Apple supercharges its tools and technologies for developers to foster creativity, innovation, and design

Apple today announced new technologies and enhancements to
its developer tools to help developers create more beautiful, intelligent, and
engaging app experiences across Apple platforms. A beautiful new software
design brings more focus to content, and delivers more expressive and
delightful experiences across iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26,
and tvOS 26,¹ while keeping them all instantly familiar. The
Foundation Models framework joins a suite of tools that allow developers to tap
into on-device intelligence, and Xcode 26 leverages large language models like
ChatGPT, giving them access to Xcode’s Coding Tools and other intelligent
features.

These new resources join the extensive and continuously
evolving set of technologies Apple offers developers, including over 250,000
APIs that enable developers to integrate their apps with Apple’s hardware and
software features. These APIs span a wide range of capabilities, such as
machine learning, augmented reality, health and fitness, spatial computing, and
high-performance graphics. With each platform release, Apple expands and
refines its technologies and tools to assist developers in bringing their ideas
to life and delivering rich, responsive, and optimized experiences across Apple
platforms.

“Developers play a vital role in shaping the experiences
customers love across Apple platforms,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice
president of Worldwide Developer Relations. “With access to the on-device Apple
Intelligence foundation model and new intelligence features in Xcode 26, we’re
empowering developers to build richer, more intuitive apps for users
everywhere.”

New Design with Liquid Glass

The elegant new design gives developers the opportunity to
make their apps more expressive and delightful, while being instantly familiar.
It’s crafted with a new software-based material called Liquid Glass, which
combines the optical qualities of glass with a sense of fluidity. This gorgeous
new material extends from the smallest elements users interact with every day —
like buttons, switches, sliders, text, and media controls — to larger elements,
including tab bars and sidebars for navigating apps.

Native frameworks like SwiftUI give developers everything
they need to adopt the new design in their apps. The universal design allows
developers to bring greater focus to their users’ content, establishing a
consistent experience when developing across Apple’s platforms.

With the all-new Icon Composer app, developers and designers
are empowered to create visually captivating app icons that enhance their app’s
identity. This powerful tool helps create a consistent visual identity for app
icons by annotating layers for multiple rendering modes, with advanced features
that include blurring, adjusting translucency, testing specular highlights, and
previewing icons in various tints.

Foundation Models Framework

With the Foundation Models framework, developers will be
able to build on Apple Intelligence to bring users new experiences that are
intelligent, available when they’re offline, and that protect their privacy,
using AI inference that is free of cost.

The framework has native support for Swift, so developers
can easily access the Apple Intelligence model with as few as three lines of
code. Guided generation, tool calling, and more are all built into the
framework, making it easier than ever to implement generative capabilities
right into an existing app. For example, Automattic is using the framework in
its Day One journaling app to bring users privacy-centric intelligence
features.

“The Foundation Model framework has helped us rethink what’s
possible with journaling,” said Paul Mayne, head of Day One at Automattic. “Now
we can bring intelligence and privacy together in ways that deeply respect our
users.”

Xcode 26

Xcode 26 is packed with intelligence features and
experiences to help developers make their ideas a reality.

Developers can connect large language models directly into
their coding experience to write code, tests, and documentation; iterate on a
design; fix errors; and more. Xcode has built-in support for ChatGPT, and
developers can use API keys from other providers, or run local models on their
Mac with Apple silicon, to choose the model that best suits their needs.
Developers can start using ChatGPT in Xcode without needing to create an
account, and subscribers can connect their accounts to access more requests.²

Coding Tools help developers stay in the flow and be more
productive in their tasks. Accessible from anywhere in a developer’s code,
Coding Tools provide suggested actions like generating a preview or a
playground, or fixing an issue, and can also handle specific prompts for other
tasks right inline.

Xcode 26 comes with additional features to keep developers
focused and productive, like a redesigned navigation experience, improvements
to the localization catalog, and improved support for Voice Control to dictate
Swift code and navigate the Xcode interface entirely by voice.

App Intents

App Intents lets developers deeply integrate their app’s
actions and content with system experiences across platforms, including Siri,
Spotlight, widgets, controls, and more.

This year, App Intents gains support for visual
intelligence. This enables apps to provide visual search results within the
visual intelligence experience, allowing users to go directly into the app from
those results. For instance, Etsy is leveraging visual intelligence to enhance
the user experience in its iOS app by facilitating faster and more intuitive
discovery of goods and products.

“At Etsy, our job is to seamlessly connect shoppers with
creative entrepreneurs around the world who offer extraordinary items — many of
which are hard to describe. The ability to meet shoppers right on their iPhone
with visual intelligence is a meaningful unlock, and makes it easier than ever
for buyers to quickly discover exactly what they’re looking for while directly
supporting small businesses,” said Etsy CTO Rafe Colburn.

Swift 6.2

Swift 6.2 introduces powerful features to enhance
performance, concurrency, and interoperability with other languages like C++,
Java, and JavaScript. And now, in collaboration with the open-source community,
Swift 6.2 gains support for WebAssembly.

Building upon Swift 6’s strict concurrency checking, Swift
6.2 simplifies writing single-threaded code. Developers can now configure
modules or individual files to run on the main actor by default, eliminating
the need for additional annotations.

Containerization Framework

The Containerization framework enables developers to create,
download, or run Linux container images directly on Mac. It’s built on an
open-source framework optimized for Apple silicon and provides secure isolation
between container images.

Tools and Resources for Games

Game Porting Toolkit 3 provides developers with
updated tools for evaluating and profiling their game. Developers can now
customize the Metal Performance HUD, and get onscreen insights and guidance for
optimizing graphics code for the best possible performance in the evaluation
environment. And developers can use Mac Remote Developer Tools for Windows to
build Mac games on a remote Mac in their existing development workflows.

Metal 4 is designed exclusively for Apple
silicon, and sets the stage for the next generation of games on Apple platforms
with support for advanced graphics and machine learning technologies.

Developers can now run inference networks directly in their
shaders to compute lighting, materials, and geometry, enabling highly realistic
visual effects for their games. MetalFX Frame Interpolation generates
an intermediate frame for every two input frames to achieve higher and more
stable frame rates, and MetalFX Denoising makes real-time ray
tracing and path tracing possible in the most advanced games.

The Apple Games app gives players a new
all-in-one destination for all of their games and the friends they play them
with on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It also introduces a new dedicated app for
developers to reengage their existing players and attract new ones.

Challenges give players a new way to compete with friends in
score-based showdowns, turning single-player games into shared experiences.
Developers that have Game Center leaderboards for their games can easily add
challenges, offering players even more ways to rally a group, crown a winner,
and have a rematch.

Game Overlay enhances in-game engagement by
integrating Game Center features directly into gameplay. Players can access
their next achievement and recent scores, and see which friends are currently
playing, making it easy to start a chat — all without leaving the game. Players
can also adjust settings and view the latest In-App Events, keeping them
connected and in control without breaking immersion.

Managed Background Assets simplifies asset
hosting for developers, giving them control over how their app or game
downloads assets. Developers can self-host or opt for Apple-Hosted Background
Assets, where Apple handles hosting. Every Apple Developer Program membership
includes 200GB of Apple hosting capacity for the App Store. Apple-Hosted
Background Assets can be submitted separately from an app build.

Tools to Help Protect Kids Online

To ensure kids have enjoyable, enriching, and appropriate
in-app experiences, developers can utilize a range of tools — including
parental controls and the Sensitive Content Analysis framework — to enhance
child safety and ensure privacy. Building on these existing tools, developers
can use the new Declared Age Range API to deliver age-appropriate content based
on a user’s age range. When developers implement this API, parents can allow
their children to share their age range without disclosing a birthdate or other
sensitive information, enabling developers to tailor experiences accordingly.
The feature is built around privacy: Age range data is shared only if parents
choose to allow it, and they can disable sharing at any time.

New App Store Accessibility and App Store Connect
Features

New Accessibility Nutrition Labels for App
Store product pages help users learn which accessibility features are supported
before they download an app or game.

Developers can now share information in App Store Connect
about their app or game’s support, such as whether it includes VoiceOver, Voice
Control, Larger Text, Captions, and more. An Accessibility Nutrition Label will
appear on their app’s product page, specific to each platform it supports.
Developers can also add a URL on their app’s App Store product page that links
users to a website with more details.

The App Store Connect app on iOS and iPadOS
has been updated to let developers view TestFlight screenshots and crash
feedback, in addition to receiving push notifications when beta testers provide
feedback. The App Store Connect API supports these enhancements, and introduces
the ability for developers to create webhooks to get real-time updates, and
support for Apple-Hosted Background Assets and Game Center configuration.