At WWDC 2025 on Monday, Apple announced Games, a streamlined app store and unified library for gamers using multiple Apple devices — showing a greater commitment to the video game industry than ever before.

The App Store won’t be rendered useless, since you’ll still need to access it for nongaming app downloads. But the old Game Center app, which provided leaderboards and social features to mobile gamers (and has long been relegated to a deep, dark corner of the iPhone’s Settings menus), will finally be reaching a point of obsolescence.

Once it launches later this year, the Games app will be preinstalled on all new Apple devices. The hub will allow gamers who are deeply embedded in Apple’s product ecosystem to launch their favorite titles from their mobile devices, Macs and smart TVs.

The app provides multiple tabs to manage your gaming experience on Apple devices. The streamlined interface includes Home, Apple Arcade, Library and Play Together tabs, as well as a search feature that will allow you to delve into a dedicated game storefront.

The Games app’s Home tab allows gamers to quickly check out new events and updates for the mobile games they frequently play, while the Library tab lets users scroll through any game they’ve ever downloaded from the App Store.

The new app will also serve as a hub for Apple’s other recent endeavor in the gaming space, Apple Arcade. This curated gaming subscription service launched in September 2019 and allows subscribers to download and play hundreds of games handpicked by Apple employees. The Apple Arcade includes some of the biggest indie successes and retro gaming ports, as well as classic fan-favorites from the App Store with some additional bells and whistles.

The Games app is a hybrid gaming app store and social hub, making it much more front and center than the Game Center application. Game Center functionality has long been buried within Apple’s mobile device settings, but it’s possible that this new hub fares better now that Apple has built out a scaffolding of mobile gaming infrastructure with Apple Arcade.

The Game Center leaderboards will be revamped and integrated into the new Games application through the Play Together feature. Within the Play Together tab, people will be able to keep up with what their friends are playing, compare achievements and high scores and invite other gamers to multiplayer games.

The announcement of the Games hub comes on the heels of Apple’s acquisition of RAC7, the developer of Apple Arcade hit Sneaky Sasquatch. An investment in first-party developers could signal that Apple wants to pursue some level of gaming exclusivity on its platforms.

I was expecting, and hoping, Apple would launch some kind of AI-powered health feature on the Apple Watch at WWDC 2025, but Workout Buddy wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.

I’m the kind of person who spoils any and all surprises by reading the last page of a good mystery novel, or the finale synopsis of a Netflix whodunit before I’ve even gotten through the pilot. So I went into WWDC, Apple’s annual developers conference, having read all the rumors, feeling pretty confident that I knew most of what was coming to WatchOS 26: a smarter Health app with AI coaching that could finally turn all my fitness metrics into meaningful, personalized guidance.

What we actually got during Apple’s WWDC keynote was a bit different… and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Rather than unleashing a flood of generic coaching suggestions or unsolicited advice (like caffeine restriction windows, which should not exist in my vocabulary), Apple is being intentionally conservative with its approach to AI on the watch, testing the waters with Workout Buddy and laying the groundwork for more meaningful, context-aware insights.

What Is Workout Buddy?

Workout Buddy isn’t meant to be a coach (at least not in the traditional sense). It won’t train you for a marathon or map out a four-week plan to boost your VO2 max. What it will do is act as a voice in your ear, offering encouragement during a workout based on your past fitness data. Think: «That was your fastest mile ever,» or «You’ve just crossed 500 miles for the year.»

For some people, that kind of affirmation might be enough to keep pushing forward. But I’m the kind of runner who thrives on structure and tough love. I should note that I haven’t tested Workout Buddy, but from what Apple showed off, Workout Buddy won’t cut it for me — at least not yet. I already rely on pace and heart rate alerts to let me know when I’m slacking. What I really need is a drill-sergeant-style coach that handles the math for me, so I can focus on my stride, breathing and whatever podcast is carrying me through mile four.

What Workout Buddy means for the future

What Workout Buddy is doing is technically impressive, combining exercise and health information and turning that into a conversational voice that gives you a personalized pep talk. It proves that Apple has both the data and the processing power to analyze workouts in real time and turn that data into something meaningful. It’s the first step toward a more responsive, intelligent Apple Watch experience that doesn’t just track your fitness, but actively helps you improve it.

It also offers a window into Apple’s broader strategy for AI on the Watch. Whether due to hardware limitations (Workout Buddy relies on Apple Intelligence, which requires an iPhone 15 or newer model communicating with the watch) or just Apple being Apple (cautious, user-first and deliberate), the result is a feature that feels thoughtfully scoped rather than rushed and half baked. It’s not shouting unsolicited advice or drowning users in confusing metrics. It’s dipping a toe into coaching, not diving in headfirst.

Now that the groundwork is there, it feels like only a matter of time before we get a true AI-powered health coach.

And if this voice assistant really is the start of something smarter and more didactic, can it please expand to other areas of health too? I’ve never been a fan of sleep tracking. But maybe, if I had the right incentives or feedback, I’d get on board. The new Vitals app already does a decent job of flagging early signs of illness, but imagine a proactive sleep coach that tells me my room’s too hot to hit deep sleep. That’s the kind of data driven encouragement I’d actually listen to.

For now, Workout Buddy is limited to eight workout types: indoor and outdoor running and walking, outdoor cycling, HIIT, functional strength and traditional strength training. It’ll arrive in September with the watchOS 26 update — alongside a handful of other features you can read about here.

Meta says a new generative AI model it released Wednesday could change how machines understand the physical world, opening up opportunities for smarter robots and more. 

The new open-source model, called Video Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture 2, or V-JEPA 2, is designed to help artificial intelligence understand things like gravity and object permanence, Meta said. 

Current models that allow AI to interact with the physical world rely on labeled data or video to mimic reality, but this approach emphasizes the logic of the physical world, including how objects move and interact. The model could allow AI to understand concepts like the fact that a ball rolling off of a table will fall.

Meta said the model could be useful for devices like autonomous vehicles and robots by ensuring they don’t need to be trained on every possible situation. The company called it a step toward AI that can adapt like humans can. 

One struggle in the space of physical AI has been the need for significant amounts of training data, which takes time, money and resources. At SXSW earlier this year, experts said synthetic data — training data created by AI — could help prepare a more traditional learning model for unexpected situations. (In Austin, the example used was the emergence of bats from the city’s famed Congress Avenue Bridge.) 

Meta said its new model simplifies the process and makes it more efficient for real-world applications because it doesn’t rely on all of that training data.