WWDC 2026 Wishlist
Basically everything from my wishlist last year still holds, especially around Photos. Unfortunately the one-two of Apple Intelligence in 2025 and Liquid Glass in 2025means that this year is likely to be a mix of cleanup and trying to deliver on those original promises.
A lot of my list is framed in terms of how much of my personal computing life is on iOS, because it’s the computer I have with me most often. (I spend plenty of time on my work laptop, but it is primarily a thin client to various tools.)
Hardware
I think it’s unlikely but I’m hoping the updated Apple TV (with whatever new Siri support it apparently requires) comes sooner rather than later. I’d like to move the living room one to bedroom TV (currently using some painfully slow LG apps, including the Apple TV one) and upgrade the living room to the latest.
Like last year I’d like to see this box get support for cloud gaming services and some kind of cheap console play with a controller, but since Apple doesn’t “get” games this also seems unlikely.
Photos
We have three family members taking pictures that we want to easily share amongst ourselves but also plenty of things that don’t need to be shared, or we want to make sure kid can’t accidentally delete something from the archives. The UX I’d like is to be able to add photos to albums that are marked as being part of our shared library, as opposed to shared photo streams or local albums.
In addition to my list from last year, I’d like to see more Pixelmator features promoted into Photos’ edit mode. (I still use a ton of “Pixelmator Classic” features to make memes and such, but I don’t need Pixelmator Pro, and I want features on my phone.)
Liquid Glass
For the most part the UI changes last year haven’t bothered me that much; though the window cornering inconsistency on macOS bothers me on my work laptop where I have many overlapping windows. There are a few longer term UI trends that I’d like to see tweaked, or at least made optional.
GIVE. ME. SCROLL BARS.
Scroll bars do not get in the way; they are an affordance that tells me that there is more content and how much of it there is. I read a ton of stuff on my phone and one of the inputs is how long it is, which right now I might have to fidget wiggle to see.
I loved ResEdit back in the day, and the early customizability of Mac OS X, which mostly works today… so I want to see a return to user control of menus and toolbars as a general system pattern in every app on iOS. Ivory provides a good example of what I want: 4-5 slots with reasonable defaults that I can almost arbitrarily reorder and reassign. I know this takes away some authority from developers but I want to be able to pick which features in an app I consider to be the most important, especially in iOS context menus (hard to scroll) and bottom bar (limited space).
Games
Not much has changed here; I’d like to see an app (perhaps in Apple Games) that bakes in GPTK or a Steam Deck like experience for showcasing the power of Apple Silicon and running Windows games in a compatibility layer. I will probably have to keep dreaming.
Grab Bag
A few other pain points I run into regularly:
- Recurring medication schedules in health are buggy if they’re not every day
- More watch face customization
- The main things I want to do in Music always seem extra taps away compared to my favorite old iTunes three column view
- Automatic cleanup of old items in Downloads in Files
- More consistent marking read of voicemails when I’ve read the automatic transcript (I’m a Millennial, I’m not answering, sorry)
- Apple Books mode to be able to automatically zoom on a comic panel