8 Key Questions For Digital Product Teams Coming Out of WWDC '22

WWDC 2022 kicked off June 6, bypassing the singular bombshell product drop in favor of dozens of small-yet-substantial improvements enabling a more integrated and seamless user experience across the Apple ecosystem. Many of these changes will ripple across industries—disrupting some, enabling others—and at the very least impacting how companies envision the use and integration of their digital products. 

With dozens of updates impacting end-users—from hardware improvements for gamers to cross-device workflow features for creative professionals-—we’ve focused on Apple’s mobile announcements for iOS 16, detailing the most relevant business-critical news below.

Here are the immediate questions to be asking your team:

• What’s our widget strategy? New Lock Screens and Focus modes will create an immediate land grab for prime real estate. The first and best widgets optimized to occupy that “always on” space will have a competitive advantage.
• How are we using voice? Multimodal dictation updates and Siri integration will make it far easier to capitalize on voice as a vital input to new and existing apps. As you know, we're bullish on multimodal experiences.
• How are we working with Apple Pay/Apple Wallet? The Apply Pay Later update has potentially disruptive impacts on POS hardware and POS financing.
• Are we implementing Passkeys? Passwordless authentication using biometrics can limit damage and liability from data leaks, and is both easier and more secure. 
• Can App Clips help us? No huge changes here, but we can now automate how App Clip experiences are registered in App Store Connect. This is an excellent way to get potential users in the door and drive adoption. 
• What’s our CarPlay strategy? Apple unveiled the dashboard of the future, with countless opportunities for app/widget and voice integrations. Have a plan.
• Can we scan instead? New text recognition and translation opportunities across images and video will enable new use cases for interaction and extraction while breaking down language barriers. 
• How can we connect the dots? Each improvement and feature is not merely a standalone opportunity. Take a systems approach and act on multiple improvements across the Apple ecosystem to create an exponential impact. 

Want to dive deeper? Here are the details:

Lock Screen and Focus

Extraordinary personalization for fonts, colors, and images promise a more elegant look, but the real opportunity here lies with widgets—the simplified, at-a-glance version of your company’s digital app.  

• Free Real Estate: With the addition of widgets to the iPhone’s Lock Screen, Apple is opening up this canvas—typically reserved for a single image, date/time, plus camera and flashlight shortcuts—and apps will now battle for this prime “always on” real estate. 
• Focus Modes: Refined Focus modes allow users to further partition their mobile experience distinctly into work and play—some apps, lock screens and notifications will be prioritized during the 9-5, with others foregrounded on nights and weekends, for example. 
• Streamlined Experiences: New developer toolkits give individual apps the ability to modify content based on Focus modes. And with the ability to create multiple lock screens, users can tie each screen to a particular Focus mode. All in all, this amounts to a transformative level of customization and streamlining. 

All New Voice Experience

• Automation punctuation: A supercharged dictation feature automatically recognizes when and where to add proper punctuation while composing text. This update elevates voice as a primary medium for users to interact with their digital environment.
• Keyboard stays open: Users can more easily toggle back and forth between voice and screen editing—selecting text with touch, and replacing it with voice dictation—creating a truly multimodal experience. Dictation even works with emojis!
• Easier Integration with Siri: New APIs enable seamless creation of Siri Shortcuts through regular actions in an app. This massive shift will make it far easier to integrate voice as a vital input to existing apps.

Apple Pay

• Tap To Pay: Apple’s expanded contactless payment system enables easier payments for small businesses without the need for Point-of-Sale hardware systems. Payment apps can now accept contactless payments from contactless credit/debit cards, Apple Pay, Apple Watch, and smartphones with other digital wallets—right on iPhone and without any additional terminals or hardware.  
• Apple Pay Later: All Apple Pay users now have the option to split their purchase into four equal payments, spread over six weeks, with zero interest or fees. While many questions were left unanswered, Apple Pay Later is potentially disruptive to existing point-of-sale financing partners like Klarna, Affirm, or Afterpay, as well as PayPal’s “Pay in 4” POS loan option. Retailers should consider how this may impact consumer buying and budgeting habits.
• Apple Pay Order Tracking: This feature enables merchants large and small to send detailed receipt and tracking information directly to Apple Wallet.
• Passkeys: Biometric authentication (FaceID and TouchID) protects better against phishing and leaks, and is a huge fix to “Forgot My Password” churn. Just as Apple Pay is attempting for contactless payments, Passkeys could mark the first widely deployed implementation of this technology.
• Sharing Cards: Users will now be able to securely share saved Apple Wallet items with close contacts. Want to share your hotel key with friends arriving later? This update may bring new efficiencies to the travel and hospitality sector. 

CarPlay

• Reinvented Dashboard Experience: Partnerships with select automakers will give CarPlay—available on 98 percent of new cars in the U.S.—access to numerous vehicle peripherals and data, creating a more unified and car + smartphone experience across an increasing number of dashboard screens. This won’t all be “real” for a couple more years, but the time to start planning is now.
• Voice Integration: Users will enjoy a truly customizable digital dashboard with their favorite widgets, instruments, and must-have driving apps. While the visual overload risks distracting drivers, expanded voice integration offers a promise of the exact opposite–a more hands-free and focused driving experience.
• Maps API: A revamped Maps experience offers Street View to dozens of partner apps and now allows users to add up to 15 stops to plan more complex routes. Not only a CarPlay opportunity—this can have huge ramifications across all industries and devices.

Live Text Expansion

• Scan anything: Apple has brought their popular text recognition and translation capabilities to video. This upgrade creates entirely new use-cases, allowing consumers to extract and manipulate meaningful information from videos.
• Not lost in translation: The Live Text API for developers now integrates with Apple Translate, breaking down language barriers and further impacting countless industries from retail to media to food service to travel/hospitality. 

Share Experiences and Devices

• Watch and Share: With new SharePlay functionality, users will be able to not only watch synchronized video and media together through FaceTime; the update more holistically extends the SharePlay feature to other apps, without having to go through FaceTime, enabling the kind of first-party “Share Screen” capability we’ve come to rely on in our day-to-day digital interactions. 
• iPad Multitasking: Updates add transformative workflows and greater potential for iPad app use. There’s now a stronger case for prioritizing iPad layouts and app compatibility if market adoption rates around iPads continue to rise.What’s Next?

This year we didn’t get any major new device categories (we were wondering if a big AR announcement was coming). Instead, Apple is working towards providing a more meaningful and connected user experience and we’re here for it.