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As one of the community kick‑off events for WWDC26 week, we had a great turnout at Saturday’s gathering. By my count, about 250 people from around the world—including Apple developers, students, employees, and fans—came to San Pedro Square throughout the evening. Thank you to everyone who attended; I hope you all had a great time!

Several months ago, San Pedro Square Market covered the open‑air patio. It definitely helps protect the area from the elements like sun and rain, but it also created three or four distinct zones in what used to be one big space. You could relax in the covered section, which now features sofa chairs and fewer tables; pass through the doors into a hallway between the coffee shop and the patio; or hang out on a smaller patio area by the street.

The layout made the space feel both more and less intimate at the same time. While we had more people than last year, they were spread out across these different sections.

I arrived early at 3:00 pm to secure a table where I had my name tags and Sharpie pens. Charlie Chapman, Elijah, and Kyle (developer of Paku for PurpleAir quality sensors) were the first two to arrive early. Soon, the people starting arriving in bunches, and by 6:00 pm, we had pretty much taken over the various spaces.

The best part of the gathering is always meeting other indie developers and seeing their apps. There’s so much innovation happening, yet marketing and visibility remain challenges. With so many things vying for attention, it can be hard for indies to get their apps in front of the people who would benefit the most.

I caught up with Quentin, the developer of the popular habit tracker, Streaks, who gave me some valuable tips on an upcoming app of mine. Looking for order and sense out of your calendar, reminders, email, and messages? Check out the work from the team at Structured or Sai’s Poppy application. I saw a really cool demo from the Nils, developer of Lengo, for SchoolGPT, a guided‑education tool where the LLM initiates conversations with you instead of the other way around.

Ussain’s WiseDuo Studio goal is “to facilitate creating authentic content fast.” It’s a dual camera application for creators that has a ton of features like a built-in teleprompter, overlays, captions, beauty filters, and more.

sqim from milq.ai, a developer tool for previewing, testing, and sharing iOS builds of your app while you’re physically away from your Mac running Xcode. This is a something that I’ve been wanting to do since I saw Eric Cheng doing something similar with his Android phone a few months back.

There were countless others that I met in the evening, but that their details are escaping me at the moment. Sorry! I’ve been looking for a tool to help me better remember people that I meet at conferences. Here are three possibilities: Joe F. has an upcoming app called Networking Events that’s currently awaiting TestFlight approval. Morris R. has LookBack: Contacts History which pairs the creation date of your contacts with a matching calendar event. And Gero G. demoed Meetory to keep track of the people you meet and the moments you keep.

Next year, I think I’ll need to hire a photographer to capture the event. I was talking so much that I didn’t take as many photos as I would have liked.

Once again, thank you to everyone who came. I’m already thinking about how to make next year’s WWDC27 community gathering even better!