up to the developers to decide.
Apple never apologizes in public and doesn’t admits mistakes as mistakes in public (it may sometimes acknowledge certain things and word it very differently). At least not as a full fledged apology of any sort for various reasons. IIRC, there’s already a class action lawsuit filed against it for misleading and false promises about Apple Intelligence. The last thing Apple would do is provide more ammo for that suit to succeed and for more lawsuits to be filed for every misstep and egregious delivery in/from its announcements.
I mean perhaps, but this comes off as entirely naive. Does the author really think this would happen?