At WWDC 25, Apple should make amends with developers after AI shortfalls and lawsuits

Summary

There was palpable excitement around Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) last year. The company was about to unveil its AI capabilities, with the tech world expecting the company to unveil an AI platform capable of competing with Google and OpenAI. The demos Apple showed off at the time were compelling, but the follow-through has been underwhelming, leaving both developers and consumers wanting more. Apple’s broader struggles with AI have become clearer over the past year. Its ambitions around personalized intelligence have faced delays, and its rollout of new tools has been inconsistent. The vision that Apple sold in 2024 — a seamless blend of on-device AI, revamped Siri interactions, and powerful new developer capabilities — has yet to materialize in full. Apple Intelligence features saw a staggered rollout that came with several hiccups. The personalized version of Siri that was showcased last year has been delayed, which matters because Apple framed the new Siri as a cornerstone of its AI strategy — a context-aware assistant that could understand user behavior across apps. Without it, the company’s AI value proposition looks surprisingly thin. This also meant that developers couldn’t take full advantage of the new AI-powered Siri, and users couldn’t rely on the assistant to perform in-app actions as promised. For developers, that’s a lost opportunity to build more interactive, intelligent app experiences. For consumers, it’s another promise unfulfilled. And for Apple, it raises concerns about how competitive its AI stack really is compared to its increasingly powerful rivals like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. With WWDC 2025 now just around the corner, expectations for consumer-facing Apple Intelligence features are more cautious than last year. Most developers and analysts are now hoping for incremental improvements: smoother integration of AI into native apps, and tools that empower developers to actually use the AI that Apple is building. (No is exp...