At WWDC 2025, Apple sang developers’ praises amid AI letdowns and App Store battles

Summary

At the end of the WWDC 2025 keynote address on Monday, the company literally sang its praises to app developers, as singer-songwriter Allen Stone humorously turned customers’ positive App Store reviews into song lyrics for a tune titled “6 out of 5 stars.” “Best app I’ve ever set my sorry eyes upon,” he crooned. “This is not an app. It’s a piece of art.” Image Credits:Apple (screenshot) What Apple didn’t mention, however, was anything related to the tumultuous past few years for its developer community, or more broadly, why its developers should continue to put their trust in a company that’s fighting them for every nickel and dime while failing them in other ways. In recent years, the Cupertino-based tech giant has put its app developer community through the wringer as it stringently fought against regulation, lawsuits, and any other efforts to rein in its alleged App Store monopoly by nations, lawmakers, and the courts. Meanwhile, it has yet to deliver on some of the key technology advances that could modernize developers’ apps for the AI era. In March, it delayed its “more personalized,” AI-powered Siri, demonstrated at last year’s WWDC. Apple only briefly acknowledged this fumble during this year’s keynote address, when SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi said the work “needed more time” to meet Apple’s high bar. Image Credits:Apple At WWDC, Apple’s scattered mentions of AI related to features that Google’s AI already has, such as Apple’s AI-powered translation features, though it tried to differentiate from Google by offering lyrics translation in Apple Music. Apple’s AI-powered Visual Intelligence feature was even demonstrated by tapping into Google’s app for image search results, something that feels more native on Android devices with innovations like Circle to Search, Lens’s multisearch, visual search in videos, and more. Elsewhere, Apple appeased developers’ demand for AI with further integrations with OpenAI technology, like the addition of ChatGP...