Today’s a big day for Mac Admins everywhere, as Apple takes to the stage to announce their next round of operating systems, and the developer frameworks that will enable many new features. In addition to features that devs will love (like new APIs for Swift and Swift UI, I hope!) there will be new MDM and DDM functionalities as well. At some point this coming week, we’ll get a session called “What’s New in Managing Apple Devices” (WNIMAD, said Winny Mad, I think).
That session — not before — is when MDM manufacturers find out what they have to adapt to for the year.
We’ll get updated YAML files in the Apple Device Management Github, as well as updated documentation in Apple’s Developer Documentation, and we’ll likely get betas that have some of that functionality enabled.
That will be the very first time that anyone outside of Apple understands what’s coming this year.
Whether it’s Jamf or Mosyle, SimpleMDM or Kandji, JumpCloud, Microsoft, Fleet, or Omnissa, none of them go into today holding anything more than guesses about what’s coming. Their Product and Engineering teams will be reacting in realtime to the delivery of new information about what the future holds.
Chances are, they have big spaces in their Roadmap that just say “Apple 2025/2026” in them. We might get big things, we might get small things. We might get things that work in beta 1, or we might get things that don’t work until the dot-3 release in winter, or that never work quite the way they’re described.
This isn’t an ideal state of affairs for companies that plan in years. This isn’t an ideal state of affairs even for the most agile of companies who pickup and drop work on a whim. Apple’s been criticized by a lot of developers for not working on better relationships, and this is one place where they definitely could use work. They are listening, and I hear — though second hand now that I’m out of that game — that things may change for the better this summer with some of the support that’s coming after WWDC 2025.
Building great experiences for customers isn’t just adapting to doc drops. It’s about collaborating on what it means to do this work, and talking it through from end to end with a lot of different people. The MDMs of the world shouldn’t be working only with a one-way communicator. If you’re the customer of an MDM and mad that Feature X hasn’t made it yet, make sure that you understand the whole of the thing that might enable that for your product of choice. Have some empathy for the PMs whose roadmaps are just about to get shook, and for the dev teams in a race against time, functionality, and existing deadlines to get the work done.
Now: let’s go see what happens next! Personally, I’m hoping we’re all in on Declarative this year, with a brilliant new implementation of Platform Single Sign-on that makes sense to everyone.
Cannonball 