On yesterday’s Upgrade podcast with Jason Snell and Mike Hurley they talked about products that would only be introduced at WWDC if they had a developer angle1.
Seeing that it boils down to almost guaranteed updates for iOS and OS X – with a possible introduction of a new Apple TV we could see a couple of news that would have this angle. These news might further tie in into the streaming services, that are rumoured to be announced in early June to be launched later that month.
Apple Watch on the other hand may be largely absent from the show, with Apple just saying “We’ll get back to you later this year” when they are ready to show a WatchOS beta that brings a native Watch SDK.
The WWDC lineup: iOS, OS X and Apple TV
What’s Apple to show at WWDC? The most obvious things are iOS 9 and OS X 10.11. The question here is how much of a change they’ll bring. Will they become – as suggested for iOS 9 – a modern day Snow Leopard, which instead of bringing plenty of new features, will try to make the platforms more stable.
Not having to demo many new apps or features could potentially cut down time that Apple would need otherwise during the presentation, opening it up for other things.
These could include Apple TV, which might bring a couple of new things. To be viable for said developer angle there’s been talk of Apple enabling developers – and not just chosen ones – to create apps for the big screen.
The next thing Apple TV has been rumoured to be is a bridge for HomeKit, enabling the connection between your home automation needs (“Internet of Things”) and iPhone and iPad. This again could provide as another developer angle.
One more thing
Apple’s one more thing could be the rumoured start of not one but two new streaming services. One being the audio streaming service based on Beats Music. We’ve seen first signs of an upcoming change in Apple’s music scene in the Music.app on iOS 8.4. This service might come to OS X 10.10.4 as part of an updated iTunes.
The other rumoured streaming service is on the video side of things. After making HBO Now a member of the exclusive Apple TV club, this service is supposedly bringing additional channels into your living room.
After ending this part of the presentation we might hear something like this: “We’ll bring these new services also to the OS X and iOS updates we released today.” These updates being OS X 10.10.4 and iOS 8.4, which should be ready just in time for WWDC – seeing Apple just yesterday released the third beta of either version.
- I guess you could make that point even for WWDC 2012 where the Retina MBP was introduced, the developer angle was the need to add 2x assets to your app. ↩