ET at Apple’s Bengaluru developer showcase: The apps headed to WWDC 2026

Ahead of this year’s WWDC 2026, ET visited the Apple Developer Showcase in Bengaluru, where a new generation of Indian developers demonstrated how they are building deeply personal, design-led, and AI-powered experiences across the Apple ecosystem.

Several of these developers will also travel to Apple Park in Cupertino this year, where they will spend a week engaging with Apple engineers, attending WWDC sessions, and interacting with the wider global developer community.

What stood out at the showcase was not just the diversity of apps being built, but the range of problems they aim to solve. From mood-driven music discovery and emotional wellness journaling to audio-first storytelling for children and large-scale consumer platforms, these developers are increasingly using Apple’s design frameworks, on-device AI capabilities, and native tools to create experiences tailored for real-world usage.

District Wants to Become the Operating System for Going Out

District, developed by Eternal, the parent company of Zomato, is positioning itself as an all-in-one platform for discovering and booking offline experiences including dining, movies, concerts, sports, workshops, and events.
Launched in November 2024, the app has already crossed 10 million downloads and is part of Eternal’s larger push into lifestyle and entertainment commerce.

At the showcase, Yash Shah from District walked ET through the company’s transition from food delivery-centric design systems to building a content-heavy lifestyle platform.

“Before District, users often had to juggle four or five different apps for going out experiences. The idea was to simplify that into one platform,” he said.

The team revealed that the core technology and design transition began around May 2024 and took roughly six months to execute. Much of the effort involved rethinking interface design beyond the conventions of food delivery apps.

A major influence on the redesign came from Apple’s evolving interface language, particularly the Liquid Glass design system introduced at WWDC. According to the team, District adopted the visual approach aggressively across the app to allow content to take centre stage.

“Earlier, every section sat inside rigid containers. Now content flows through the interface more naturally while controls float above it,” Shah explained during the demo.

District has also begun integrating AI-driven discovery experiences. One feature allows users to share Instagram Reels directly into the app, where backend large language models identify restaurants and cafes featured inside the video. Another feature uses Apple’s on-device foundation models to help users query large event guides conversationally.

The company has also added Live Activities, Dynamic Island integrations, Wallet pass support, and offline venue navigation using GPS. Interestingly, the app uses OpenAI models for several backend AI experiences, while selectively leveraging Apple Intelligence capabilities for on-device contextual features. The developers also discussed how shared logic layers between Android and iOS are reducing development overheads, while native UI experiences continue to remain platform-specific.

LookAway Brings a Gentler Approach to Digital Wellness on macOS

Among the most understated apps at the showcase was LookAway, a macOS utility designed to help users reduce eye strain and digital fatigue without disrupting workflow.

Built by independent developer Kushagra Agarwal, LookAway functions as a contextual break reminder system that intelligently pauses itself during meetings, videos, presentations, or periods of active typing.

Agarwal’s journey into app development began with a personal accessibility challenge. Being colour blind, he initially built an app called Cone that helped identify colours using an iPhone camera.

“That was my first real experience with Apple’s developer ecosystem, and I just kept building after that,” he told ET.

LookAway emerged from a far more common modern problem: losing track of time while working from home.

“I realised the solution was simple, just take regular breaks. But traditional reminders interrupt you at the wrong moment, so eventually you ignore them,” he said.

The app uses AppKit, SwiftUI, CoreAudio, and accessibility APIs to detect meetings, activity states, and user context. Instead of forcing interruptions, it waits for natural pauses before gently nudging users to step away.

The design philosophy is intentionally subtle. Notifications are minimal, the interface blends naturally into macOS, and the app even uses carefully designed ambient sounds to create a calming experience. “It should feel invisible. You focus on work, and LookAway quietly takes care of your health in the background,” Agarwal explained.

One particularly interesting feature is its companion app, LookAway Mirror, which syncs break states across iPhone and iPad so users are not simply switching from one screen to another during breaks. The app also integrates deeply with Apple ecosystem features including Focus Filters, Shortcuts, AppleScript, and multi-display support.

Katha Room Is Betting on Audio-First Storytelling for Children

While many modern children’s apps rely heavily on animation and visual stimulation, Katha Room takes the opposite approach. Built by Raksha Rao and Krishnaprasad Jagadish, the app focuses entirely on audio storytelling, encouraging children to imagine scenes and characters themselves instead of consuming pre-rendered visuals. The founders believe this strengthens cognition, listening skills, and creativity.

“If you show visuals, imagination becomes limited to what is on screen. Audio allows children to build the world themselves,” the founders explained.

Katha Room currently offers more than 100 stories across Kannada, Tamil, Hindi, Sanskrit, and English, drawing from Indian mythology, folklore, Panchatantra tales, Jataka stories, history, and regional oral traditions.

Authenticity is a major focus. Stories are curated and vetted by in-house experts to ensure cultural accuracy while still appealing to modern families.

The app’s artwork uses a visual style inspired by Gond art from Madhya Pradesh. Initially, all illustrations were manually created by an artist using an iPad. As the library expanded, the team trained a custom GPT model on those artworks to generate new illustrations while maintaining visual consistency.

However, the team has deliberately avoided AI-generated narration.

“We wanted the experience to feel like somebody sitting next to you telling a story,” they said. As a result, every story is voiced by human narrators, many of whom sound intentionally conversational and familial.

Katha Room has also started using Apple’s on-device foundation models for semantic search. Instead of searching through exact titles, parents can ask for themes like friendship or courage, and the app surfaces relevant stories contextually.

The app supports Apple TV, HomePod, CarPlay, playlists, favourites, and sleep timers designed around bedtime routines. According to the founders, retention has been particularly strong because children frequently revisit the same stories repeatedly.

Feelly Turns Emotional Reflection Into a Private, Visual Experience

Feelly approaches emotional wellness through self-reflection rather than therapy or AI chatbots. Created by developer Subbulakshmi Balamuthu, the app was inspired by her own experience navigating emotional highs and lows while raising children.

“Motherhood is joyful and exhausting at the same time. I wanted a simple private space where people could understand their emotions better,” she said.

Feelly allows users to log emotions using text or voice input while visualising mood patterns through colour-driven interfaces and animations. The app intentionally avoids ads and tracking, with all data stored privately on-device or in iCloud.

The visual language of the app revolves around four emotional colour states inspired partly by the emotional mapping seen in films like Inside Out. Even the app icon and animations were designed internally by the founder and her husband.

One standout element is the app’s use of Apple Intelligence for generating reflective mood stories locally on-device instead of relying on external AI systems.

The developer revealed that earlier versions integrated ChatGPT, but the team eventually removed it.

“Large language models often tell users what they want to hear. We wanted people to reflect and understand themselves instead of receiving overly agreeable responses,” she explained.

Instead of acting like a conversational therapist, Feelly focuses on helping users slow down, process emotions, and identify their own patterns through journaling and guided reflection.

The founder also hinted at future plans involving therapists and psychologists while maintaining self-reflection as the app’s central philosophy.

Mood Dial Reimagines Music Discovery Through Emotion

Independent developer Mohit Nadwani from Jaipur showcased Mood Dial, an app that rethinks music discovery using a tactile, radio-inspired interface built entirely around moods.

The app integrates with Apple Music and allows users to discover songs by rotating a central dial representing emotional states instead of navigating playlists.

“I grew up listening to radio where music discovery felt effortless. Streaming platforms are personalised but often overwhelming. Mood Dial tries to bridge that gap,” he explained.

The app blends inspirations from vintage radio tuners and the original iPod click wheel. Underneath the interface, it uses MusicKit, HealthKit, and Apple’s Foundation Models framework to create personalised mood stations.

Instead of curating fixed playlists, Mood Dial continuously adapts recommendations based on listening history and emotional context.

Users can also generate entirely custom mood stations using natural language prompts like “90s Hindi music” or combinations of genres and artists.

One of the app’s limitations is platform exclusivity. Since Apple Music currently provides the APIs necessary for deep third-party playback integration, the experience cannot be replicated easily on services like Spotify. Despite being a niche utility, the developer said the app has already found users in the US and Europe alongside India.

The showcase ultimately reflected how India’s developer ecosystem is evolving beyond utility apps into experiences shaped by emotion, culture, design, and increasingly, on-device intelligence. Whether it was wellness, storytelling, entertainment, or music discovery, the common thread across these apps was a focus on deeply personal experiences built natively for the Apple ecosystem ahead of WWDC 2026.