Apple sets WWDC for June 8-12, again uses ticket lottery
The dates fit with past iterations of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which have been held in June, usually early in the month, for years.
WWDC will again take place in San Francisco's Moscone Center, the venue for the last 12 years.
Like last year, tickets for WWDC 2015 will be allocated in a random drawing after registration closes on Friday at 10 a.m. PT. Developers who have been awarded tickets will be notified by April 20. The drawing replaced the former first-come-first-s served practice, which had irked developers who missed the very short window of opportunity as tickets sold out within minutes.
WWDC tickets will cost $1,599, a price Apple has maintained since 2010.
Apple will also give away 350 tickets to students -- up from last year's supply of 200 -- who can apply on Apple's website. Full- or part-time students 13 years old and up are eligible, but they must submit a native iOS or OS X app written in Objective-C and Swift, or Swift alone. The latter is Apple's relatively new programming language.
More information about the free tickets for students can be found on this page (download PDF).
If Apple follows its usual timetable, it will preview the next editions of iOS and OS X at WWDC, give pre-release code of at least one, probably iOS, to developers at the conference, then launch the new operating systems in the fall. The last four years Apple has waited until June's WWDC to hand developers an iOS SDK (software development kit), then unveiled new iPhones in September (2012-2014) or October (2011).
Apple has launched the last two editions of OS X -- Mavericks in 2013, Yosemite in 2014 -- in October. The two predecessors, Lion in 2011 and Mountain Lion in 2012, debuted in July.
The company will undoubtedly also tout the Apple Watch as another development opportunity, and may reveal an SDK for building native Watch apps.
The WWDC opening keynote is one of Apple's milestone events each year, typically kicked off by CEO Tim Cook, as executives trumpet the latest versions of iOS and OS X. Apple publicly live-streams the keynote, but often waits until about a week before the conference before confirming that.
Registered developers can apply for tickets on Apple's site.