Our WWDC24 wish list

We shared our hopes and dreams with you before Apple’s developer conference last year, and now we’re back with a whole bunch more. Fingers crossed that all of our wishes will come true next week! 🤞

Sam Gold

There comes a time in every idea prototyping cycle when you face the facts and have to switch a SwiftUI List to a LazyVStack because List just won’t cut it anymore.

So you either forge deeper and design around the limits of List, introspect some undesirable behavior away, or give up on List entirely and use some other container. Which is a shame; there are so many benefits to using a List when something is semantically just a List. Deletion controls, accessibility hints, swipe actions, headings, etc. So my wish is full design control over Lists. No more goofy header size hacks, no more automatic implicit padding you can’t get rid of, bridge the gap with the .onDelete modifier adding a delete accessory but not having an .onInsert for the green add button accessory. I should be able to use any stock UITableViewCell accessory from SwiftUI.

Oh, I forgot one thing: Siri default apps. I would love to just use Siri without having to stipulate “remind me to do something in Things” or “play this album on Spotify”.

Tom DeVuono

I’d like to see 3rd party watch faces, blood pressure readings for watchOS, and improved green bubble texts.

mb

I’m hoping that this year’s WWDC brings thoughtful integration of LLMs across Apple’s OSes, performance and reliability updates for core serves, and a few power-user tweaks I’ll use every day.

On iOS and iPadOS, my wishlist includes a Home screen redesign, customizable Lock Screen quick actions, and better notification management. I’m also looking forward to potential improvements in macOS, like a notifications redesign and Live Activities, as well as custom watch faces on watchOS.

For developers, I’m excited about the possibility of Xcode for iPad, a Copilot-like assistant in Xcode, and API access for local and cloud LLMs. For the my full wishlist, check my blog post.

Michael Liberatore

This year, in addition to the hundreds of API treats I haven’t even thought of, I’m hoping for some solid developer quality-of-life additions.

At the top of my wishlist is integrated device mirroring in Xcode. These days, I do a lot of native Android development in addition to iOS, and one huge boost to my productivity is using Android Studio’s device mirroring feature. Don’t get me wrong, the iOS simulator is a godsend. But there are so many things it understandably can’t naturally do, requiring physical hardware (e.g. taking photos, tracking health metrics, etc). Android’s device mirroring allows you to always have your device’s screen streamed to your IDE, BUT! you can also interact directly with it using your mouse and keyboard, just like a simulator. I was blown away the first time I got to use this feature, and I think it’d make a great addition to iOS development workflows.

Like others, I’m also hoping for a first-party Copilot-like LLM integration in Xcode to speed up routine coding tasks and suggest approaches. I’m very curious to see if and how Apple aims to provide comparable results to competitors, but with a focus on privacy and reduced energy consumption.

Lastly, and not to sound like a broken record, I’d LOVE for stale, outdated errors in Xcode to be a problem of the past. Everyday I spend at least a minute questioning whether the errors in my issue navigator are real, or a fragment of former lines of code, and I sincerely hope those days will be behind us soon.

Jillian Meehan

I just want one thing this year: an actual “Now Playing” Home Screen widget. If you can show me whatever I’m listening to in other places — on the Lock Screen, on my watch, in Control Center on my Mac — then it shouldn’t be too hard to put that in a nice little widget, right?

More widgets in general is always my wish — how about some more widgets for Apple Health? Or the new Sports app?

Michael Amundsen

I really want to see SwiftUI APIs have a much parity as possible with their underlying UIKit types. If the underlying type has something exposed like say contentOffest, I should be able to easily access that in a SwiftUI List. That is a huge undertaking so even better yet, open source SwiftUI in the way they did with Swift so the community can help expand, fix, and improve upon it.

As a developer, make it so an iPad is relevant to my workflow. Ideally, I’d love for it to be viable to take an iPad into another room or place instead of my laptop and be able to continue my workflow.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in Android Studio as of late and it make going back to Xcode in some key areas difficult. The ability to integrate AI chat bots and suggestions both first party and third party would help a lot. Device mirroring and ability to control a physical device inside of Xcode like a simulator would be huge.

What’s on your WWDC wish list this year? Let us know on Mastodon or X.