Apple announced a number of new updates during its annual Worldwide Developer Conference 2025 keynote. It showed off an exciting new design refresh coming to its operating systems, as well as various interesting features for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, AirPods, and more.
One of the most noteworthy updates the company announced is Liquid Glass, a new design language that runs across all of Apple’s operating systems. This is Apple’s first significant redesign of its iPhone operating system since 2013, when the company announced iOS7.
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Apple says the lock screen will look like it’s made out of glass. Buttons will turn into little glass pills, fluidly sliding over glass rails. New animations would also be included, while answering calls. Apple said this new look was inspired by the look of VisionOS, the company’s software for Vision Pro.
“Apple Silicon has become dramatically more powerful — enabling software, materials and experiences we once could only dream of,” Apple Software Chief Craig Federighi said. The company also announced a few improvements to its AI capabilities. This includes expanding its integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, integrating its image generation capabilities into an app that previously only used Apple’s technology.
Apple is also rolling out a language translation update. With this feature, during a phone call between two people who don’t speak the same language, the phone app can translate a sentence after it’s spoken and use an AI-generated voice to speak to the other party in their language. Apple says the feature uses AI processed on the iPhone and doesn’t require a connection to a server.
Despite the announcement of these features, this developer conference was considered “light” when it came to advances in artificial intelligence. “Many of the AI features announced were more incremental in our view, and already available through competitor applications,” UBS Analyst David Vogt said.
Apple also revealed that it has given each of its operating systems new version numbers that now align with the year after their release, rather than the version number. The new names are iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26, and visionOS 26. They’ll be coming out in late 2025.
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The tech giant also announced new looks for camera, safari, and phone apps, as well as new windowing capabilities for iPadOS 26, that makes multitasking easier. It also announced an update for Messages that allows users to change the background of their chats, and create polls in group conversations.
Apple also announced a new hub for games that allows users to access all their Apple Arcade games and discover new ones from a single spot. It also revealed that its next macOS software update will introduce an upgrade to Spotlight that will make search results more relevant with advanced personalization and filtering options. The company is also bringing the Phone and the newly announced Games app to macOS 26, along with support for the iPhone’s Live Activities.
Apple also announced that the Apple Vision Pro will support PlayStation’s VR2 Sense controllers in visionOS 26, which will allow users to play a wider variety of virtual-reality games. Another update announced was for WatchoS 26, which added a new “wrist flick” gesture.