WWDC’25 Viewing Guide

I've been following WWDC since 2011 and over the years I've developed my own process for watching sessions.

Over the past 15 years, I've gone through all the stages from denial (I missed all the videos—for example, in 2014, when I couldn't accept Swift's appearance), to bargaining ("I still CAN watch all of them!") and finally accepting and creating my own approach to watching WWDC.

In previous years, I often used the guide from Use Your Loaf and this was my inspiration to write this post.

So here's my current approach:

1. I try to watch Keynote and Platforms State of the Union at the time of their live broadcast or in the early days.
2. When all the sessions become available, I sit down and go through all the titles and descriptions and choose what I will watch.
3. All sessions fall into 4 categories:
   • Essential is a must watch and should never be missed
   • Nice To Watch is something interesting to me personally and/or may be applicable to what I work with
   • Only If I Have Time is for optional sessions that interested me, but if I skip them, then nothing terrible will happen
   • Everything else

Thus, I clearly identify a fairly small set of sessions that I definitely need to watch, usually it's about 10 sessions and I don't feel any FOMO or pressure that there is so much new and how and when to watch it all.

Most of the time, it takes me all summer to slowly watch everything from Essential, a few (or all, it depends) Nice To Watch, and sometimes a couple, and sometimes nothing at all from Only If I Have Time.

An important rule for me is to watch Essential first. Then I can do whatever I want.

Another personal kink of mine is to watch the sessions in the order of their numbering. For example, in my Essential category, the very first video is 219. Meet Liquid Glass, and then 243. What's new in UIKit and so on.

Sometimes, while watching sessions, I notice some other sessions for myself, for example, this year I did not add the Make your UIKit app more flexible session to any of my categories, but while watching What's new in UIKit, I realized that I still want to watch it, so it went on the Nice To Watch category.

So, here is my personal list of WWDC’25 sessions, divided into these categories:

Essential

• Meet Liquid Glass
• What’s new in UIKit
• What’s new in Swift
• What’s new in Xcode 26
• What’s new in SwiftUI
• Build a UIKit app with the new design
• Meet the Foundation Models framework
• Build a SwiftUI app with the new design

Nice To Watch

• Say hello to the new look of app icons
• Finish tasks in the background
• Explore prompt design & safety for on-device foundation models
• Explore concurrency in SwiftUI
• Embracing Swift concurrency
• Code-along: Elevate an app with Swift concurrency
• Make your UIKit app more flexible
• SwiftData: Dive into inheritance and schema migration
• Deep dive into the Foundation Models framework
• Design hover interactions for visionOS
• Improve memory usage and performance with Swift
• Discover machine learning & AI frameworks on Apple platforms

Only if I have time

• Code-along: Bring on-device AI to your app using the Foundation Models framework
• Design widgets for visionOS
• Explore Swift and Java interoperability
• Safely mix C, C++, and Swift
• Get ahead with quantum-secure cryptography
• What’s new in SF Symbols 7
• Meet Containerization
• Get to know the new design system
• Design foundations from idea to interface
• Create icons with Icon Composer

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list, and for you it may be different depending on what technologies you work with or what interests you have. But if you feel lost every year (like I was before), then you can use this guide to collect your own, using the principles laid down in this post.

Have a nice WWDC ⌘