AI Summary
5 min readA top iPhone app developer reacts to Apple's new Siri
Ryan Jones has been building apps for Apple's platforms for over 13 years — he created Weather Line, sold it, and now runs Flighty, one of the most beloved flight-tracking apps on iOS. He also attends Apple's annual WWDC keynote every year, where he watches the company announce what it plans to ship. This year, he walked away with a clear impression: Apple is cleaning up its own messes, moving slowly on AI, and betting that privacy will matter more than users currently think it does.
The "humble" keynote and the limits of liquid glass
Jones described this year's WWDC keynote as "humble" — a word he borrowed from John Gruber — because Apple spent much of its time acknowledging problems it had created. The first 15 minutes of the keynote were devoted to cleaning up "liquid glass," the translucent design language Apple introduced last year. Jones explained that Apple had originally banned "glass on glass" — for example, making tab bars translucent when they sit on top of a translucent card. This year, Apple loosened that rule to "just make it look good." It also fixed inconsistent corner radii on Mac windows. "They might have made some mistakes," Jones said. "Let's do a little bit of cleanup."
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What you'll learn
- 1 (03:15) **Design Critique: Apple's "Liquid Glass" and the Slider Problem** - Ryan argues that Apple's new transparency slider for Liquid Glass is a design failure, showing they didn't fully think through the UI.
- 2 (07:17) **Apple's AI Strategy: Cohesive but Years Behind** - Ryan assesses Apple's new Siri and AI approach as playing to its strengths but being 2-3 years behind competitors.
- 3 (10:33) **The "Entity" Problem: Why Apple's Siri Can't See Your Flights** - Ryan details the core technical limitation of the new Siri: it requires developers to define rigid "entities" that don't exist for many data types.
- 4 (15:47) **The Holy Grail of Search vs. The Indexing Reality** - Ryan and Alex discuss whether Apple's new on-device indexing will finally fix its historically bad search, but Ryan is skeptical due to the slow process.
- 5 (17:55) **The Privacy Pitch: Will Anyone Care?** - Alex questions whether Apple's "local and private" pitch for Siri AI will matter to users, comparing it to the Facebook/Apple ATT narrative.
- 6 (19:53) **The Flighty Edge: Design, Data, and the AI Moats** - Ryan explains that Flighty's real competitive advantage is its data accuracy and the difficulty of replicating it, even with AI.
- 7 (22:29) **The Data Spider Web: Why Flight Tracking is Hard** - Ryan reveals the messy reality of flight data: it's a spider web of intermediaries, not a single API.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
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