Chris Parker

I carried an 11" iPad Pro with me everywhere since 2021. It’s a great size and with the keyboard it’s everything I need when I’m not programming. When Claude came out I started experimenting with it and discovered that I was hamstrung by what iOS doesn’t have that macOS does: AppleScript.

AppleScript was a mainstay of Mac OS 9 and early Mac OS X. For a long time it was a selling point for automation and the subject of significant WWDC sessions. In recent years it’s fallen off as a primary talking point. Originally, the automation was designed for users to write scripts to drive applications or chain applications together.

Today, it’s the key to opening agentic control of your device.

On iOS every application is a silo with very little opportunity for communication with anything including the LLM application on the device. The LLM is a chatbot that can do some very limited things but only with the automations Apple’s made directly available.

On macOS I can tell an AI assistant to create a task in Things, check my calendar, draft an email, and file a note in Obsidian and it does all of those things by talking to the apps through AppleScript. It tells the app what to do, on my machine, and the app does it. AppleScript opens up an entirely customizable environment; every scripting dictionary provided by any application is the set of instructions an agent needs to drive the application.

And it turns out AIs are really good at writing AppleScript. The language’s tell/get/set paradigm maps almost perfectly to how LLMs reason about tasks. The syntax is verbose and reads like intent — which is exactly the kind of structure these models thrive on. There’s decades of documentation and examples on the Internet for models to have learned from.

The result is that AppleScript becomes a universal adapter between AI and applications. You don’t need to be an AppleScript expert. The AI is the expert. You just need the app to have a scripting dictionary and the AI handles the rest. It’s become more useful because AI arrived, not less.

I really want to see Apple bring AppleScript to iOS in order to make the platform have the best surface area for agents to work with. It would make whatever agent whether it’s Apple’s, Anthropic’s, or OpenAI’s a true assistant in ways Apple’s been unable to do it to date with Siri and Shortcuts alone.

Apple has a well-understood, well-documented scripting model that developers have been implementing for decades on the Mac. There’s extensive documentation, sample code, and institutional knowledge. Third-party developers wouldn’t be starting from scratch, they’d be adopting a pattern that’s been refined for over thirty years.

WWDC 2026 is right there. Bring AppleScript to iOS and put real AI assistance in everyone’s pocket. The technology is proven, the security model exists, the developer ecosystem knows how to adopt it, and AIs already know how to write it.

Apple doesn’t need to invent the future of AI on mobile. They already built it. They just need to ship it on the right device.