can you tell me all updates regarding Application delegate and Scene delegate

Asked on 2025-07-28

1 search

This post is brought to you by Tailscan,
the best devtool for Tailwind CSS.

At WWDC 2025, there were several updates regarding Application Delegate and Scene Delegate:

Scene Lifecycle: Adopting the UI Scene Lifecycle will become mandatory in the next major release following iOS 26. This means that all UIKit apps built with the latest SDK will need to use the UI Scene Lifecycle, otherwise they will not launch. This change emphasizes the importance of scenes in providing flexibility and portability for apps. For more details, you can refer to the session Make your UIKit app more flexible (00:58).
Scene Configuration: The App Delegate is responsible for determining the scene configuration for a connecting session. This involves checking the scene session's role and returning the appropriate scene configuration. The UI Scene Delegate manages the lifecycle of an individual scene, including creating a window and associating it with a connecting scene. This is covered in the session Make your UIKit app more flexible (03:01).
Deprecation of Legacy APIs: Many legacy UI Application Delegate callbacks and UIApplication launch option keys are being deprecated. Only the init window scene initializer for UIWindow remains, and every other initializer is deprecated. This is part of the move towards adopting the UI Scene Lifecycle. More information can be found in the session What’s new in UIKit (21:20).
Scene Bridging: There is support for mixing SwiftUI and UIKit scene types in a single app, allowing for incremental adoption of SwiftUI. This is facilitated by a new delegate protocol that supports scene bridging, enabling UIKit apps to leverage SwiftUI features. This is discussed in the session What’s new in UIKit (17:36).

These updates highlight the shift towards a more scene-centric architecture in iOS, promoting flexibility and modern app design practices.

Explore new advances in App Intents

Explore all the new enhancements available in the App Intents framework in this year’s releases. Learn about developer quality-of-life improvements like deferred properties, new capabilities like interactive app intents snippets, entity view annotations, how to integrate Visual Intelligence, and much more. We’ll take you through how App Intents is more expressive than ever, while becoming even easier and smoother to adopt. We’ll also share exciting new clients of App Intents this year like Spotlight and Visual Intelligence, and learn to write app intents that work great in those contexts.

Make your UIKit app more flexible

Find out how your UIKit app can become more flexible on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro by using scenes and container view controllers. Learn to unlock your app’s full potential by transitioning from an app-centric to a scene-based lifecycle, including enhanced window resizing and improved multitasking. Explore enhancements to UISplitViewController, such as interactive column resizing and first-class support for inspector columns. And make your views and controls more adaptive by adopting new layout APIs.

What’s new in UIKit

Modernize your app with the latest APIs in UIKit, including enhanced menu bar support, automatic observation tracking, a new UI update method, and improvements to animations. We’ll also cover how you can include SwiftUI scenes in your UIKit app and explore SF Symbols, HDR color pickers, and more.