Apple’s WWDC 2019 means big changes and new opportunities for app publishers

This year’s WWDC is off to an impressive start with major updates and changes coming across Apple’s suite of products and services. While new hardware, updates to tvOS and others are exciting in their own right, changes to iOS and the mobile environment will mean big changes and new opportunities for app publishers. While some of these updates will be effective almost immediately, others will have broader and longer term implications for mobile apps and software in general.

Privacy advancements

Impacting app publishers almost immediately are further additions to Apple’s privacy-first strategy. Most notable are major updates to location permissions coming with iOS 13. Users will have even more control and opportunity to restrict background location, meaning achieving background location permissions for use cases like geofence-based push messaging will become increasingly more difficult for publishers.

Furthering their commitment to privacy is a significant feature addition addressing the way in which users create accounts and login to apps. While most of us are familiar with Sign in with Google or Facebook as an easy way to create new user accounts, these companies have taken major criticism of late surrounding the data and information these sign in/sign up services enable. Apple’s answer? A completely privacy-first driven approach, appropriately dubbed ‘Sign in with Apple’.

This update will provide seamless, one-click registration and sign on for new apps on the iPhone. Users will have the option to use an Apple-generated unique email alias as part of the registration process, essentially anonymizing their email address and making email subscription management easy. Digging more deeply in to this, it can be argued that Apple is effectively taking away app publishers ability to associate an email captured through registration with third party data sources, restricting app publishers’ ability to create a more extensive data picture of their users through data matching from other sources. The benefits to app developers will be a much more streamlined on-boarding process with an automatically verified email address and the elimination of bot-based sign ups.

Making better apps with less code

From a developer perspective, Apple has announced a completely new framework for iOS development with the launch of SwiftUI. Built on top of Apple’s intuitive programming language Swift, SwiftUI will significantly reduce the amount of code required to write mobile apps, through established UI code libraries. A corresponding update to Xcode that will enable developers to live-view updates to user interfaces as they develop them.

This new framework will presumably deliver a significant productivity gain for developers who will be able to build better apps, requiring fewer decisions and increased time savings by leaning on the frameworks best practice UI libraries.

This new framework will also make building apps for all Apple Platforms (iOS, iPad,Watch OS, MacOS and tvOS) less siloed and further streamlined as each platform will be able to share code between them.

An exciting new reality for app developers

While SwiftUI will have significant implications for multi-platform development on new apps going forward, another impactful update, is the announcement of Project Catalyst. Initially rumoured under the code name Marzipan, Catalyst will fundamentally change the reach and impact of apps developed for iPad and iOS. This once rumoured, now confirmed update will allow apps developed for the iPad to become macOS apps with only a few code additions.

This update has major implications. Firstly, the reach of iOS apps will rather quickly expand from mobile only, to significant desktop penetration as developers will take advantage of Catalyst to expand the accessibility of their apps across platforms. In the WWDC keynote, Apple highlighted that they have used Catalyst to adapt internal apps News, Voice Memos, Stocks and Home to the Mac. While Twitter, Jira, American Airlines and Gameloft have also taken advantage of early access to transform their apps to macOS as well.