Dub Dub Clickbait 2025

This is the least connected I’ve felt to WWDC in years, in fact I booked a flight during the keynote 🙃. That’s not to say my love for Apple has waned, I think maybe the dud that was Apple Intelligence last year just has me less tuned-in as most years. Nonetheless, I’m excited to see what they announce.

There’s always shiny new features during dub dub, but what I really love is quality-of-life refinements to mature APIs that I’ve used for ages. The canonical example I use is when iOS 15 introduced a dedicated image decoding API, or iOS 13’s introduction of first-party animated GIF playback. APIs that make you go “finally!”

A couple years ago I started recording little API wishes I had for Apple to put together a sort of “bingo card” for future WWDCs. I feel like publishing it is a little clickbait-y, but might as well in case it resonates with folks or developers at Apple might see it. Here’s what I’d love to see in no particular order:

• Add a built in hex-to-UIColor method
• Add a “Toast” UI component
• Add images to actions in UIAlertController
• Extended swipe to pop navigation controller gestures to full screen easily (like this)
• Aesthetic text wrapping (like this)
• Easily detect if text in UILabel/UITextView is truncated, provide alternates to fit
• Tappable links in UILabel (like this)
• Better share/action extension disabling rules
• Auto-sizing UISheetPresentationController
• Nav bar header customization via appearance proxy
• Open up translate sheet to UIKit (like this)
• More fine grained control of UIVisualEffectView
• Get size of keyboard arbitrarily, without it even being shown
• Expose NSDataCompressionAlgorithmBrotli (this)
• A better way of creating launch screens (maybe more control over UILaunchScreen)
• Make it so wireless debugging can be turned off
• Allow typing :emoji-name: to autocomplete emojis in text fields
• Allow double tap on hardware action button to trigger a specific action
• Add “Unsubscribe” action to email notifications