Dub Dub Daily: Day 2

Welcome to Dub Dub Daily. It's day two of WWDC26 and we are just getting started. I'm Lauren Grimm from Worldwide Developer Relations, coming to you from Apple Park. And every day this week, I'll be your guide to what's happening at the conference. Yesterday was a lot. Keynote, platform state of the union, and if you already watched both, you're a hero. And if you're still catching up, we've got you covered. Head to the Apple Developer website and app to watch both on demand. We also dropped a SOTU recap video if you're short on time, plus an article with all of the big takeaways. Now, I have to tell you who's coming up next because I have been so excited about this since we filmed it. You might recognize Josh Schaffer from yesterday. He MC'd the platform State of the Union, and my colleague Jeff talked to him earlier for some additional insights on what we announced this year. Here's Jeff and Josh.

Josh Shaffer, Senior Director of Platform Technologies, thank you for being here. You were the host of SOTU this year. We can see you right now on the Apple Developer app and website, YouTube and BiliBili. This seems like a question for you. Can you give us the headline for SOTU this year? Oh yeah. Well, I mean, SOTU itself is sort of the headline for the whole show, but if it had its own headline, I guess it would be the three themes of the year. It would be, you know, rebuilt intelligence, refine platforms, and transform tools. What do we mean by transformed tools? Oh, well, you know, intelligence is just transforming the way that we're doing development, and the tools themselves have this year really undergone a huge transformation towards agentic coding. That's just making it so much easier to build stuff.

Lots to dig into there in SOTU and in the sessions that are... A ton to go into across everything for sure. That's fantastic.

There's a really lovely line in SOTU, I like this line a lot. It's about the intelligent platform and I'm paraphrasing, but the line is about how rich native experiences and intelligent natural language interfaces come together. Can you tell me a little bit more about what that means? Yeah, intelligence is changing so many things, but in this particular case, there's the intelligence coming into apps that's making apps themselves more powerful, and adding capabilities within them that weren't previously even possible. And then there's intelligence at the system level, like with Siri, where it's making, you know, system-wide interactions more powerful. And these things are really complementary. The apps are just as important as they have always been, now made even more powerful by intelligence, and accessible in new ways through the system level intelligence. It's just a really great combination at both layers.

There's a lot this year. What are some of the things, this is not an entirely fair question, what are some of the things that you're most excited for people to check out? Boy, I mean there's just so much, but obviously when you're gonna get started, you'll download Xcode and install it, and try out all the new capabilities with agents, and new ways to code and develop. It's just a pretty incredible leap forward. Lots of headlines, lots going on this year, right out front. What's an example of something that you and your team are especially proud of that might not be as apparent, might not be as outwardly obvious to people? You know, I think building with frontier models seems like it should be really easy.

But there's a lot of barrier to getting started. I mean you have to figure out a business model where you can pay for all these token usage and figure out how to connect to somebody's server and all this stuff. There's a lot of, especially for somebody just getting started, things to figure out. So what I'm really excited about with the Foundation Models framework this year, is the ability to now just access one of these frontier models in Private Cloud Compute with basically no setup or friction at all. I think it's gonna democratize access to this in a a really incredible way and we're gonna start seeing apps that will get developed that might not have otherwise even happened because of the the barriers to entry.

This is going to be a very big week. Once again, we got more than a hundred sessions this year, covering all sorts of everything. Can you tell me a little bit about what people can expect when they go to dive into that list this year? Yeah, I mean the great thing about the session list is that it covers such a broad range. Like there's a ton of things that are just really broad interest that everyone's gonna really enjoy seeing. Down to really niche things that are super interesting, but maybe, you know, relevant to a smaller subset of people. And it goes really deep in all these areas. It's really exciting. What do you and your team most look forward to? It's kind of a mature question. When WWDC is approaching, what do you most look forward to? Oh man, I mean the exciting thing about Dub Dub coming up is just the anticipation of getting to put this out in the world and have everybody see what we've been working on for so long, and see the reactions, and hopefully great positive reactions, but also get the feedback of areas where there's, you know, an opportunity to do better, and listen to how it's being received, and figure out what we do next. Do you get feedback all week long? Oh, we get feedback all the time. But certainly all week long for sure! And the exciting part about Dub Dub week is getting to talk to some people in person about it too, and interact with folks online and the more direct engagement is really exciting. I love it.

Alright, let's talk about today because the calendar is packed. We have Group Labs running all day! Group Labs are live online presentations and Q&A sessions hosted by the Apple engineers and designers who build the technologies you use every day. So drop in, bring your questions, and anyone can watch live or on demand.

A few more things before you go.

Try out the AI-powered answers on developer.apple.com. Go through the search bar to get more information and insights from WWDC.

Our friends at Apple Music put together brand new playlists for the entire week.

Search WWDC26 in Apple Music.

More than 100 sessions dropped yesterday on everything from Core AI to Xcode 27 to design foundations.

Every one of them is streaming right now.

I've already got 17 tabs open with the sessions I'll watch after this.

That's day two. See you tomorrow for day three of WWDC.