WWDC from the other side of the counter

For fifteen years I’ve watched the WWDC keynote as a customer. New toys, new wallpapers, a list of things my Mac would soon do. I’d take notes for the blog and move on.

This year is different. This year, for the first time, I’m planning to ship.

AI has made it possible to build things that were out of reach for a solo developer a year ago. I won’t say what yet. But the practical effect is that when I sit down for the keynote in a few days, I won’t be watching it as a customer. I’ll be watching it the way a shopkeeper watches a bigger store open across the street.

That changes everything about what I’m looking for.

Two App Stores

I don’t build in Apple’s App Store. I build in the EU’s version of it.

Here’s something most coverage skips: there isn’t one App Store anymore. There’s Apple’s, and there’s Apple’s-under-protest in the European Union. I live in the second one.

Since the Digital Markets Act, Apple in the EU has to allow alternative marketplaces, sideloading, and outside payment. In exchange it built a fee structure of genuine baroque complexity: a reduced commission, a per-install Core Technology Fee once you cross a million installs, optional payment-processing add-ons. The standard 30% cut, 15% if you’re under the small-business threshold, becomes a different set of numbers entirely over here.

I’d quote you today’s exact rates, but I can’t with confidence. They’ve been revised so many times under legal pressure that the terms I’d plan a business around might change before I ship. That’s the actual problem. Not that the cut is too high. That I can’t tell what the cut will be next quarter.

A US developer signs one deal. I sign whichever version of the deal Apple and Brussels have settled on this month.

The slide that kills your year

The fees are the EU’s problem. Sherlocking is everyone’s.

There’s a second thing I never used to notice, and now I can’t stop seeing it.

In March I wrote that Apple sherlocked Battery Toolkit: they added a native battery charge limit in macOS 26.4, years after a third-party developer built exactly that. I wrote it as a happy user. I got a good feature for free. I didn’t spend one sentence on the developer whose product Apple had just absorbed into the operating system.

Now I’m about to be that developer. And the keynote reads differently from this side.

Every “new feature” on stage is, somewhere, an app. Someone spent nights and weekends building it, charging a few euros for it, slowly finding an audience. Then it shows up as a bullet point in a slide and the thank-you is implicit: nice idea, we’ll take it from here. The crowd cheers. The developer reads about their obsolescence in real time, in a prerecorded video they can’t even interrupt.

That’s the shopkeeper’s fear. Not the rent. The chance that the bigger store across the street starts selling exactly what you sell, for free, with better placement.

What I actually want from WWDC

So I’m not watching for a fee cut. A lower commission would be nice, but it isn’t the thing.

What I want is tooling that makes a solo developer dangerous. On-device AI that any app can call, not just Apple’s. An Xcode that does more of the boring work. A review process measured in hours instead of days. Frameworks that let one person ship what used to take a small team.

That’s the part Apple is uniquely positioned to nail, and it’s the part that would actually change my year. AI already closed a gap I thought would take me a decade to cross. If Apple amplifies that instead of just absorbing the results into next year’s OS, the terms become survivable. I’ll pay the maze of fees if the tools let me build something worth paying for.

That’s the trade I’m watching for. Not a discount. A multiplier.

A few days out

I’ll watch the keynote the way I always do: evening, second screen, tea going cold. But I’ll be reading it for different things now. Which numbers changed. Which framework opened up. Which slide is quietly somebody’s dead business.

For fifteen years WWDC was a list of things I’d get to use. This year it’s the terms of a shop I’m about to open.

Same keynote. Completely different stakes.