I’ve install the developer beta of iOS26 on a spare phone and have been trying out the new liquid glass interface. My first impression is positive and I’m a little bit surprised that I like it. Don’t get me wrong, if you turn on clear mode, icons and widgets are almost unusable, but if you select default icons and light mode it’s perfectly fine.

Icons are little bit rounder and the dock and the icons all have some shadow and depth to them. The Camera and Clock icons are re-designed and a bit more skeuomorphic.

The bigger changes however are inside apps. The Notes app for example still functions in the same way overall but buttons have been re-organised, search is consistently at the bottom now and sits on top of content. Buttons all have a uniformly round background. And speaking of buttons, text links have all been converted to buttons. The current version of iOS has a lot of text links for actions like Done, Edit and Back and these are all actual round buttons now.

Other apps like Photos and Camera have been re-organised and made simpler, the same options and content are still there, but now extra options are accessed via an overlay or in another tab.

Some of the effects aren’t entirely smooth on my device. I don’t know if this is because it’s a developer beta or because it’s a less powerful iPhone 12 mini. Or because the effects just take that much processing power.

Some of the liquid effects are pretty wild and I’d expect them to be dialled down a bit before public launch.

Joanna Stern sat down and interviewed Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak.

A year after last year’s conference, major Siri features are still missing. The company’s head of software and head of marketing say why they aren’t worried.

Apples message on where they are at and their strategy for AI is very clear in this interview. They’re adding AI to existing apps and services to enhance them, real time translations are a good example of this, and Siri is going to take longer than they had expected but they’re not in a rush.

I think this is a perfectly reasonable approach and wouldn’t be that remarkable if they hadn’t rushed to announce products that weren’t ready at last years WWDC.

Steve Balmer appeared on the acquired podcast recently…

Steve listened to our Microsoft episodes and had some thoughts to share — and boy, did he deliver.

He listened to their Microsoft episodes and got it touch because he wanted to fill in the blanks from his perspective. He sent them his notes as a PowerPoint presentation the night before. You have to love that energy.

This was a really fun listen, he’s very honest about what they got right and wrong and also about the necessary luck that they had along the way.

Apple opened their WWDC keynote yesterday with Senior VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi racing an F1 car around the roof of the Apple campus. Ignoring the fact that F1 cars don’t race on oval tracks, but IndyCar’s do, it all felt a bit uncomfortable.

Apple have recently been battling with developers in court over their 30% app store commission. An American court just ruled that Apple wilfully ignored a previous court order and insisted that they must allow developers to link out of their apps to alternate payment methods on the web.

Meanwhile the opening to the developer conference is an elaborate video production that must have cost quite a lot of money. It all felt a little bit tone deaf.

It ended with Tim Cook celebrating Apple for taking out the top spot for the best quality programming for the fourth year in a row and was all in service of promoting the upcoming F1 film. Since the rest of the keynote was software announcements it did make sense to put it up front.

Snark aside I do enjoy the quality of Apple TV+ productions. Even if I end up not enjoying a show or film it’s never because the production is bad.

During yesterdays WWDC keynote Apple announced the creation of their new Foundation Models framework. Using this framework developers will be able to access Apples on-device AI models.

This has two main benefits. Firstly it means that the models can work while the device is offline and secondly it means that developers won’t incur API costs. This second point didn’t get a lot of attention but is a big deal I think.

Also of interest are the paragraphs on how Apple trains it’s models and acquires it’s data.

We believe in training our models using diverse and high-quality data. This includes data that we’ve licensed from publishers, curated from publicly available or open-sourced datasets, and publicly available information crawled by our web-crawler, Applebot. We do not use our users’ private personal data or user interactions when training our foundation models. Additionally, we take steps to apply filters to remove certain categories of personally identifiable information and to exclude profanity and unsafe material.

Further, we continue to follow best practices for ethical web crawling, including following widely-adopted robots.txt protocols to allow web publishers to opt out of their content being used to train Apple’s generative foundation models.

There is a fairly stark contrast between this and OpenAI’s approach.

I’d love to see more attention and discussion around the ethical training of AI.

Molly White writing on her blog Citation Needed:

The relative separation between World Liberty Financial and the Trump memecoin projects, both of which are trying to develop defi trading platforms, may help to explain the chaos around the latter’s wallet launch announcement yesterday.

There was an announcement by Magic Eden that they were launching a Trump Wallet and then a complete denial from Eric Trump that he knew anything about the project. He does know about another project that is launching a Trump Wallet and trading platform though. The whole thing is about as big of a mess as you could imagine a Trump + Crypto + Crypto Wallet + Trading product could be (and that’s a pretty considerable mess).

Again from Molly White:

It is very plausible to me that Trump has sold his likeness to so many separate projects, not to mention his sons also using the “Trump” branding, that no one really knows what’s going on in aggregate.

I 100% agree that this, unfortunately, makes complete sense. If it’s not gross enough that the Trump family is launching meme coins, it’s even grosser that they are just licensing their likeness, to any grifter that can pay for it.

You need to click through to Molly’s article to see the incredible diagram she has created showing the numerous crypto projects and their connections to various Trump family members.

From the EFF’s Surveillance Self Defence guide on how to encrypt your iPhone, talking specifically about iCloud backups:

If you use an Apple device, there’s a good chance you’re storing at least some data on Apple’s cloud service, which it calls iCloud. This can include a variety of information, ranging from your contact lists and app files to an entire backup of your iPhone. Some of this data is end-to-end encrypted—meaning only you will have the means to decrypt the data, not Apple—by default, while some of it is not.

I knew that content on your device was encrypted by default and I had assumed that iCloud backups were also end-to-end encrypted by default. I was wrong and some, but not all, iCloud data is end-to-end encrypted by default.

Apple refers to its iCloud encryption categories as “Standard Data Protection,” or “Advanced Data Protection.” Standard is a type of encryption enabled by default, while Advanced is a feature you’ll need to optionally turn on.

It turns out that some iCloud data is encrypted using keys that Apple holds and because of that they are able to decrypt it. So assumably they can be compelled by law enforcement to decrypt some of your data in certain jurisdictions and under some conditions.

It’s relatively easy to enable Advanced Data Protection but you’ll need to set up a recovery method. You’ll need to either setup a recover contact person or create recovery keys that you will need to be responsible for. It makes some sense that this isn’t the default since Apple won’t be able to recover your data if you lose your keys.