Apple Announces XCode 16, Swift 6, More for Developers

With all the interesting end-user features that Apple announced today, it’s easy to forget that WWDC is a developer show. But the company revealed major advances across its developer stack as well.

“At Apple, we are dedicated to providing developers everywhere with the cutting-edge technologies and resources to build incredible apps,” Apple vice president Susan Prescott said. “With thoughtful innovation behind Xcode 16 and our latest platform APIs, we’ve created the best tools for developers to create outstanding apps. We’re excited to see what they build next.”

Here are some highlights of Apple’s developer announcements at WWDC 2024:

XCode 16. Apple’s integrated development environment (IDE) will provide a GitHub Copilot-like experience called Swift Assist that uses a cloud-hosted AI model and “serves as a companion for all of a developer’s coding tasks, so they can focus on higher-level problems and solutions. It’s seamlessly integrated into Xcode, and knows the latest software development kits (SDKs) and Swift language features.” XCode 16 will also feature a new predictive code completion engine that’s trained for Swift and Apple SDKs, a new dynamic linking architecture, and various other enhancements.

Swift 6. Apple is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its Swift programming language with a new version that provides compile-time data-race safety for enhanced code safety and maintainability, support for additional code editors, and GitHub-hosted Swift compiler, Foundation, and other key libraries. “Today, nearly 1 million apps use Swift,” Apple noted, “and it’s utilized throughout Apple’s software stack — from apps and frameworks, all the way down to firmware like Secure Enclave.”

Game Porting Toolkit 2. The next version of Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit 2 for Mac provides improved compatibility with Windows games, new shader debugging tools, and updates to Xcode so developers can unify their game code and shaders across devices.

visionOS 2. The second release of Apple’s spatial platform will arrive with new APIs and frameworks to help developers create more complex and nuanced spatial experiences, new volumetric APIs for controlling 3D objects, TabletopKit for anchoring objects to flat surfaces (as with Microsoft HoloLens), and more.

App Store improvements. Apple is introducing custom product pages, deep links, resubscription offers, StoreKit improvements, and other developer updates to its App Store. And the App Store Connect app for iOS and iPadOS is getting an updated UI with marketing asset generation capabilities and other changes.

You can learn more about what’s new for Apple developers on the Apple Developer website.