Mastodon and Ivory in the WWDC Keynote ⇥ schwarztech.net
One of my favorite moments from WWDC 2025 was when Apple designer Billy Sorrentino introduced the changes to visual intelligence. The new screenshot features in iOS 26 are already among my favorites, but what really caught my eye was the surprising amount of screen time given to Tapbots’ Ivory.
Ortolani describes this as an “endorsement”, “snuck” into the presentation. I am not sure it is either. For one thing, these presentations are obviously choreographed with each segment approved by many, many people. Nothing truly sneaks in. For another, I do not know that this is endorsing Mastodon as much as it is evading one, as Eric Schwarz writes:
I also noticed this during the keynote and I think it served a few subtle purposes: highlight an indie developer (Tapbots) that has been developing for Apple’s platforms for years, serve as a way to avoid endorsing a specific commercial social network, and potentially throw some support (indirectly) behind Mastodon. It doesn’t appear that Sorrentino has an account, but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone on the team that worked on his portion of the presentation does.
Apple probably does not want to associate with Meta’s family of social apps. TikTok is problematic for some number of people and probably not a good illustration of this feature. X is, well, you know. What typical social platforms are left — LinkedIn?
I obviously checked if these were real accounts — Apple used to have a set of fakey Twitter accounts it used in demos like these. But I could not find any public record of them. That is another advantage of Mastodon: Apple could be running a private instance internally just for demos like these. Or, of course, the whole thing could just be a mockup of sorts.