Tech giant Apple recently announced that its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) will still take place this year later in June from Monday, 22nd to Thursday, 26th, 2020. There is a catch however! – It will be a solely virtual experience for all participants in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The WWDC is typically a convention Apple organizes each year (this year’s being the 31st edition) where up to 23 million independent developers from 155 countries around the globe gather to interface with engineers from the tech company. The primary purpose of their coming together is to work to build app experiences that enrich the lives of Apple consumers around the globe.
Offerings at the WWDC include keynote addresses from the technological & development heads from Apple as well as previews and reviews of latest operating systems for a range of Apple product lines which include iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS.
The event which Apple typically charges $1,600 per head for, and apart from being an online experience this year as previously stated, will also be free and open to all registered developers, student developers, press and consumers alike.
Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, Phil Schiller says the company hopes to take advantage of the virtual experience by offering a wider coverage to as many beneficiaries as possible as well as provide loads of content. “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, 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.”
Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi is also highly optimistic that despite the circumstances causing the need to have the convention online, the tech company has a lot of interesting content for developers to get their hands on in order to further elevate the bar. “With all of the new products and technologies we’ve been working on, WWDC 2020 is going to be big, 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.”
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 (The event normally takes place at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California). The tech giants also typically sponsor over 300 students from around the world to come to California for WWDC, based on a coding contest. This year, it’s doing a Swift Student Challenge instead, and the winning students will get WWDC swag.
The future of tech events for 2020 and beyond?
Apple’s reactive response concerning the hosting of its WWDC convention in the face of the ongoing pandemic is the latest in a string of companies cancelling or shifting events. Other companies like the internet giants Facebook and Google have also canceled their respective developer events, for the year. This also raises a concern on the play out of future product launches and physical events for major smartphone companies for the remainder of the year; for instance, Apple’s annual unveiling of new iPhones in September. While Samsung on the other hand, inadvertently beat the shutdown of global activities [due to COVID-19], with the launch of its flagship Galaxy S20 series in February, Tecno reportedly launched its first-ever online smartphone launch in African history, with its camera phone – the TECNO CAMON 15 series.
For the foreseeable future this may be the new norm. If corporations and other smaller business entities want to continue to engage their target demography with their various products or services in the face of social distancing, they may all have to resort to virtual platforms as a means. From a short-term revenue perspective, this may not look appealing due to potential revenues lost in logistics and hosting fees etc but on the bright side they may just have access to a much wider reach of target audience leading to increased visibility of their products or services. This may be something Apple CEO Tim Cook may very well be pondering as well as WWDC approaches. There may very well also be new developments and updates concerning the picture down the line.
