WWDC’26 Viewing Guide

Sergei — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 12:22:35 +0000

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.

So here's my current approach:

I try to watch Keynote and Platforms State of the Union at the time of their live broadcast or in the early days.
When all the sessions become available, I sit down and go through all the titles and descriptions and choose what I will watch.
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 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 227. Create UI prototypes using agents in Xcode, and then 258. What’s new in Xcode 27 and so on.

So, here is my personal list of WWDC’26 sessions, divided into these categories:

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 dub-dub-DC :)

*it was quite a significant conference that year: it was the last WWDC at which Steve Jobs spoke, and it was the year that ARC was introduced

DEV Community: Sergei

WWDC’26 Viewing Guide