Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, a.k.a. WWDC 2026, has official dates: June 8 to June 12. It will be Apple’s most important one in years.
All eyes will be on Apple to see whether the company can fix the mess that is Liquid Glass. Introduced at WWDC 2025, Liquid Glass was touted as the new design material to unify all of Apple’s platforms. It has been anything but unifying; it’s been very divisive. The glass-like transparent aesthetic looks cool in videos, but using it is a completely different experience.
#WWDC26
June 8-12
Save the date! pic.twitter.com/Z7JmyEXghJ
— Greg Joswiak (@gregjoz) March 23, 2026
On iOS 26, users are still complaining about legibility issues. I personally still hate the optical illusion that makes app icons look slanted on my iPhone’s home screen. On macOS 26 Tahoe, Liquid Glass undid over two decades of what is considered excellence in human-computer interaction design. Users continue to bemoan broken and inconsistent app window corners, broken Finder column views, further-hidden menus, and more.
With Alan Dye, Apple’s former vice president of human interface design, now swimming in Meta’s pools of cash, it’s reportedly on his replacement, Stephen Lemay, to bring some polish and stability back to software. He reportedly won’t ditch Liquid Glass since he helped create it, but he may provide users with controls, like a slider, to adjust how it appears. We can only hope that he’ll restore some sensibility to macOS 26’s usability.
Siri’s last chance
WWDC is the place where Apple announces new versions of all of its software. Rumors suggest that this year will focus on tweaking the “26” versions instead of introducing too many new features. That’s not surprising. It’s widely believed that Liquid Glass was introduced to distract from the embarrassing delay of the new, AI-charged Siri that was announced at WWDC 2024 as part of Apple Intelligence.
Apple won’t get another chance to show it’s not behind on AI. The pressure will be on to show the new Siri actually doing the context-based things that Apple promised two years ago. Can a Gemini brain, borrowed from its frenemies at Google, deliver? Fumbling Siri again could cause generational damage.
We should also get updates for Apple’s other platforms: watchOS, tvOS, visionOS, and iPadOS. Last year, iPadOS 26 brought much-needed desktop-like multitasking features, including resizable app windows, to iPads. What else can Apple add to prove the iPad is not a second-class device to the Mac, which now has the very affordable and terrific MacBook Neo?
Gizmodo plans to be at Apple Park to see what Tim Cook and company have in store. In the meantime, what do you guys want to see Apple “fix” at WWDC?
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