Apple said on Tuesday it would host its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in an online-only format for the second year in a row. The event will take place from June 7 to June 11, as COVID-19 cases rise in the United States. WWDC21 is expected to offer insight into the future of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS.
The iPhone maker’s WWDC event, usually held in San Jose, California, the US with more than 5,000 people attending, was moved completely online for the first time in June last year due to the coronavirus outbreak.
Apple said the event will be streamed for free again on its developer app or website. “We are working to make WWDC21 our biggest and best yet, and are excited to offer Apple developers new tools to support them as they create apps that change the way we live, work, and play,” Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations and Enterprise and Education Marketing Susan Prescott said.
The Cupertino company also announced that it is currently accepting submissions for this year’s Swift Student Challenge, where young developers are given an opportunity to showcase their coding skills on Swift programming language by creating an interactive scene in a Swift playground “that can be experienced within three minutes.”
Apple hopes that “WWDC21 will provide Apple’s worldwide community of more than 28 million developers, as well as the next generation of app developers, with the information and tools needed to turn their ideas into reality.”
The United States surpassed 30 million total cases of COVID-19 on Sunday, and the seven-day average of new cases was slightly less than 60,000 per day, according to officials of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast, has a double bill this week: the OnePlus 9 series, and Justice League Snyder Cut (starting at 25:32). Orbital is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.