At the end of the WWDC 2025 keynote address on Monday, the company literally sang its praises to app developers, as singer-songwriter Allen Stone humorously turned customers’ positive App Store reviews into song lyrics for a tune titled “6 out of 5 stars.”
“Best app I’ve ever set my sorry eyes upon,” he crooned. “This is not an app. It’s a piece of art.”
What Apple didn’t mention, however, was anything related to the tumultuous past few years for its developer community, or more broadly, why its developers should continue to put their trust in a company that’s fighting them for every nickel and dime while failing them in other ways.
In recent years, the Cupertino-based tech giant has put its app developer community through the wringer as it stringently fought against regulation, lawsuits, and any other efforts to rein in its alleged App Store monopoly by nations, lawmakers, and the courts.
Meanwhile, it has yet to deliver on some of the key technology advances that could modernize developers’ apps for the AI era.
In March, it delayed its “more personalized,” AI-powered Siri, demonstrated at last year’s WWDC. Apple only briefly acknowledged this fumble during this year’s keynote address, when SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi said the work “needed more time” to meet Apple’s high bar.
At WWDC, Apple scattered mentions of AI related to features that Google’s AI already has, such as Apple’s AI-powered translation features, though it tried to differentiate from Google by offering lyrics translation in Apple Music. Apple’s AI-powered Visual Intelligence feature was even demonstrated by tapping into Google’s app for image search results, something that feels more native on Android devices with innovations like Circle to Search, Lens’ multisearch, visual search in videos, and more.
Elsewhere, Apple appeased developers’ demand for AI with further integrations with OpenAI technology, like the addition of ChatGPT in Apple’s Image Playground app and coding assistance in Xcode. But no deals with other AI providers were announced, despite rumors that Google Gemini integration was on the way and that Apple was teaming up with Anthropic on an AI-powered coding assistance tool.
Apple also made its scripting and automations app Shortcuts easier to use with the addition of AI features, but this ended up feeling more like a stop-gap to tide over power users until an AI Siri could take actions in their apps for them.
Then there was the deafening silence over the increasingly controversial App Store commissions.
In the U.S., for instance, Apple is fresh off a key loss in its battle with Fortnite maker Epic Games that forces Apple to now allow U.S. developers to point to alternative payment mechanisms on the web, where it can’t take a commission.
Yet Apple didn’t spend time during its hour-and-a-half-long keynote to talk about how its App Store is the best place to build an app business, improvements it’s made to payment processing systems, or how it’s weeding out scams. (It touted some of its developer benefits in the days leading up to WWDC, where it focused on its anti-fraud features and developer revenues.)
Apple also launched a standalone Games app, but the keynote address focused on the consumer benefits — Challenges, social features, easy access to Apple’s own gaming store, Arcade — not on what it could do for mobile developers.
Nor, as some had hoped, did Apple announce a reduction in its App Store commissions across the board for all developers, finally putting the question to rest as to whether Apple’s in-app payments system is worth its price.
While arguably more developer-focused improvements will roll out this week at WWDC, through its developer keynote, Platforms State of the Union, and its various sessions, Apple missed a chance to surprise its developer community with some sort of acknowledgement that it’s understood that these past years have been tough, but ultimately it’s on developers’ sides.
Instead, the only reference so far to the changing market dynamics of the App Store ecosystem was a small update to its App Review Guidelines, which has swapped out the wording “alternative app marketplace” for “alternative distribution” — a subtle reminder that Apple only thinks the only app “marketplace” that can exist is its own App Store.
As for boosting developers’ businesses, Apple seemed to be thinking of itself and its own coffers first. In the initial developer beta of iOS 26, the App Store opens up to its Search page by default, meaning that Apple is pushing developers to spend more on its App Store Search ads for discovery.
Other changes point to Apple seeing developers as just another lever to be pulled to make the company more money, while it focuses on delighting consumers with new bells and whistles, like its interface design overhaul dubbed Liquid Glass.
Though inspired by its VR headset Vision Pro, Apple didn’t offer developers an explanation as to why they should make over their perfectly functional apps to meet these new design guidelines. The company could have at least hinted at the fact that Liquid Glass seems an obvious precursor to building an operating system that will eventually extend beyond smartphones and tablets to reach new computing platforms, like AR glasses.
But Apple’s cultural preference for keeping secrets, despite years of comprehensive leaks, largely from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, kept it from suggesting that Liquid Glass was anything but an updated new look to wow consumers.
In wrapping the event by singing cheery App Store reviews (a system now beset by bots and fake reviews, as developers know), Apple tried to lighten the mood. It knew that this year’s event would let down its developer community with its AI delays, amid an aggressive pursuit of developer revenue.
The end result made the song feel like a performative act of developer appreciation — yes, an actual performance! — rather than a true reflection of how valuable developers are to Apple’s ability to ship more iPhones and make consumers happy.
