Apple WWDC ’24: A new era for apps!

Apple’s yearly Worldwide Developers’ Conference was concluded last week, and while the keynote is the most popular event, developers follow a week’s worth of events, most of them being instructional technical discussions and videos on upcoming updates to Apple’s ecosystem.

The most exciting and game changing takeaway from this year’s event is the upcoming Apple Intelligence. With Apple Intelligence, the promise is that Siri will gain a major update that can perform actions and provide information with the user’s personal context in mind. Most of this processing to be done on the device itself with privacy in mind.

This is of most interest to us as developers, as Apple Intelligence promises to perform actions on apps as well on behalf on users. This is a new interface for apps where users can now interact with services provided by an app using Siri, rather than the app’s user interface itself.

We have been following along to see how we can implement this in our apps at Vioside. Apple has a set of predefined “blueprints” called schemas which apps can implement. A schema could be, for example, “open a photo”, or “apply a filter to a photo”. The idea is fairly simply, but an app would need to mark which information the app has that is valid and also provide a function for an action to provide when a user makes a request. Both data points and function need to fall within the set of schemas provided by Apple.

While this is an exciting start, it’s a bit of a slow start with a promising future. Apple provides around 100 schemas at this point of writing, implementing some system functions like search, mail apps, and photo apps. Apple Intelligence will also be available on iPhone 15 Pro and later in the US only to start with. So we will be patiently waiting and preparing in the meantime. However, as Vioside, this is something we will be investing in as it promises a new exciting future for apps.

Feel free to reach out if you wish to find out more. In the meantime, check out Apple’s preview of Apple Intelligence on their website here for more information about what's coming.