What's new for UIKit and AppKit apps?
Asked on 2026-10-04
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Apple highlighted a lot of updates for UIKit and AppKit apps across the recent WWDC sessions. Here are the main themes:
UIKit apps
In the newer UIKit sessions, Apple focused on:
- The new design system / Liquid Glass
- Standard UIKit controls, materials, and containers are updated to match the new look.
- Apps can adopt the new design mostly by recompiling, then refine with new APIs.
- Better adaptivity
- UIKit apps are expected to work more smoothly across screen sizes, window sizes, orientations, and device shapes.
- iPhone apps are becoming fully resizable, and iPad apps get stronger multitasking and layout behavior.
- Improved containers and navigation
- Updates to tab bars, sidebars, split views, navigation bars, presentations, and search.
- Menu bar support
- UIKit gains new APIs for the menu bar on platforms where it applies.
- Architectural improvements
- Observation tracking is built into UIKit.
- New UI update methods and more modern lifecycle APIs reduce manual work.
- SwiftUI interoperability
- UIKit continues to integrate more deeply with SwiftUI.
- Apple Intelligence and notifications
- UIKit apps can integrate with Apple Intelligence-related features and newer notification APIs.
The most relevant sessions are:
- What’s new in UIKit from WWDC 2025
- Build a UIKit app with the new design from WWDC 2025
- Modernize your UIKit app from WWDC 2026
AppKit apps
For AppKit, Apple emphasized:
- Modernization for macOS
- Updates for input, event handling, context menus, drag and drop, keyboard navigation, and state restoration.
- The new Mac design
- AppKit supports the new macOS visual style, including Liquid Glass, refreshed controls, scroll edge effects, and related design updates.
- SwiftUI integration
- Better ways to host SwiftUI in AppKit apps and use SwiftUI in menus and scenes.
- System continuity and lifecycle
- Improvements around app termination, state restoration, and continuing smoothly across launches.
- New refinements
- Updates to text selection, toolbars, save panels, cursors, SF Symbols, and text entry suggestions.
The most relevant sessions are:
- What’s new in AppKit from WWDC 2024
- Build an AppKit app with the new design from WWDC 2025
- Modernize your AppKit app from WWDC 2026
Big picture
Across both frameworks, Apple’s message is:
- adopt the new design system
- rely more on standard containers and controls
- modernize for adaptivity
- embrace SwiftUI interoperability
- remove dependence on older lifecycle and UI patterns where possible
If you want, I can also give you a side-by-side UIKit vs AppKit summary or a “what should I update first?” checklist.
Modernize your UIKit app
Discover the latest updates to UIKit. Learn how to update your iPhone app layouts to work great when resized with iPhone Mirroring and on iPad. Explore new APIs for tab and navigation bars, find out how to prepare your app for new Apple Intelligence capabilities, and get introduced to a skill for your coding agent of choice that helps modernize your codebase.
Use SwiftUI with AppKit and UIKit
Discover how to incrementally adopt SwiftUI in your existing AppKit or UIKit app. We’ll show you how to use the Observation framework to automatically update your views, integrate SwiftUI components into an existing view hierarchy, and bring gesture recognizers into SwiftUI. We’ll also explore how to add complete SwiftUI scenes to your app without changing your overall architecture.
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.