Interview: We asked three developers their wishes for Apple’s WWDC.
WWDC is almost like a national holiday for developers, mainly because they get to see the new features that they will be able to include in their applications in a future update, and every year we watch the keynote as every operating system from Apple gets its time to shine with a new version number and a multitude of features. While many of us are hoping for improvements to iPadOS, or third-party watch faces, we spoke to three developers on what they want to see from Apple at WWDC. Shortened from the term ‘Application Programming Interface’, this is what developers use to create features for their applications. For example, a MapsKit API can allow someone to display points of interest for their app, or a GameKit API could allow players to compete against each other in a leaderboard. Becky Hansmeyer is the developer of YarnBuddy and Scribblet, who tells us that improvements to WidgetKit would be a great start. “It’s hard to pick just one API, but I’ll go with this: new capabilities in WidgetKit that allow developers to make widgets much more dynamic and interactive. With widgets only introduced last year, developers are wanting more control on how they interact with a user. For instance, in my app it would be nice to be able to increment/decrement a tally counter within the widget,” she explains. “I’d love to see Apple introduce a camera API for Night Mode,” Ben McCarthy, developer of the camera app Obscura, tells us. With cameras on both iPhone and iPad becoming the sole reason for many when upgrading, Night Mode is only going to improve since its debut in the iPhone 11 phones. Shihab Mehboob is the developer of many apps, namely his Aviary Twitter app, and told us that he would most like to see “more MusicKit APIs with finer control and more access to features such as lyrics.” This isn’t a surprise, as he’s the developer of the great Vinyls app. For the next big update to the iPhone, Hansmeyer suggests that improvements to last year’s introduction of the App Library feature would be a great feature. “I’m pretty happy with iOS 14, but I would like to see some changes to the App Library this year. In particular, it should either be just an alphabetical list of apps with a search bar, or I should be able to opt out of the auto-organization and place apps in folders of my choosing.
