At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), the tech giant unveiled its next-generation Apple Intelligence, incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into everyday tasks and introducing new Child Safety features. The focus, however, was on tools for developers, who will build apps to define the intent with new experiences.
Apple's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations, Susan Prescott, emphasized the importance of developers in the Apple ecosystem, providing them with the best possible tools and technologies to build the future.
The new Intelligent Frameworks offer significant enhancements to Apple Intelligence and a new Siri AI, enabling developers to integrate AI features into their apps across all Apple platforms. The framework serves as a single native Swift API, supporting more powerful on-device models with image input, server models, and the ability to build custom skills.
Developers enrolled in the App Store Small Business Program can access the next generation of Apple Foundation Models running on Private Cloud Compute at no cloud API cost. These models represent a significant generational leap in quality of output and overall capabilities.
Apple's Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Kevan Parekh, believes AI models have widened the scope for developers and levelled the playing field for newer and smaller app developers.
The company is also offering a brand new Core AI framework designed to run models on device, optimized for the unified memory and Neural Engine of Apple silicon. This will allow developers to deploy full-scale LLMs locally.
Significant updates to the App Intents framework will enable developers to connect their apps to Siri AI capabilities on Apple devices, building with personal context understanding, app actions, and onscreen awareness.
Xcode 27 integrates agentic coding, allowing developers to integrate the most useful models and agents from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI directly into their workflow.
Apple has also widened the capabilities available to game developers, introducing Managed Background Assets to reduce game install sizes and a new Steam Asset Converter to streamline the process of adapting PC games for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and visionOS.
