This year’s Worldwide Developers Conference will be held in San Francisco’s Moscone Center from June 6-10, Apple has announced.
The company said it would ‘unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS’ at the event.
UPDATED (29 March): Tickets to WWDC 2011 sold out within 10 hours of going on sale yesterday. Last year’s event took just over a week to sell out, while in 2009 tickets remained available for a month. The uptake reflects the increasing importance of WWDC, both because of the growing Apple developer ecosystem and as the only remaining scheduled annual showcase for Apple product announcements. Apple no longer attends third-party industry events and launches most products at specially convened press conferences.
‘At this year’s conference we are going to unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS,’ said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. ‘If you are an iOS or Mac OS X software developer, this is the event that you do not want to miss.’
WWDC has often been the scene of major announcements from Apple. Last year it saw the launch of the iPhone 4 and iOS 4.
Recent reports suggest that Apple will preview iOS 5 at WWDC, though is unlikely to launch it then. That version of iOS could see the debut of Apple’s long-rumoured cloud services, such as the re-vamped MobileMe and ‘music locker’ we reported on in the 5 March issue of MacUser. Also likely to be included in iOS 5 are location-based social features along the lines of Foursquare and Facebook Places.
Other candidates for announcements at WWDC include the next version of the iPhone and Mac OS X Lion. When Apple released a developer preview of Lion in February, it said that the final version would ship in the summer.
