At its World Wide Developer Conference on Monday Apple did little to assuage fears that it is falling behind with its artificial intelligence offerings, but said it would open up its core AI tools to outside developers along with other incremental improvements, while also showing a major interface revamp that is to take effect across its range of devices.

After largely failing to deliver on AI plans announced last year, at this year’s WWDC event the company focused on more modest announcements such as a shopping tool to help find items such as shoes or jackets viewed online.

The Visual Intelligence tool, which can already analyse items viewed by an iPhone’s camera and help find similar ones to buy, will now be able to do the same for items viewed on the user’s screen, for instance in a web browser.

AI updates

It will then be able to link across to other apps installed on an iPhone to see if the app offers a similar item for sale, Apple said.

Phone calls will get live translation, and other app makers will be able to add live translation to their apps. The person at the other end of the call will not need to be using an iPhone for the feature to work.

Apple also introduced a call-screening feature that answers any call from an unknown number, asks the caller their purpose, then submits a transcript of their response while ringing the phone’s owner.

Apple added ChatGPT’s image-generation features to its Image Playground generative AI app and said user data would not be shared with OpenAI without consent.

Software chief Craig Federighi said Apple would offer its own and OpenAI’s code completion tools in its Xcode developer software.

He said the company would open access to its own in-house large language model running on devices so that outside developers could build apps on top of it.

Liquid Glass

Federighi showed a new interface design model Apple calls Liquid Glass that he said was the company’s biggest update in a decade, made possible by the power of its in-house Apple Silicon chips.

The design introduces translucent elements as well as unifying design across the Mac, iPad, iPhone and Apple Watch ranges.

The theme adapts intelligently to light and dark modes and surrounding visual elements, and gives users an option to use completely translucent icons.

Elements such as transparent menu bars are intended to make a display appear larger than it is, Apple said.

The company is changing the naming of its OS updates to match the release year, in a further unifying move.

So operating systems released this year will be named iOS 26, iPadOS 26, tvOS 26 and the like.

Regulatory pressure

Aside from investor disappointment with its AI moves, Apple is also facing increasing regulatory pressure, with the White House pushing it to move manufacturing within the country and the EU demanding increased access to its operating systems for third-party developers.

Apple said in a legal challenge to the EU’s recent moves that they pose a threat to its core business model.