Apple’s 2025 WWDC is shaping up to be a pretty exciting event with rumors of a big design update and unification across Apple’s major platforms, iPad-focused productivity features, and maybe even unified version numbers across all Apple operating systems.

A couple weeks ahead of the event, these are the top things I hope to see come to Apple’s post-pc platforms (iPadOS, iOS, visionOS, watchOS) at WWDC this year.

iPadOS

Most of my 2024 WWDC wishes for iPadOS 18 went unfulfilled, so I won’t completely repeat myself because I still want those things to happen, However, I will pull in the one I think would positively affect the most users:

Better Vertical Multitasking

This a relatively small improvement, but one that would be impactful for all iPad users (especially since Stage Manager continues to be restricted to M-Series iPads). The lack of usable vertical multitasking is one of the few areas where Apple’s tablet competition is way ahead.

The weird two-thirds/one-third app split in portrait has outlived its usefulness. There’s no reason not to allow a one app on top/one on the bottom split in portrait. For a machine that works so well in both orientations, the lack of proper portrait multitasking is a strange omission and productivity hindrance.

iOS

Pervasive Landscape Support

When the iPhone 6 Plus launched as Apple’s first “big” phone (a ginormous at the time 5.5 inch display), many people thought it could serve as something of an iPad replacement. I certainly tried to use it that way. Unfortunately, we’ve decided as a society that the modern smartphone is a portrait oriented device.

The iPhone 6 Plus came with a landscape Home Screen (which eventually got removed), but never received a landscape call screen or lock screen, which really bugged me. It’s like Apple started adding landscape support to iOS (for iPhone), and ran out of time. Or lost interest…I’m not sure.

Adding landscape support for the home screen, lock screen, and call screen sends a powerful message to developers to support both orientations in their iPhone apps, just like on iPad.

visionOS

Denser App Grid

In visionOS 2, each page in the Home View is only allowed 13 apps. I find that to be a few short of what I want on that critical first page. Making the app grid denser or. shrinking the app icons could fit apps in roughly the same space.

Apple Apps Recompiled as Native visionOS Apps

My biggest wish for the next visionOS release is that all of Apple’s first party apps at the very least get recompiled to be visionOS native. Ideally, they are able to go way beyond that and properly reimagine their core apps for a spatial computing environment.

iPad apps have been a pretty okay stopgap, but the endgame should be to encourage and incentivize developers to build platform native apps. And Apple should lead by example.

Do Something Cool with the Maps App

Navigation and mapping have been some of the coolest use cases I’ve seen demoed on competing products like Google’s forthcoming Android XR glasses, or the prototype Meta glasses. Maybe navigation isn’t in the cards for the Vision Pro itself (wearing it outdoors seems kind of iffy, and also, why would you?), but some kind of immersive maps experience with support for Flyover and Look Around could be amazing on visionOS.

A Solution for Glanceable Information

I’m not sure what widgets look like in a spatial computing paradigm, but visionOS is begging for some kind of solution for quick access to glanceable information. Maybe its being able to pin pieces of apps to a persistent location in your view that follows you around. Maybe it’s a dedicated Home View page of widgets. Who knows, but hopefully this is something Apple has given some thought for visionOS 26 (that feels really weird to type).

Quicker Access To Quick Settings/Playback controls

There are some days where my AirPods Pro 2 don’t want to stay connected to my Vision Pro. When that happens, about 50% of the time they automatically reconnect. When they don’t, it’s a bit of a hassle to get to Control Center or Settings to reconnect them.

It would be wonderful if the same hand flip gesture that shows the time and volume could also show either media controls or Control Center.

Airplay (Audio) Support

It may not be the most practical thing to AirPlay audio from your Vision Pro, but its another one of those odd omissions that makes me have to go find another device. My use case is either AirPlaying audio to my HomePods, or configuring them to play something directly, neither of what I can do on my Vision Pro. I don’t know if there’s maybe a thermal consideration to enabling this, but I’d love to have the option from my headset.

watchOS

Please, Let Us Navigate Away From Call Screen During a Call!

Among the Apple Watch’s many unsung talents is that it makes a pretty good mini iPhone when you don’t have or want to use your phone. Taking calls using either the built-in speaker or a pair of earphones is a pretty good experience (watch battery life aside).

A big annoyance with watchOS is that it doesn’t let you navigate away from the call screen when you’ve taken a call. This means that if I want to quickly look up my calendar before committing to some event, I need to go find my iPad or my phone.

I imagine in the early days of Apple Watch, this was a due to the watch hardware being technically limited. At this point, the watch should be more than powerful enough to walk and chew gum at the same time, so to speak.

More Digital Watch Faces

In the absence of a Watch Face store (which would also be nice), the only times we get new Watch Faces is with an OS update or when a new Apple Watch is released. Often those faces are exclusive to the new model.

It’s always been a bit of an annoyance how many new faces are analog. A smartwatch gives you a blank canvas to create completely new and different interfaces. The amount of energy Apple puts into creating analog watch faces that mimic a normal dumb watch is obnoxious, and frankly, kind of lazy and uninspired. I think Apple’s design team can do a lot better here.

Bonus Item

XCode for iPadOS

XCode is the last of Apple’s big name Pro apps that hasn’t made it to iPadOS yet. Swift Playground remains a good start, but any real progress on that app has slowed to a halt and we’re left missing some pretty basic features. There’s still no support for breakpoints during debugging and the XCode Previews environment that runs your app builds doesn’t even support multiple windows. There’s also no support for WidgetKit or really any app extensions. These things are all pretty basic.

The existence of Final Cut and Logic on iPadOS continues to give me hope that Apple is at least considering a native XCode app for iPad, but they sure are dragging their feet.

Conclusion

I’m a little concerned we won’t see much beyond the big UI redesign this year, but even when Apple released iOS 7 (the last big iOS redesign), there were still some big new features like AirDrop and background multitasking. So, well see!

Let me know what you want to see from WWDC 2025 in the comments or on Threads, Mastodon, or BlueSky.