What to expect from WWDC 2026

Bloomberg reports that Apple’s upcoming update will be “focused on improving the software’s quality and underlying performance” and that the company’s “engineering teams are now combing through Apple’s operating systems, hunting for bloat to cut, bugs to eliminate and any opportunity to meaningfully boost performance and overall quality.” Those fixes will presumably extend to the company’s other operating systems, too.

Some of this effort may also be focused on cleaning up the visual changes introduced in Apple’s big switch to Liquid Glass. The design overhaul has been controversial among the company’s diehard fans, and Apple has already introduced tweaks in updates that arrived after the release of iOS 26 to make Liquid Glass interfaces more legible. Bloomberg reports the company could go a step further in its next updates and add a system-wide slider that will allow users to adjust the intensity of Liquid Glass (visual effects like translucency and reflectivity) they want in the interface.

The chatbot-ification of Siri

While stability and performance improvements will be a major focus of this year’s updates, Apple is also rumored to be making some major changes to Siri. When the company first introduced Apple Intelligence at WWDC 2024, it promised to launch an updated version of the voice assistant that could use your personal context (like the information securely stored on your iPhone) to act across apps. Apple delayed those features in March 2025 and then announced a partnership with Google in January 2026 to use Gemini models to presumably make them possible.

Those features might finally arrive in this year’s updates, but Apple is reportedly also changing how users interact with Siri by making the assistant more like a chatbot, according to Bloomberg. This would make the assistant more interactive and natural to speak to, and could open up other possibilities, like letting users direct Siri to perform two actions at the same time. Developers will reportedly also be able to integrate their own AI assistants with Siri, much like OpenAI has with ChatGPT.

New places to talk to AI

The chatbot version of Siri will be accessible in the usual ways, but also reportedly through a standalone Siri app. The new app will let users prompt the assistant to take care of tasks on their device, search the web and even access news, not unlike current Gemini and ChatGPT apps. Bloomberg writes that the app will also be a way to review past conversations with Siri and receive suggestions of prompts to try with the new chatbot version of the assistant.

Users will also be able to interact with Siri inside Apple’s other apps via a new feature called “Ask Siri.” This may appear as an option in app menus, and allow you to ask the AI assistant questions about content in the app. It’s not clear if this will be as in-depth or capable as Google’s Ask Maps or Ask Photos features, but it at least seems like Apple’s thinking along the same lines as its partner.