Apple will host its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June and due to the recent coronavirus outbreak, it will be an online event. Apple normally holds WWDC at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California, but the area has seen multiple coronavirus cases and Apple is canceling the physical event as it is unknown if the infection will still be an issue in the coming months.
WWDC 2020 will take on an entirely new online format and Apple says the online event will be an opportunity for millions of creative and innovative developers to get early access to the future of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS, and engage with Apple engineers as they work to build apps
.“We are delivering WWDC 2020 this June in an innovative way to millions of developers around the world, bringing the entire developer community together with a new experience,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing.
“The current health situation has required that we create a new WWDC 2020 format that delivers a full program with an online keynote and sessions, offering a great learning experience for our entire developer community, all around the world. We will be sharing all of the details in the weeks ahead.”
The annual keynote speech from CEO Tim Cook is usually streamed online each year anyway, to a much larger audience than the one in the convention centre in San Jose.
Additional program information will be shared between now and June by email, in the Apple Developer app and on the Apple Developer website. Apple also announced it will commit $1 million to local San Jose organizations to offset associated revenue loss as a result of WWDC 2020’s new online format.
“With all of the new products and technologies we’ve been working on, WWDC 2020 is going to be big,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering.
“I look forward to our developers getting their hands on the new code and interacting in entirely new ways with the Apple engineers building the technologies and frameworks that will shape the future across all Apple platforms.
”The WWDC 2020 program will provide Apple’s entire global developer community — which now includes more than 23 million registered developers in more than 155 countries and regions — and the next generation of app developers with the insights and tools needed to turn their ideas into a reality.
At WWDC 2020, we expect Apple to announce its next generation operating systems: iOS 14, watchOS 7, macOS 10.16, tvOS 14 and more.
