WWDC 2025 Wish List
Zach Waugh •
A list of things in no particular order that would solve problems for me in my current apps. There’s no bearing here on whether I think any of this is actually likely or not. I think most of it is rather unlikely, but we’ll know soon enough.
SwiftUI: Dramatically increase APIs available
There’s still way too much you can’t do with SwiftUI directly. I’d love to see them come out and double the surface area of SwiftUI. They say it’s the best way to make apps, but in Artifacts, I drop-down to UIKit/AppKit a lot. I have to hack in a lot of different pieces to get the features and/or performance I want. Of the APIs not available, the biggest missing piece to me where I drop-down to UIKit/AppKit is for UICollectionView/NSCollectionView. It’s a huge hole in SwiftUI for being able to make performant, complex interfaces. It’s long-overdue.
SwiftUI: Improved cross-platform support
Artifacts is absolutely littered with #if os(macOS) blocks. There’s a ton of apis only available on one platform or the other. There’s many other things that just behave differently. I’d like them to both close the gap in the available apis and also just make it easier to tweak things per platform. Even just using different font sizes or colors on different platforms results in a big mess of code for me.
SwiftUI: Backporting
This is the a long-shot and I don’t think they’ll do it if they haven’t already. But part of the problem with SwiftUI is just moving too slow and then having that stuff locked to the latest version. It means something introduced today you might not be able to use for a year. Android has great support for back-porting and something Apple should have done a long time ago. At least for the last major version, everything should just work. I don’t care if the app bundle gets a little bigger (or preferably it gets dynamically loaded by the OS and shared amongst apps), but it would fantastic to use newer apis today.
AI/LLM
I want an LLM available to use from my app. I was hoping this would come last year, and never did. I don’t care if it’s on-device, or on the cloud, or just an Apple provided and secured proxy to OpenAI or Anthropic. There should be a built-in way to use a multi-modal LLM from Swift. I already have a lot of use cases for it in Artifacts and I’ll use a 3rd-party if necessary, but would love to have the option available.
App Store/App Review
I’ve never cared all that much about the 30%. It’s high and I would love to pay less, but it covers a lot. Dropping down to 15% as in the small-business program is totally reasonable to me. What I hate is the app review process. Specifically, my main gripe as I’ve said for years is arbitrary rejections. I think Apple should not reject any app unless they’re malware/scams/illegal. Everything else should be a green-light. If you’re the 100th app in a crowded category, let the market decide if the want to buy it or not. Maybe you make it for 10 people that you know and they love it. That’s fantastic and should be supported. Especially in the world of AI-assisted development where velocity is only ever increasing, this desperately needs to change. Automate the scans, approve all apps within a day, and deep review things that are reported or have suspicious activity.
Xcode/Ecosystem
You should be able to build an iOS app or macOS app completely with VS Code. Keep building Xcode, but make other IDEs a first-class supported option. If you’re not going to make Xcode fully extensible (I can’t even configure Xcode to format on save…) or integrate AI into at as faster pace, give people the choice. I think it would go a long way to making Swift a more friendly choice to adopting on other platforms or for the back-end if Apple met people where they are.