WWDC25 and the year Apple changed the rules for good

Every year at Apple Coding Academy we do the same thing: on WWDC keynote day we open the stream with more anticipation than any blockbuster premiere could ever build. We've been doing it for more than eight years. And this year, for the first time in a long while, WWDC left us speechless.

Liquid Glass and the Foundation Models framework. Two announcements that are huge on their own. Taken together, they redefine what an Apple developer will be needed for in the years ahead.

Liquid Glass: when design stops being decoration

Apple doesn't change the visual language of its platforms often. The last big leap was the flat design of iOS 7 in 2013. Before that, skeuomorphism, which mimicked physical materials on screen. Twelve years later, Liquid Glass.

This isn't a cosmetic change. It's a paradigm shift. The interface stops being an opaque surface and becomes something that responds to light, to the content underneath it, to the user's context. For a developer who has spent years working with SwiftUI, that means a lot of assumptions about how to build interfaces need to be rethought from scratch.

And that, far from being a problem, is exactly the kind of challenge that keeps this ecosystem exciting after all this time.

The most important design session this year is the one that explains the principles behind Liquid Glass. Not so you can copy Apple's style without judgment, but so you understand the reasoning. Because once you understand why Apple makes a design decision, you start making better decisions in your own apps. And that's exactly the difference between a developer who follows instructions and one who has judgment.

Foundation Models framework: AI that doesn't send your data to any server

This is what changed our year the most, internally. The Foundation Models framework gives you the ability to run language models directly on the device, with no calls to external servers, and with privacy guaranteed by Apple by default.

For those of us who have been talking about artificial intelligence in the context of Apple development for years, this announcement goes far beyond the technical. It means any iOS developer can now build real intelligence into their apps without depending on third-party APIs, with no per-request costs and no network latency. Just the A-series chip doing what it does best.

Is an on-device model better or worse than GPT-4? That's the wrong question. They're tools for different contexts. A model that runs on your iPhone and doesn't send your data to any server is, for most real-world use cases, exactly what you need. And it adds something no external API can guarantee: it works offline.

The sessions you can't miss

Eight years of WWDC give us the perspective to separate the noise from what really matters. This year's WWDC wasn't the biggest in number of sessions, but it was one of the most significant in impact. These, in our view, are the must-watch ones:

Designing with Liquid Glass. Start with “Meet Liquid Glass” before you touch a single line of code. Understanding the design direction first saves you hours of work later.

Foundation Models framework: the introduction and the advanced sessions. Three sessions, dense and necessary. If you only watch three things from WWDC25, make it these. AI is no longer an extra you can ignore if you build for Apple platforms.

Swift 6.2 and strict concurrency. Concurrency is still the topic that generates the most questions in our programs. The “Embrace Swift concurrency” session is the best official explanation to date. If you still haven't finished your migration to Swift 6, this is the year.

SwiftUI: animations and navigation. Every year Apple expands SwiftUI significantly. This year the focus is on navigation transitions and animations. The upshot is that fluid experiences that used to require UIKit are now native in SwiftUI.

Xcode and tools. The improvements to the compiler and the concurrency debugger are substantial. Take the time to learn the new capabilities before the September update season.

Why WWDC matters beyond what's new

At Apple Coding Academy we don't teach technology. We teach you to think like an Apple developer. And WWDC is, every year, the most important document Apple publishes about what exactly that means.

The developers who've gone through our programs have this rhythm built in: WWDC in June, getting to grips with the new APIs over the summer, apps updated before the competition gets there. Not because we're fast. Because we understand the direction before it becomes a requirement.

Liquid Glass and the Foundation Models framework are the themes of the 2025–2026 academic year. Not as new items to bolt onto the curriculum. As the new standard.

Whoever masters them first will have a head start that others will take years to close.