Yesterday, Microsoft kicked off its annual developers conference with, unsurprisingly, a slew of AI features, models, and capabilities it is bringing to its own systems, many of which developers will also be able to leverage.
While some are very specific to Microsoft’s ecosystem, there were quite a few that would undoubtedly be a great addition to Apple’s own native AI offerings, whenever those finally materialize.
#1: On-device AI models access through Edge
A new set of APIs will allow developers to access the 3.8-billion-parameter Phi-4 mini model built directly into the Edge browser, from their websites or extensions. As Microsoft explains it:
The AI APIs include the Prompt API for easy model prompting and Writing Assistance APIs for generating, summarizing, and editing text, which are available in the Edge Canary and Dev channels today. Soon, the Translator API will join this suite, enabling text translations
Additionally, it introduced a PDF translation feature on Edge, which will allow users to easily convert entire documents into their preferred language.
#2: A coding agent
Last year, Apple announced Swift Assist, the company’s answer to GitHub’s fantastic Copilot feature. Apple’s promise was an AI tool in Xcode that would help developers streamline their coding with up-to-date Swift and SDK knowledge.
One year later, Swift Assist is still a promise. GitHub Copilot, on the other hand, has evolved by a lot.
Last Monday, Microsoft announced a new coding agent for GitHub Copilot, and the way it works is pretty interesting: the agent is assigned an issue on GitHub, like a human coworker would. It then goes on to clone the repository on a virtual machine, keeps a log of its reasoning process as it edits the code, and flags it for human review.
While it cannot code an entire, complex app yet, this is the sort of stuff that lowers the barrier of entry for app development, which is what Apple has always said it was all about. Not only that, but this can shave off hours or even days of work for the most experienced developers.
#3 Model Context Protocol (MCP) support
I recently wrote about this one, but yesterday’s news that Microsoft will natively adopt Anthropic’s MCP shows that this protocol really is becoming the industry standard for interconnectivity between AI models, and platforms or systems.
With this integration, AI agents will securely (according to Microsoft, that is) gain access to core Windows features like the file system, which will facilitate much more intuitive and automated functions within applications.
In essence, this will allow AI models to interact directly with the system and installed apps, which is dangerous as it sounds. But just as promising.
Microsoft says this support will initially be released to selected developers, which is a good idea considering how badly it screwed up with the Windows Recall rollout.
Do you think we might see this sort of announcement at WWDC 2025 next month? If you are a developer, what kind of AI support do you wish you could leverage on Apple’s operating systems? Let us know in the comments.
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