Build for iPadOS

The Foundation Models framework is a native Swift API that gives you direct access to Apple Foundation Models — on device and in Private Cloud Compute* — as well as any model provider with a Swift package conforming to the Language Model protocol.

From there, multimodal prompts and on-device Vision framework tools let your app reason about images alongside text, while Dynamic Profiles let you swap models, tools, and instructions within a continuous session so your app's intelligence can adapt in real time. Then use the Evaluations framework to ensure your AI features work reliably across dynamic conditions.

The App Intents framework connects your app to Apple Intelligence and Siri AI through schemas — recognizable structures built on years of language model training — that make your app's content discoverable and its capabilities available through natural language with less code.

Entity schemas contribute your content to the Spotlight semantic index for personal context understanding, while intent schemas let people take action on that content naturally, with no specific phrases to define and no code changes needed as Siri's language understanding evolves. The View Annotations API extends this further with on-screen awareness, letting you map views to entities so people can reference and act on what's in front of them conversationally.

Apple platforms have a unified language that elevates the content people care about most. It maintains the distinct qualities that make each platform unique and makes apps feel expressive, delightful, and focused.

New platform design refinements improve consistency, readability, and accessibility, and introduce ways for apps to adapt across devices and screen sizes. And new and updated design tools offer greater control of creative work, from icons and SF Symbols to Wallet passes and 3D content.

Apple Pencil sets the standard for drawing, note-taking, and marking up documents, with pixel-perfect precision, low latency, tilt sensitivity, and palm rejection. Apple Pencil Pro goes further with advanced capabilities like squeeze, barrel roll, haptic feedback, and Apple Pencil hover. Bring Apple Pencil into your app with PencilKit, which provides a low-latency drawing canvas, a rich set of inks, and a built-in tool picker — now with on-device handwriting recognition across a wide range of alphabets and languages. And PaperKit, built on top of PencilKit, brings a complete markup experience to your app — with shapes, images, and text boxes alongside Apple Pencil drawings.

With Live Activities, your app can provide up-to-date, glanceable information — like weather updates, a baseball score, or how long it’ll be until dinner is delivered — right on the Lock Screen or Dynamic Island.

For apps with frequent content and status updates that go beyond the existing push notification system, Live Activities can be a more flexible way to keep people updated about live events, activities, or tasks over a couple of hours, because in addition to frequently updating data, they offer a way for people to interact with the information.

A widget elevates and displays a small amount of timely and relevant information from your app or game so people can see it at a glance in additional contexts — without requiring them to open your app.

The system can display widgets in different places depending on a person’s device. In iOS and iPadOS, widgets appear on the Home Screen, in Today View, and on the Lock Screen. The widget gallery also supports widget stacks, including a Smart Stack. In a Smart Stack, the stack automatically rotates its widgets to display the widget that’s most likely to be relevant in the current context.

Create local and push notifications that give people timely, high-value information they can understand at a glance. Notifications are great for keeping people informed with relevant content, whether your app is running in the background or inactive. Notifications can display a message, play a distinctive sound, or update a badge on your app icon. And with the broadcast capability from the Apple Push Notification service (APNs), you can deliver updates to your Live Activities at scale, and reach all your subscribed users by sending just a single push notification.

Metal gives you direct, low-overhead control of the GPU so you can build visually rich games and run them at maximum efficiency on Apple silicon. Run ML inference directly in your shaders to compute lighting, materials, and geometry in real time. Use MetalFX to boost performance by upscaling lower-resolution content and save GPU time. Game Porting Toolkit 4 dramatically cuts the time and cost of bringing your game to Apple platforms with new agent skills and command-line Metal tools that let AI coding agents drive every step of the porting process.