Everything announced at Apple's WWDC 2026 keynote
Source: Engadget
Liquid Glass will look a little less liquid soon.
By [Kris Holt](https://www.engadget.com/author/kris-holt/)
Updated: June 8, 2026 1:34 pm EST
Zhiyue/Unsplash
It’s that time of year when developers who create apps and tools for Apple’s ecosystem (and your friendly neighborhood tech journalists) gather around at Apple Park and remotely to learn what’s coming to the company’s operating systems later this year. Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference kicked off today with, as ever, the keynote that contained the bulk of the major announcements.
There’s something a bit different about this year’s WWDC. This is Tim Cook’s last one as Apple CEO before he steps down and cedes the role to John Ternus, the company’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, on September 1. Ternus’ appointment might shed some light on where the company is going next, hopefully with a larger focus on hardware innovation. However, WWDC is all about the software side of things.
Here’s our breakdown of everything Apple announced during its WWDC 2026 keynote.
*This is a developing story; refresh for updates. *
Design and performance updates
Apple
Apple is making some some welcome changes to the Liquid Design language that it foisted upon users with last year’s OS updates. This year, across its devices, the company is changing the default look of Liquid Glass. It’s adding an opacity slider so you can decide how transparent you want it to look (not at all, thank you very much).
The company is making some design changes to macOS as well. Expect a more uniform toolbar across apps. Sidebars will stretch to the edges of the screen to help minimize distractions. All macOS windows will have a tighter corner radius, while Apple is refreshing app icons. By the by, this year’s version of macOS — aka macOS 27 — is dubbed macOS Golden Gate.
On the performance side, Apple is promising a lot of improvements, with speed boosts of up to 80 percent for AirDrop transfers, messages loading in Mail and playback starting in Apple Music, among other things. Apps will launch up to 30 percent faster, Apple claims, while photos will appear in your camera roll up to 70 percent faster as well. As for switching to a cellular connection when you move out of range of Wi-Fi? Yup, that should be faster too.
There’s some very positive news for all those for folks still rocking older iPhones. The company says it modified the CPU scheduler to help many of those devices feel faster. Since iOS 27 will work on all models that support iOS26, those with an iPhone 11 or later should feel the benefit.
Apple has revamped search across iOS, iPadOS and macOS. The company says it rebuilt the foundation of search that powers Spotlight, Mail and Photos so that it’s more stable and efficient. This infrastructure will seemingly start indexing new files and data “almost immediately.”
Speaking of Photos, iCloud shared albums will now work with full-resolution photos. This will be supported in Android and Windows as well.