Apple has also announced several new technology innovations to improve the app experience further.
The announcement includes new tools, technologies, and APIs that the company says are designed to help developers create better and more engaged user experiences.
Xcode Cloud is available to users now, starting with 25 hours per month free through December 2023 for all Apple Developer Program members and with a maximum of 1,000 hours per month. It acts as a cloud continuous integration and delivery service designed specifically for Apple developers and can deploy testing to a simulated version of any current Apple device.
Improvements have also been added to Xcode 14, where project building can now be 25% faster, thanks to improved parallelism. The Xcode application is now also 30% smaller to download, with downloadable simulator runtimes for watchOS and tvOS.
Enhanced gaming capabilities have also been announced, with Metal 3, the latest version of Apple’s graphics framework, introduced with new features that allow game developers to take advantage of the power of Apple silicon for even better gaming performance.
MetalFX Upscaling also allows developers to render complex scenes using less compute-intensive frames quickly, then apply high-quality spatial scaling and temporal anti-aliasing. Game developers also benefit from a new Fast Resource Loading API that minimizes latency by providing a more direct path from storage to the GPU. This provides easy access to high-quality textures and geometry to create expansive worlds for realistic and immersive gameplay.
There will also be noticeable improvements to Swift and SwiftUI, with new regular expression literal support built into the language. SwiftUI features an improved navigation API to make it easier for developers to control. New package plugins in Swift Package Manager make it easier for developers to run custom commands and upload and share them with others.
WeatherKit will be available to developers through both native Swift and REST APIs. It allows developers to integrate the same world-class global weather forecast that powers Apple Weather directly into their apps, and additional service levels can be purchased.
A privacy-focused approach to ad measurement is also something Apple is highlighting, with the SKAdNetwork API bringing new features designed to help ad networks and advertisers better measure how ads are performing in apps or across the web while preserving user privacy. Stays.
Several other APIs range from iOS 16, which enables widgets on the iPhone lock screen, new Apple Maps Server APIs, and automatic shortcuts.
“We love to partner with our developer community and bring them new innovative technologies that help them build the next great generation of apps,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of global developer relations and marketing for enterprise and education.
“With powerful new APIs for lock screen widgets, new services like WeatherKit, the availability of Xcode Cloud to help any Apple developer build apps faster, and new gaming capabilities with Metal 3, developers have more tools than ever to create app experiences. Create that their users will love.”
