Apple’s new AI tool will help you write iPhone apps, report says

Apple is working on an artificial intelligence-based tool that could help developers create apps for its products, a new report claims.

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple has been working on this software for a year, and it will be a part of the next major version of the tech giant’s programming software Xcode. It could launch “as early as this year,” the report says.

Xcode is Apple’s programming environment, which is used to develop apps for all of the company’s software platforms, including iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.

The details about the new tool are scarce, but Gurman says it will be similar to Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, and that it will use AI to “predict and complete blocks of code.” Apple also may be looking into using AI to generate code for testing applications.

Launched in 2021, Github Copiilot is an AI tool that can generate code based on queries in natural language. In other words, the developer can describe the problem they want to solve in a text prompt, and Copilot will generate snippets of working code. OpenAI’s ChatGPT can also be used to create code in a variety of programming languages.

The announcement of this new tool could happen “as soon as June,” during Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).

With AI seemingly permeating every aspect of our digital lives (just this month, we’ve seen several major AI announcements, including a new OpenAI tool that lets users create realistic video clips from text prompts, as well as a new language model from Google), this move by Apple seems more inevitable than innovative. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently said that Apple will make a big AI announcement later in 2024. He did not share any additional details, but the new, AI-enhanced Xcode could be a part of that announcement.