WWDC25

Preamble

I feel this article might be a mix of two, one about WWDC in general and one about this year. The problem here is my general advice is heavily based on my experiences, so separation of the two felt weird as well. Also I swear I will write about tech things (soon-ish) (I hope).

Introduction

What, is WWDC? WWDC (also called DubDub - from the phonetics DubbleU-DubbleU-DeeCee) is Apple's annual developer conference. Since Covid, Apple has been hosting WWDC at their own venues, Apple Park and Apple Infinite Loop. DubDub is now 3 days long, the first day being Sunday, where developers can pick up their badges at Infinite Loop, mingle with other devs, and play games. The second day is Monday at Apple Park, with the special event and the platform state of the union. The third day is a session at the developer center, across the street from Apple Park. There are also loads of community events happening around WWDC, making it a great place to be. I've been lucky enough to be at WWDC twice, in 2024 and 2025. I am writing about my personal experience with those two.

Travel

Around WWDC, there are loads of Community events happening. These happen from Saturday to Thursday. So I would recommend staying a bit longer, especially when traveling from far away; it can be nice to have some time to visit San Francisco or other surrounding cities. This year I had time to go to Santa Cruz, Monterey, and San Francisco. I loved Santa Cruz. It features a nice walk to the beach, along lots of small local businesses (a thing I love). The sun was out and the beach was great too! The parking in the city was free, but very expensive at the beach. The parking spot we had was only a 15-minute walk from the beach, so it was very lovely to walk through the city center.
The laast two years, my friends and I went to In-N-Out Burger. As the name suggests, it's a burger fast food chain! The food is quite good and its very popular in the bay area. I've heared, I have no actual idea, but you can't get it in germany, so it's very 'USA' for us, and we go there once a WWDC.
If you go to San Francisco, you might enjoy seeing he sea lions at Pier 39 (they are super cute!), the Golden Gate Bridge, Twin Peaks or (if youre like me) the cute little trams and cable cars going through the city. I also really enjoyed China Town, they had a street festival that day as well, so we got a lot of different foods and it reminded me a bit of night markets. Prepare to bring a jacket, it's windy and cold in sf.

Accomodation

Lots of hotels will be booked for WWDC, as lots of people will be travelling in. The prices for hotels can also be really expensive. Personally, I prefer sharing apartments with other people, as it has a nice community aspect and is also much cheaper for everyone involved. There are often some Developer Houses happening, or other people that know each other sharing accommodations, so that might be worth looking into if you're friends with people who also travel to WWDC.

Weather

If you're going, bring clothes that layer. It's usually quite cold in the morning, and then really hot during the day (you're turning into a rotisserie chicken, bring sunscreen!), and then freezingly cold in the evening. Most events run really late, so bring a coat or pullover.

Events I went to and loved

This list is unordered and probably incomplete.
The Talkshow Live
I went there in 2024 with a friend, and I really enjoyed the evening.
James Dempsey and the breakpoints live near WWDC
The music is good with fun lyrics, and the proceeds go to charity. They also offer really nice poster art every year.
Community Kit
This is not really an event, but a space where events were held; it was still super nice and offered a lot of online communities to hold their events there (for free, I think).
HWS:IRL by Paul Hudson
Super nice event, as always, but I sadly had to leave early. Very helpful presentation tho.
Launched Live podcast
I'm sorry, I'm not a podcast person, but I really enjoyed this recording.
Core Coffee at Voyagers
This usually happens before Apple's WWDC events, so it really is nice to meet everyone and get to know new people. I love this as the start of WWDC week.

This list is not extensive; there were so many more events, lots of them listed in Paul's repository.

An event I am totally biased about

Students, Swift, Stars!
This year Students, Swift, Stars returned for its third run. In the event, Swift Student Challenge winners can showcase their projects and get inspired by their fellows. This year included a panel focused on how to bring the 'spirit' of DubDub home, by starting or joining a local community and helping others. I was lucky to help with organizing this year, and be the Co-Emcee in the past two. This year, I had the pleasure of co-emceeing with Verity Lim. (She's awesome!) It's always a great event and super inspiring to me. This year we were lucky to have lots of amazing speakers from the community, including Esther Hare from Apple, Paul Hudson and Rudrank, Kai and Malin, and Mikaela for our panel.
The event is organized and led by Jia Chen, Subhransu, Melvin, Meyi and their team from Singapore, who lead multiple Swift Communities and Events there. They are such a great team and I enjoyed working with them so much!

Badge Pickup on Sunday

On Sunday afternoon 'til evening, Apple hosts the badge pickup event at its Infinite Loop campus. The campus has (like Apple Park) a garden on the inside; it's just smaller. Basically, you get in and pick up your badge; this year they did print your name on both sides of the badge, which was really nice (they spelled my name wrong tho, but corrected it when I pointed it out). Then you spend time in the inside garden. There you can play games or enjoy the activities Apple offers. In the cafe, the ADA (Apple Design Award) winners can present their projects. Outside of the cafe, there are tasty snacks and drinks. There are also lots of opportunities to take pictures; this year an icebreaker and a map where all participants could put pins for the places they traveled in from.

There will also be Pins. As someone obsessed with Pins, this is the highlight for me.

Keynote and Announements

Monday is sort of the main event at Apple Park. The past two years, the event starts at 8:00 when you queue up at the visitor center and then walk over to Apple Park. Then Apple serves breakfast. The whole day is spent in their cafeteria, with the giant sliding doors opened to the outside. There on the outside is also where the big screen is located. At about 9:55 Tim Cook and Craig Federighi welcome everyone and then we all watch the keynote together. It's basically a giant watch party. Do bring sunscreen, this is prime roasting season. Apple has put up some sunshade now, but it's not enough to not get burned quickly. Also, there are still loads of seats that won’t be in the shade. The seats are first come first served, there are some seats reserved for Swift Student Challenge winners, but everywhere else you have to be early to reserve some good ones. This is great for my German primal instinct to get up at 7 and reserve a seat next to the pool by placing my towel there. I have been trained for this.
After the keynote, there will be lunch and after lunch, the Platform State of the Union will be played. Throughout the day, there are opportunities to take pictures around the beautiful park.
This year Apple also had an F1 car there to take pictures with.
After the State of the Union, there are 'in person labs' which are basically just Apple developers standing at different tables and you sort of search for developers that can help you with your questions. My friend and I had the chance to talk to Richard Wei about the new Foundation models. It was a great chat and answered all of our questions.
On Monday, there is also often the opportunity to meet not just developers but also other people from Apple. They are all super nice and I gave Greg Joswiak one of my stickers and he put it on his jacket! If you met me this year at WWDC, I probably gave you a holo sticker with my fancygoose icon.

What I'm excited about

As a developer, I am excited about the on-device Foundation model. I've been having some ideas on apps that could make good use of a small local LLM, and I didn't want to deal with using a service for that. The model is only 1GB big, I think, so it might not be as skilled as ChatGPT, but it's definitely enough for most things. I've had some time to experiment with the content tagging (I'll write about that next) and it was super easy to set up and use. I'm a big SwiftUI fan, so I'm looking forward to all the new SwiftUI things as well.
As an iPad (apparently power) user, I am super excited for the things coming to iPad. I am one of those suckers that has two iPads: a small one and a larger one. I love painting on there, and when I make presentations, I always draw them out in Freeform first. For my bachelor's thesis, all my graphics were made in Freeform. Then I usually make all of the slides in Keynote or work on texts in Pages (with a keyboard tho). Now I get to use the power features that were reserved for Mac in Pages and Keynote. I am excited for that; I hate it when I am working on something, and I want to do something, and Google how to, and it says 'nah you gotta switch to the Mac now'. What I love about my iPad mini is how light it is and how I can quickly sketch things out there; in portrait mode, it's also good for typing. I can watch movies or show others pictures in a way that they can see them, and because of the USB-C, I can connect it to any monitor or projector usually, to show something in public. Another thing I love is the Apple Pencil. If you know me, you know I love drawing. I used to draw something every day, which scaled back during the past months, but I still love sitting somewhere and sketching what I can see.

Tuesday developer session

On Tuesday, Apple hosts developer sessions in their Developer center. These sessions are always nice to learn some more about the new announcements. Last year it included a demo of object tracking I loved; this year it included a demo of the new icon designer, and some demos on how to work with the new glass design. These sessions usually 'sell' out quickly; once Apple opens the free ticket registration, they are pretty much gone immediately. This year, Apple offered overflow seating, which is where I got my ticket.

F1: The Movie - No Spoilers

As a special event this Tuesday, Apple did a screening of their new F1 movie. This screening happened in the Steve Jobs Theater, and I was able to get a ticket. Mostly, I was excited to see the theater. The tickets were given out on Monday, to people who were able to open up their email the quickest.
To be honest, I am not a fan of F1, so I didn't care about the movie much. But as this blog is apparently turning into a movie critique, here are some of my opinions.
The movie is 2.5h long. As I've stated before, that's too long. I've become a fan of movies that are about 90 minutes long. 150 is too much in my opinion. The movie itself was really nice; I enjoyed it. If you enjoy movies about 'random' topics, you should go and watch it. All the relevant F1 things will be explained, so you do not need to know anything about it. The camera shots in the movie are awesome! I really loved the way it was filmed. The music is great too. I do not like scary movies, or movies that present me with nightmare scenarios of being stuck in a submarine (don't know how that would happen, but loads of movies do that now). This movie wasn't scary or 'nightmare scenario', but it was still serious and thrilling(?).
The only nitpick I have with the event: before the movie, there were drinks and snacks; I do not drink alcohol, so the only choice for me was water, as they only served wine and champagne (not sure if they had beer too). There was also a non-alcoholic cider, but that still tastes like cider, and I don't like the taste of (fake)alcohol.

Final Remarks

All in all, I think DubDub is a great opportunity to meet friends and mingle. I love the whole atmosphere there, it's super fun and inspiring. The weather in California is great too! Definitely bring sunscreen and use the time to mingle with fellow developers and designers!

PS: I don't live close to any of my developer friends, the closest to me is probably Hamburg, which is still about 2h train travel away from me. So WWDC is the event where I get to see most of my dev friends in real life again.

General Life Things

To be honest, I have been quite out of iOS and Swift Development for a couple of months. I'm looking forward to spending July getting back into it. Basically, I've been super stressed and busy with my bachelor's, and lately I've been feeling quite spent. Also, I will be presenting my bachelor's thesis soon-ish at a Google Developer Group meetup in Braunschweig. So if you're close and interested in Smart Home and AI, feel free to join! (I will post a link once I have one, the event will most likely be in German.)