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6/5/2026» 0
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# [My WWDC 26 Wish List](https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2026/06/05/1113?utm_content=atom)

Jun 5th 2026 · 4 min read · #apple #automation #ios #ipad #macos #rant #wwdc

Michael Tsai’s annual roundup of WWDC wish lists went up this week, and the thing that struck me most wasn’t any single request–it was the mood. There seem to be fewer wish lists than last year, several people openly admitted they couldn’t be bothered to write one, and the ones that did are pretty much bereft of any “aspirational” wishes.

In short, most Apple developers seem resigned to their fate, and echoed the same weary plea for a “Snow Leopard” year where Apple fixes things instead of shipping more, er… “liquid” junk.

One thing that is clearly apparent even to me (even though I am not doing a lot of Mac or iOS development save ios-linuxkit) is that we haven’t even got stability in the 26s yet (John Siracusa has a rather mordant take on that in the latest ATP episode), and in a couple of weeks we’ll get betas of the 27s piling bugs on top of bugs.

I already wrote my catalogue of what’s broken last month, so consider this the constructive inverse–roughly the same list, reframed as things I’d actually like to see fixed next week.

None of these are moonshots. Most have been fixable for years, and a fair few were working better a decade ago.

What’s changed for me is the agentic-era stakes: I now point Codex and Claude at almost every tool I use during the day, and Apple’s software is, conspicuously, the part that fights back hardest (although I can’t really go on about it much, this week’s MS Build is chock full of examples where Microsoft is way ahead of Apple in working AI integration, and it’s… just sad to me personally).

My expectations are effectively rock-bottom by now. Apple has become a hardware company where software seems to have been tacked on as a somewhat under-maintained afterthought. But I can’t help but keep a scorecard, so here’s what I’m hoping for–in rough order of how often it ruins my week.

  • - I want Mail to be automatable again. Not necessarily the full plugin API they killed, but an AppleScript dictionary that isn’t frozen in amber and a MailKit surface that can file, tag and search without ceremony–because the one app I live in all day is the one black box I can’t point an agent at. While they’re at it, smart folders and rules that sync from the Mac should finally arrive on iOS, roughly twenty years late.
  • - Spotlight should simply find things that exist. I’d settle for that alone–no AI, no reinvention–just reliable, complete results and the one-line reindex affordance the Mac has had for years made available on iOS, so a corrupted index doesn’t mean a multi-hour restore that breaks Apple Pay and FaceID along the way.
  • - In the agentic era, automation needs to be a first-class platform, not an afterthought. Like many others, I wish for a way to programmatically create and modify Shortcuts; I also want Shortcuts that don’t break between OS releases, a genuine cross-platform story, and the MCP-style hooks that OpenAI and Anthropic have to keep reinventing to automate anything in macOS. Windows still does COM and Win32 automation so well that I built an agent tool against it in fifteen minutes–Apple should be embarrassed by that comparison.

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