Tim Cook and Craig Federighi at WWDC 2024.
Next week is WWDC, which has always represented Apple’s connection to its community of third-party developers, and in recent years has also served as the official start of Apple’s annual operating-system cycle.
Recently, I’ve been thinking of the D in WWDC a lot more. Developers aren’t all programmers, but many of them are. The programmers have always created the code that runs the apps that run on our devices. And yet, this year, things have changed an awful lot.
These days, I’m getting emails pitching me for an endless stream of new Mac apps. It’s quite remarkable because there was a period five or ten years ago when it seemed like all app development on Apple’s platforms was focused on iOS. Even more interesting, these are all indie Mac apps that seem to be built using native Mac frameworks, not the product of big corporations that are just rolling their cross-platform development system out everywhere. These apps seem to have a point of view and are focused on the Mac.
Of course, it’s happening because of AI.
