why would a developer refrain from adopting new wwdc24 apis

Asked on 07/31/2024

1 search

A developer might refrain from adopting new WWDC24 APIs for several reasons:

  1. Privacy and Security Concerns: As mentioned in the session Introducing enterprise APIs for visionOS, some new APIs provide a greater level of access to device capabilities, which might raise privacy concerns. Apple has designed these APIs with privacy in mind, but developers might still be cautious about integrating them, especially if they require managed entitlements and licenses.

  2. Compatibility and Stability: Migrating to new APIs can sometimes introduce bugs or require significant changes to existing code. For example, in the session Migrate your app to Swift 6, it is mentioned that enabling the new Swift 6 language mode brings full data isolation enforcement, which might require developers to audit their code for data races and other concurrency issues.

  3. Deprecation of Legacy APIs: Developers might be using older APIs that are now deprecated, such as the original API for in-app purchases mentioned in the session What’s new in StoreKit and In-App Purchase. While updating to StoreKit 2 is recommended, it requires effort and resources to refactor existing code.

  4. Incremental Adoption: Developers might prefer to adopt new features incrementally to ensure stability and maintainability. For instance, the session What’s new in AppKit suggests incrementally adopting SwiftUI with new menu and animation APIs.

  5. Enterprise-Specific Constraints: Some APIs are intended only for enterprise use and require specific entitlements, as noted in the session Introducing enterprise APIs for visionOS. This can limit their adoption to specific use cases and environments.

  6. User Experience Considerations: Not adopting new APIs might lead to a suboptimal user experience. For example, the session Enhanced suggestions for your journaling app mentions that not adopting new APIs might result in some content being ignored by the app, which could surprise users.

In summary, while new APIs offer exciting capabilities and improvements, developers need to weigh the benefits against potential challenges such as privacy concerns, compatibility issues, and the effort required for migration and testing.