My WWDC 2026 Wishlist

Every year before WWDC, I find myself looking forward to the keynote. Like most developers, I'm curious about what Apple has been working on and where the platform is heading next.

What's interesting is that my wishlist has changed over the years.

Earlier in my career, I was mostly excited about new APIs, frameworks, and capabilities. I wanted new tools that would allow me to build things that weren't possible before. Those announcements still matter, but after spending years working on production systems, releases, security features, and large applications, I've noticed that the challenges consuming most of my time are often different from the ones highlighted during keynotes.

The things that have the biggest impact on my day-to-day work are usually the tools and workflows surrounding software development itself.

With that in mind, here are the three things I'd most like to see from WWDC 2026.

Better AI-Assisted Code Reviews

I use AI tools every day, and they've become a valuable part of my workflow. They help me explore ideas, understand unfamiliar code, generate implementation options, and move faster when working through repetitive tasks.

Most AI discussions focus on generating code faster, but I'm increasingly interested in tools that help engineers identify risks before they become production problems. In my experience, the expensive mistakes are rarely the ones caused by typing code slowly. They're the race conditions that only appear under load, the architectural decisions that don't scale, the subtle security issues that nobody noticed during development, or the edge cases that surface weeks after release.

I'd love to see AI evolve further in that direction. Not as a replacement for engineering judgment, but as a tool that helps engineers make better decisions before code reaches production.

A Clear Future for Combine

This one is probably more specific to developers who have worked on larger or longer-lived Apple platform applications.

Many production apps still rely heavily on Combine. At the same time, Apple has introduced Swift Concurrency and, more recently, Observation. For new projects, the direction feels increasingly clear. For existing codebases, things are less straightforward.

I've worked on enough software projects to know that technology migrations rarely happen as quickly as conference talks suggest. Teams have deadlines, business priorities, technical debt, and existing investments that need to be considered. Rewriting working code simply because a newer approach exists is often difficult to justify.

That's why I don't necessarily want new Combine features.

What I'd appreciate is clarity.

Understanding how Apple views Combine's role in the ecosystem going forward would help teams make more informed architectural decisions and plan future migrations with greater confidence.

Faster and More Stable Xcode

Every developer probably has their own collection of Xcode stories.

Unexpected indexing issues. Simulator oddities. Build failures that disappear after cleaning derived data. Moments where restarting Xcode somehow becomes part of the debugging process.

The reality is that Xcode is one of the most important tools in an Apple developer's workflow. We spend hours inside it every day. Even small improvements in performance, reliability, and responsiveness compound over time.

New frameworks are exciting because they enable new capabilities. But a faster and more stable development environment improves every project, every feature, and every engineer's daily experience.

If I had to choose between a flashy new framework and a significantly better Xcode experience, I'd probably choose the latter.

Final Thoughts

This year, I'm thinking less about new capabilities and more about the tools that support day-to-day engineering work.

As software systems grow, the bottlenecks often shift away from implementation and toward understanding, maintenance, reliability, and operational complexity. That's one of the reasons these three items made my list. They all target areas that have a disproportionate impact on real-world engineering work.

Will any of them be announced?

Maybe.

Either way, I'm looking forward to seeing what Apple has in store for us this year.