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WWDC 2025: What to expect from this year’s conference

WWDC 2025: What to expect from this year’s conference

WWDC 2025, Apple’s annual developers conference, starts at 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET. Monday. Last year’s event was notable for its focus on AI, and this year, there is considerable pressure on the company to build on its promises, and to make amends to developers as it lags behind in AI and faces continued legal challenges over its App Store.

As in previous years, the company will focus on software updates and new technologies, including the next version of iOS, which is rumored to have the most significant design changes since the introduction of iOS 7. But iOS 19 (or 26, if other rumors about the new naming system are true) isn’t the only thing the company will announce at WWDC 2025.

Here’s how you can watch the keynote livestream.

iOS is getting the most dramatic design change in over a decade

When Apple introduced a major overhaul to iOS back in 2013 with the launch of iOS 7, it felt jarring for many users with the shift from the prior skeuomorphic design with gradients and real-world textures to the more colorful, but flat, design style that reflected Apple’s then chief design officer Jony Ive’s taste for minimalism.

Now, new reports suggest that an upcoming redesign could provoke a similar level of reaction.

Reports suggest the new design may have elements referencing visionOS, the software powering Apple’s spatial computing headset, the Apple Vision Pro. If true, that means the new OS could feature a transparent interface and more circular app icons that break away from the traditional square format today.

This visual redesign could be implemented across all of Apple’s ecosystem (including even CarPlay), according to Bloomberg, providing a more seamless experience for consumers moving between their different devices.

iOS will change its naming system

According to Bloomberg, Apple will announce a change in the naming system for iOS at this year’s WWDC. Instead of announcing the next version of iOS as iOS 19, Apple’s operating systems will shift to being named by year. That means we could be set to see the launch of iOS 26 instead, alongside the OSes for other products, including adOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26, and visionOS 26.

Apple may keep the AI news light this year

While it might be challenging to top the news related to Apple Intelligence at WWDC 2024, the company is expected to share a few updates on the AI front.

The company has seemingly been caught flat-footed in the AI race, making announcements about AI capabilities that had yet to ship, leading even some Apple pundits to accuse the company of touting vaporware. While Apple has launched several AI tools like Image Playground, Genmoji, Writing Tools, Photos Clean Up, and more, its promise of an improved Siri, personalized to the end user and able to take action across your apps, has been delayed.

Meanwhile, Apple has turned to outside companies like OpenAI to give its iPhone a boost in terms of its AI capabilities. At WWDC, it may announce support for other AI chatbots, as well. With Jony Ive now working with Sam Altman on an AI hardware device, Apple is under pressure to catch up on AI progress.

Image Credits:Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto / Getty Images

In addition, reports suggest that Apple’s Health app could soon incorporate AI technology, which could include a health chatbot and generative AI insights that provide personalized health-related suggestions based on user data. Additionally, other apps, such as Messages, may receive enhancements with AI capabilities, including a translation feature and polls that offer AI-generated suggestions, per 9to5Mac.

Apple will likely make the most of a number of smaller OS updates that involve AI, given its underwhelming progress. Reports suggest that these updates could include AI-powered battery management features and an AI-powered Shortcuts app, for instance.

iPhone users may get a dedicated gaming app

Bloomberg confirmed a 9to5Mac report that said Apple is developing a dedicated gaming app that will replace the aging Game Center app. The app could include access to Apple Arcade’s subscription-based game store, plus other gaming features like leaderboards, recommendations, and ways to challenge your friends. It could also integrate with iMessage or FaceTime for remote gaming.

Apple Arcade video game subscription service signage is displayed on an iPhone
Image Credits:Gabby Jones/Bloomberg / Getty Images

Updates to Mac, Watch, TV, and more

Along with the new design, reports suggest that Apple’s other operating systems will get some polish, too. For instance, macOS may also see the new gaming app and benefit from the new AirPods features. It’s also expected to be named macOS Tahoe, in keeping with Apple’s naming convention that references California landmarks.

Apple TV may get a visual overhaul, but also changes to its user interface, the new gaming app, and other features.

AirPods to get new features

In addition to Messages getting a translation feature, Bloomberg reported that Apple could also bring a live-translate language feature to its AirPods wireless Bluetooth earbuds, allowing real-time translation during conversations. The iPhone will translate spoken words from another language for the user and will also translate the user’s response back into that language.

A new report from 9to5Mac also suggests that AirPods may get new head gestures to complement today’s ability to either nod or shake your head to respond to incoming calls or messages. Plus, AirPods may get features to auto-pause music after you fall asleep, a way to trigger the camera via Camera Control with a touch, a studio-quality mic mode, and an improved pairing experience in shared AirPods.

AirPods Pro 2 with USB-C
Image Credits:Darrell Etherington

Apple Pencil upgrade

According to reports, the Apple Pencil is also receiving a new update, one that will benefit users who wish to write in Arabic script. In an effort to cater to customers in UAE, Saudi Arabia, and India, Apple is reportedly launching a new virtual calligraphy feature in iPadOS 19. The company may also introduce a bi-directional keyboard so users can switch between Arabic and English on iPhones and iPads.

No hardware announcements?

There haven’t been any rumors regarding new devices, because no hardware is ready for release yet, according to Bloomberg. Although it’s always possible that the company will surprise us with a new Mac Pro announcement, most reports are saying this is highly unlikely at this point.

Some reports indicate that Apple may also announce support for a new input device for its Vision Pro: spatial controllers. The devices would be motion-aware and designed with interaction in a 3D environment in mind, 9to5Mac says. In addition, Vision Pro could get eye-scrolling support, enabling users to scroll through documents on both native and third-party apps.

Bloomberg had reported in November that Apple was expected to announce a smart home tablet in March 2025, featuring a 6-inch touchscreen and voice-activated controls. The device was said to include support for Home Control, Siri, and video calls, but has yet to launch. Following the discovery of a filing for “HomeOS” by PMC’s Parker Ortolani, speculation has arisen that Apple may unveil the software for the device at WWDC.

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In an SEC filing published on Tuesday in the US, Getty said it is “not required to accept” approval conditions outlined by the UK Competitions and Markets Authority in May that require Shutterstock to sell its global editorial business, including the Backgrid and Splash paparazzi agencies.

Those conditions have proved unappealing enough for Getty to walk away from the deal, which aimed to combine the companies stock photo libraries. Both companies face competition from AI image generators that provide fast and cheap media content on demand. The company’s board of directors “unanimously” voted to terminate the merger agreement on July 6th, “assuming no material change in the aforementioned circumstances” occurs before July 7th. That essentially leaves the Getty/Shutterstock merger dead in the water.

#Cleared #derailed #Gettys #Shutterstock #merger #fallsBusiness,News,Policy,Politics,Regulation,Tech">Cleared by the US, derailed by the UK: Getty’s Shutterstock merger falls apartGetty is planning to axe its .7 billion merger agreement with Shutterstock after a UK regulator imposed restrictions that would prevent part of Shutterstock’s business from being included in the deal. The move comes despite the US Department of Justice granting the deal “unconditional antitrust clearance” in February.In an SEC filing published on Tuesday in the US, Getty said it is “not required to accept” approval conditions outlined by the UK Competitions and Markets Authority in May that require Shutterstock to sell its global editorial business, including the Backgrid and Splash paparazzi agencies.Those conditions have proved unappealing enough for Getty to walk away from the deal, which aimed to combine the companies stock photo libraries. Both companies face competition from AI image generators that provide fast and cheap media content on demand. The company’s board of directors “unanimously” voted to terminate the merger agreement on July 6th, “assuming no material change in the aforementioned circumstances” occurs before July 7th. That essentially leaves the Getty/Shutterstock merger dead in the water.#Cleared #derailed #Gettys #Shutterstock #merger #fallsBusiness,News,Policy,Politics,Regulation,Tech

$3.7 billion merger agreement with Shutterstock after a UK regulator imposed restrictions that would prevent part of Shutterstock’s business from being included in the deal. The move comes despite the US Department of Justice granting the deal “unconditional antitrust clearance” in February.

In an SEC filing published on Tuesday in the US, Getty said it is “not required to accept” approval conditions outlined by the UK Competitions and Markets Authority in May that require Shutterstock to sell its global editorial business, including the Backgrid and Splash paparazzi agencies.

Those conditions have proved unappealing enough for Getty to walk away from the deal, which aimed to combine the companies stock photo libraries. Both companies face competition from AI image generators that provide fast and cheap media content on demand. The company’s board of directors “unanimously” voted to terminate the merger agreement on July 6th, “assuming no material change in the aforementioned circumstances” occurs before July 7th. That essentially leaves the Getty/Shutterstock merger dead in the water.

#Cleared #derailed #Gettys #Shutterstock #merger #fallsBusiness,News,Policy,Politics,Regulation,Tech">Cleared by the US, derailed by the UK: Getty’s Shutterstock merger falls apart

Getty is planning to axe its $3.7 billion merger agreement with Shutterstock after a UK regulator imposed restrictions that would prevent part of Shutterstock’s business from being included in the deal. The move comes despite the US Department of Justice granting the deal “unconditional antitrust clearance” in February.

In an SEC filing published on Tuesday in the US, Getty said it is “not required to accept” approval conditions outlined by the UK Competitions and Markets Authority in May that require Shutterstock to sell its global editorial business, including the Backgrid and Splash paparazzi agencies.

Those conditions have proved unappealing enough for Getty to walk away from the deal, which aimed to combine the companies stock photo libraries. Both companies face competition from AI image generators that provide fast and cheap media content on demand. The company’s board of directors “unanimously” voted to terminate the merger agreement on July 6th, “assuming no material change in the aforementioned circumstances” occurs before July 7th. That essentially leaves the Getty/Shutterstock merger dead in the water.

#Cleared #derailed #Gettys #Shutterstock #merger #fallsBusiness,News,Policy,Politics,Regulation,Tech
Vinton Cerf will step down from his role as Google’s chief internet evangelist next week, marking the conclusion of one of the most influential careers in technology history.

While speaking via video feed at the Open Frontier conference hosted by the Laude Institute, Cerf was recognized by Dave Patterson, the UC Berkeley professor best known for co-developing RISC processor architecture.

“Vint … has been at Google more than 20 years, and he is retiring a week from today, and so I think we ought to give him a round of applause for a relatively good career,” Patterson said, to cheers from the room.

Google did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

Cerf, 83, and collaborator Robert Kahn are credited as being the architects of the networking protocols that became the internet we know today. His work developing and popularizing TCP/IP — the basic set of rules that lets different computer networks talk to each other — beginning in the 1970s has been recognized with numerous honorary degrees, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a Turing Award, among other honors.

Since 2005, Cerf has served as a vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google. (At this point, we can safely say the internet is fully evangelized, for good or ill.)

Cerf was speaking on a panel alongside other computer scientists known for their work on durable open source projects, including Patterson; François Chollet, creator of the Keras deep-learning library and co-founder of Ndea; John Ousterhout, the Stanford computer scientist behind the Tcl programming language, who also co-founded Electric Cloud; and Matei Zaharia, who is Databricks’ co-founder and chief technologist. They offered advice about what it takes to build open source systems that survive — advice that’s increasingly relevant as founders bet on open infrastructure for the next wave of AI products.

Much of the conference’s discussion focused on the problems with the centralization of advanced models in a handful of well-resourced labs, in contrast to the decentralized world of the open internet that made Cerf’s own protocols so durable. However, Cerf predicted that the rise of AI agents — software that can act autonomously and coordinate with other software — would push tech companies back towards standardized protocols.

“The agentic model of AI, with multiple agents from multiple sources interacting with each other, is going to force composability, and a requirement for interoperability and standardization,” Cerf said.

If he’s right, the companies that define those interoperability standards early could end up with outsized influence over how the agentic economy actually works — a dynamic not unlike the early internet protocol wars.

While other panelists speculated that natural language communication between LLM agents would be sufficient, Cerf predicted formal standards would be required.

“I don’t think English is going to be the best choice. There’s a flexibility in it, but there’s ambiguity, and I think precision for interagent interaction is going to be very, very important. An agent really needs to be sure the other agent understands what it is that they just agreed to do together,” Cerf said.

“Remember the old telephone game where you wish you’d whispered in somebody’s ear and then by the time it got to 10 people away the message was totally different? Imagine a bunch of agents talking to each other in natural language, you know, that’s kind of terrifying.”

In a more light-hearted moment, Patterson recalled meeting Cerf, known for his wardrobe of three-piece suits, as a grad student in the 1970s.

“He’s always been the best dressed computer scientist I’ve ever met,” Patterson said. “My memory of Vint is that he came as a grad student with a shirt and tie in the 70s.”

“It absolutely is true,” Cerf said. “I even had a vest, and for some reason I always wanted to stick out, and instead of having long hair, and something in my nose, I thought just dressing differently was one way to do it.”

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

#Father #Internet #finally #retiring #TechCrunchExclusive">The ‘Father of the Internet’ is finally retiring | TechCrunch
Vinton Cerf will step down from his role as Google’s chief internet evangelist next week, marking the conclusion of one of the most influential careers in technology history. 

While speaking via video feed at the Open Frontier conference hosted by the Laude Institute, Cerf was recognized by Dave Patterson, the UC Berkeley professor best known for co-developing RISC processor architecture.







“Vint … has been at Google more than 20 years, and he is retiring a week from today, and so I think we ought to give him a round of applause for a relatively good career,” Patterson said, to cheers from the room.

Google did not respond to a request for comment by publication time. 

Cerf, 83, and collaborator Robert Kahn are credited as being the architects of the networking protocols that became the internet we know today. His work developing and popularizing TCP/IP — the basic set of rules that lets different computer networks talk to each other — beginning in the 1970s has been recognized with numerous honorary degrees, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a Turing Award, among other honors.

Since 2005, Cerf has served as a vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google. (At this point, we can safely say the internet is fully evangelized, for good or ill.)

Cerf was speaking on a panel alongside other computer scientists known for their work on durable open source projects, including Patterson; François Chollet, creator of the Keras deep-learning library and co-founder of Ndea; John Ousterhout, the Stanford computer scientist behind the Tcl programming language, who also co-founded Electric Cloud; and Matei Zaharia, who is Databricks’ co-founder and chief technologist. They offered advice about what it takes to build open source systems that survive — advice that’s increasingly relevant as founders bet on open infrastructure for the next wave of AI products.


Much of the conference’s discussion focused on the problems with the centralization of advanced models in a handful of well-resourced labs, in contrast to the decentralized world of the open internet that made Cerf’s own protocols so durable. However, Cerf predicted that the rise of AI agents — software that can act autonomously and coordinate with other software — would push tech companies back towards standardized protocols.

“The agentic model of AI, with multiple agents from multiple sources interacting with each other, is going to force composability, and a requirement for interoperability and standardization,” Cerf said. 

If he’s right, the companies that define those interoperability standards early could end up with outsized influence over how the agentic economy actually works — a dynamic not unlike the early internet protocol wars.







While other panelists speculated that natural language communication between LLM agents would be sufficient, Cerf predicted formal standards would be required. 

“I don’t think English is going to be the best choice. There’s a flexibility in it, but there’s ambiguity, and I think precision for interagent interaction is going to be very, very important. An agent really needs to be sure the other agent understands what it is that they just agreed to do together,” Cerf said.

“Remember the old telephone game where you wish you’d whispered in somebody’s ear and then by the time it got to 10 people away the message was totally different? Imagine a bunch of agents talking to each other in natural language, you know, that’s kind of terrifying.”

In a more light-hearted moment, Patterson recalled meeting Cerf, known for his wardrobe of three-piece suits, as a grad student in the 1970s. 

“He’s always been the best dressed computer scientist I’ve ever met,” Patterson said. “My memory of Vint is that he came as a grad student with a shirt and tie in the 70s.”

“It absolutely is true,” Cerf said. “I even had a vest, and for some reason I always wanted to stick out, and instead of having long hair, and something in my nose, I thought just dressing differently was one way to do it.”


When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Father #Internet #finally #retiring #TechCrunchExclusive

Open Frontier conference hosted by the Laude Institute, Cerf was recognized by Dave Patterson, the UC Berkeley professor best known for co-developing RISC processor architecture.

“Vint … has been at Google more than 20 years, and he is retiring a week from today, and so I think we ought to give him a round of applause for a relatively good career,” Patterson said, to cheers from the room.

Google did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

Cerf, 83, and collaborator Robert Kahn are credited as being the architects of the networking protocols that became the internet we know today. His work developing and popularizing TCP/IP — the basic set of rules that lets different computer networks talk to each other — beginning in the 1970s has been recognized with numerous honorary degrees, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a Turing Award, among other honors.

Since 2005, Cerf has served as a vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google. (At this point, we can safely say the internet is fully evangelized, for good or ill.)

Cerf was speaking on a panel alongside other computer scientists known for their work on durable open source projects, including Patterson; François Chollet, creator of the Keras deep-learning library and co-founder of Ndea; John Ousterhout, the Stanford computer scientist behind the Tcl programming language, who also co-founded Electric Cloud; and Matei Zaharia, who is Databricks’ co-founder and chief technologist. They offered advice about what it takes to build open source systems that survive — advice that’s increasingly relevant as founders bet on open infrastructure for the next wave of AI products.

Much of the conference’s discussion focused on the problems with the centralization of advanced models in a handful of well-resourced labs, in contrast to the decentralized world of the open internet that made Cerf’s own protocols so durable. However, Cerf predicted that the rise of AI agents — software that can act autonomously and coordinate with other software — would push tech companies back towards standardized protocols.

“The agentic model of AI, with multiple agents from multiple sources interacting with each other, is going to force composability, and a requirement for interoperability and standardization,” Cerf said.

If he’s right, the companies that define those interoperability standards early could end up with outsized influence over how the agentic economy actually works — a dynamic not unlike the early internet protocol wars.

While other panelists speculated that natural language communication between LLM agents would be sufficient, Cerf predicted formal standards would be required.

“I don’t think English is going to be the best choice. There’s a flexibility in it, but there’s ambiguity, and I think precision for interagent interaction is going to be very, very important. An agent really needs to be sure the other agent understands what it is that they just agreed to do together,” Cerf said.

“Remember the old telephone game where you wish you’d whispered in somebody’s ear and then by the time it got to 10 people away the message was totally different? Imagine a bunch of agents talking to each other in natural language, you know, that’s kind of terrifying.”

In a more light-hearted moment, Patterson recalled meeting Cerf, known for his wardrobe of three-piece suits, as a grad student in the 1970s.

“He’s always been the best dressed computer scientist I’ve ever met,” Patterson said. “My memory of Vint is that he came as a grad student with a shirt and tie in the 70s.”

“It absolutely is true,” Cerf said. “I even had a vest, and for some reason I always wanted to stick out, and instead of having long hair, and something in my nose, I thought just dressing differently was one way to do it.”

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

#Father #Internet #finally #retiring #TechCrunchExclusive">The ‘Father of the Internet’ is finally retiring | TechCrunch

Vinton Cerf will step down from his role as Google’s chief internet evangelist next week, marking the conclusion of one of the most influential careers in technology history.

While speaking via video feed at the Open Frontier conference hosted by the Laude Institute, Cerf was recognized by Dave Patterson, the UC Berkeley professor best known for co-developing RISC processor architecture.

“Vint … has been at Google more than 20 years, and he is retiring a week from today, and so I think we ought to give him a round of applause for a relatively good career,” Patterson said, to cheers from the room.

Google did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

Cerf, 83, and collaborator Robert Kahn are credited as being the architects of the networking protocols that became the internet we know today. His work developing and popularizing TCP/IP — the basic set of rules that lets different computer networks talk to each other — beginning in the 1970s has been recognized with numerous honorary degrees, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a Turing Award, among other honors.

Since 2005, Cerf has served as a vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google. (At this point, we can safely say the internet is fully evangelized, for good or ill.)

Cerf was speaking on a panel alongside other computer scientists known for their work on durable open source projects, including Patterson; François Chollet, creator of the Keras deep-learning library and co-founder of Ndea; John Ousterhout, the Stanford computer scientist behind the Tcl programming language, who also co-founded Electric Cloud; and Matei Zaharia, who is Databricks’ co-founder and chief technologist. They offered advice about what it takes to build open source systems that survive — advice that’s increasingly relevant as founders bet on open infrastructure for the next wave of AI products.

Much of the conference’s discussion focused on the problems with the centralization of advanced models in a handful of well-resourced labs, in contrast to the decentralized world of the open internet that made Cerf’s own protocols so durable. However, Cerf predicted that the rise of AI agents — software that can act autonomously and coordinate with other software — would push tech companies back towards standardized protocols.

“The agentic model of AI, with multiple agents from multiple sources interacting with each other, is going to force composability, and a requirement for interoperability and standardization,” Cerf said.

If he’s right, the companies that define those interoperability standards early could end up with outsized influence over how the agentic economy actually works — a dynamic not unlike the early internet protocol wars.

While other panelists speculated that natural language communication between LLM agents would be sufficient, Cerf predicted formal standards would be required.

“I don’t think English is going to be the best choice. There’s a flexibility in it, but there’s ambiguity, and I think precision for interagent interaction is going to be very, very important. An agent really needs to be sure the other agent understands what it is that they just agreed to do together,” Cerf said.

“Remember the old telephone game where you wish you’d whispered in somebody’s ear and then by the time it got to 10 people away the message was totally different? Imagine a bunch of agents talking to each other in natural language, you know, that’s kind of terrifying.”

In a more light-hearted moment, Patterson recalled meeting Cerf, known for his wardrobe of three-piece suits, as a grad student in the 1970s.

“He’s always been the best dressed computer scientist I’ve ever met,” Patterson said. “My memory of Vint is that he came as a grad student with a shirt and tie in the 70s.”

“It absolutely is true,” Cerf said. “I even had a vest, and for some reason I always wanted to stick out, and instead of having long hair, and something in my nose, I thought just dressing differently was one way to do it.”

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

#Father #Internet #finally #retiring #TechCrunchExclusive

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