New design
Our broadest design update ever. The new design across Apple platforms elevates the content people care about most. And it creates a unified design language between platforms — all while maintaining the distinct qualities that make each unique.
And that stunning new material? That’s Liquid Glass, which combines the optical properties of glass with a sense of fluidity. Liquid Glass refracts content from below it, reflects light from around it, and has a gorgeous lensing effect along its edges.
App Intents
With the App Intents framework, people can easily find and use the core functions of your app, even when they’re not in your app.
The App Intents framework deeply integrates your app’s actions and content with system experiences, including Siri, Spotlight, widgets, controls, and more. App Intents can be used with context-aware Action Button experiences, interactivity in Widgets, automation via Shortcuts, and quick controls in Control Center.
You can now apply your app-specific visual search logic to content in visual intelligence. This brings your results right into the search experience, so people can deep link into your app from the results.
Apple Pencil
Apple Pencil is great for drawing, sketching, coloring, taking notes, marking up emails, and more. The intuitive touch surface supports double-tap and squeeze gestures, haptics, and barrel-roll angle tracking. And you can easily add a high-quality experience to your app using PencilKit, which offers access to a canvas, responsive inks, a rich tool palette, and a drawing model in iPadOS.
Live Activities
With Live Activities, your app can provide up-to-date, glanceable information — like weather updates, a baseball score, or how long it’ll be until dinner is delivered — right on the Lock Screen or Dynamic Island.
For apps with frequent content and status updates that go beyond the existing push notification system, Live Activities can be a more flexible way to keep people updated about live events, activities, or tasks over a couple of hours, because in addition to frequently updating data, they offer a way for people to interact with the information.
Notifications
Create local and push notifications that give people timely, high-value information they can understand at a glance. Notifications are great for keeping people informed with relevant content, whether your app is running in the background or inactive. Notifications can display a message, play a distinctive sound, or update a badge on your app icon. And with the broadcast capability from the Apple Push Notification service (APNs), you can deliver updates to your Live Activities at scale, and reach all your subscribed users by sending just a single push notification.
Multitasking
With multitasking capabilities, such as Slide Over, Split View, and Picture in Picture, people can quickly switch from one app to another using intuitive gestures.
When you implement multitouch APIs into your apps, you can enable people to move text, images, and files from one app to another. You can support drag and drop to let them quickly move content in a way that feels natural.
Plus, apps can support multiple windows. For example, someone using a document creation app can work on several documents at once, use the app in Split View or in multiple spaces, and even work with multiple apps in Slide Over.
Apple Intelligence
Built into the core of our operating systems, Apple Intelligence is the personal intelligence system that helps people get things done through features like Writing Tools, Genmoji, and Image Playground.
Now, you can tap into the large language model at the core of Apple Intelligence through the Foundation Models framework. You can use this framework to power intelligent features in your app with model capabilities, such as text extraction, summarization, and more.
Since the model is on-device, people’s data stays private. The model is readily available, so features you build will work offline. And it’s all available at no cost for any request.
Build apps and games for the distinct iPad experience. Take advantage of the new design, which elevates the content users care about most. Create more customized apps that appear in more places across the system with controls, widgets, and Live Activities. And with Apple Intelligence, you can bring personal intelligence into your apps to deliver new capabilities, all with great performance and built-in privacy.
