With Coronavirus (COVID-19) being declared as a ‘global pandemic’ by the World Health Organisation, the tech giant Apple has announced that its 31st Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) scheduled for June 2020 will now for the first time be an online-only event due to the ongoing spread of the coronavirus worldwide.
In other words, the WWDC 2020 will deliver a full program with an online keynote and sessions but without live audience reactions.
Apple cited “the current health situation” as the primary reason for the change in decision.
“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.”
“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.
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.
“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,” Federighi added.
Additional information about the event between now and June to come will be shared by email, and on Apple Developer website and the dedicated WWDC app for iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV.
The Cupertino giant normally holds WWDC at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California with a live stream available for remote audiences. As a result, Apple has pledged to donate $1 million to local San Jose organizations “to offset associated revenue loss as a result of WWDC 2020’s new online format”.
The WWDC 2020 will be packed with content for consumers, press and developers alike. The online event will be an opportunity for millions of creative and innovative developers to get early access to newest versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and Apple’s other software enterprises, and will be able to engage with Apple engineers. One can also expect Apple to unveil iOS 14, iPadOS 14, macOS 10.16, watchOS 7, and tvOS 14.
Apple has yet to confirm the actual dates of the online event to be held in June 2020. The tech giant isn’t the only company to cancel a major developer event. Facebook’s F8 and Google’s I/O developer conferences have also been cancelled in the wake of the growing coronavirus threat.
