WWDC: What’s new for Apple and the enterprise?

WWDC’s biggest news is and was Apple Intelligence, obviously. But beyond what might become the world’s most trusted generative AI (genAI) platform, WWDC 2024 has produced a variety of enhancements aimed at enterprise IT. 

Let’s start with device management. 

For this, Apple has built a range of new management capabilities for iPads, iPhones, Macs, and visionOS devices. These include changes to Activation Lock, software update, and Safari management. (Apple Business and School Manager also see changes.)

The intention behind most of these is to make it easier for IT to do what it does. That means easier adoption of Managed Apple IDs and Activation Lock and new tools to manage Safari extensions. Apple Vision Pro gets Zero-Touch deployments for IT with Automated Device Enrollment, along with more management controls, commands and restrictions.

A vision for business

There are new enterprise APIs for visionOS, too. These give you enhanced sensor access and better control, the intention behind which is to give enterprise developers more tools to build solutions for their business. 

The new APIs include:

• Main camera access.
• Passthrough in-screen capture.
• Spatial barcode and QR code scanning.
• Access to the Neural Engine and object tracking parameter adjustment.

The company is quite specific about where it thinks those APIs will make a difference, citing collaboration, medical, and engineering implementations to illustrate what these enhancements can deliver. Apple discussed some of these improvements and their applications at WWDC 2024; one way I like to see them is as steps toward truly realized team support for remote agents.  You can see how these technologies might also become powerful in future development of autonomous drones and robotics.

Xcode Code Completion

The big highlight in Xcode 16, Code Completion, is Apple Intelligence that runs locally on your Mac, even offline. It will produce code developers need to get their project done — think Github Copilot without the vulnerability.

Swift Assist

This is a natural-language model that works with servers in the cloud and lets developers use natural language to ask for help with their projects. The tool can generate prototype code, iterate it, and knows Apple’s latest SDKs and features. This helps developers experiment with new ideas, source the code they need to put those ideas into place, and over time should improve the quality of apps. It’s private, too. 

Private Cloud Compute

We looked at this in-depth here; enterprise pros will want to figure out the extent to which Apple’s provision of its own server-based, ultra-private LLM support in the cloud makes the service suitable for use across your company, but the promise of writing tools might help motivate a move to cross that line. It’s also interesting that Apple now lets developers use CoreML to run LLM models trained using most common frameworks (such as Mistral) in their apps on an Apple device. While not much is being made of that quite yet, it suggests new ways through which enterprise developers might be able to make their own business data highly actionable, while maintaining data protection guards.

I can’t help but think that Apple’s new cloud service could be the seed that grows into a full-fledged private enterprise compute cloud. 

App Intents and App Entities

Available in iOS, App Intents will let developers make specific content and actions within their apps available via Siri, Spotlight, Shortcuts, and Widgets. With Apple Intelligence, this means your app actions could be suggested to people when they make relevant requests from Siri, Shortcuts, or Spotlight. That’s good, because it brings your app to the surface, and evidently has potential in B2C and B2B communications. I also think this is a powerful step toward making Siri an agent-based assistant, capable of working on tasks over time, but that’s a story for another day. It does now have deeper and more integrated access to your apps than before.

Passkeys and Passwords

Apple’s decision to turn its existing iCloud Keychain password management tool into a full-fledged password manager is bad news for password management firms, but could be a powerful addition for enterprise IT, who I imagine will be able to fully provision staff with all relevant sign-ins as part of the deployment process.

For iPhones and iPads. a new registration API has been introduced. This creates passkeys automatically for eligible users the next time they sign into your app. Adding this requires the addition of a single parameter.

Elon Musk

While Elon Musk is quite evidently not an Apple product, his threat to ban Apple devices at his companies over Apple Intelligence betrays a lack of understanding. Not only is it worth noting that any Apple AI running on the Apple device or in its secure cloud is an Apple LLM model, with privacy by design, but I’d be surprised if device management (MDM) tools can’t be used to block access to external genAI machines. (If that’s not in the first beta, it should certainly show up by the time the operating systems ship this fall.)

Satellite Messaging

While not exactly an enterprise feature, Messages by Satellite comes across as a quietly spoken big deal. It means you should be able to send and receive texts, emoji, and Tapbacks over iMessage and SMS, so long as you can pick up a satellite connection. Apple didn’t share too much about this — we don’t know how widely available the service will be — but this does suggest the ambitions Apple had when it introduced Emergency SOS by satellite haven’t been fully realized yet.

There’s lots more coming out of WWDC, so stay tuned for more.

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