Every year, the Apple World Wide Developers Conference is an exciting opportunity for developers and fans alike to get to grips with the company’s new releases. The 2015 edition didn’t disappoint, with key players from Apple including CEO Tim Cook taking to the stage to present what’s new this year. If you haven’t had time to catch up on the Keynote, here’s a brief summary of the highlights and most-tweeted topics from WWDC 2015.

Unsurprisingly, the event attracted a lot of attention from both online media and individual fans. As we can see from the screenshot from the Visibrain platform below, the much-anticipated Keynote racked up an impressive 388,500 tweets in just one day.

On the day of the Keynote, excitement was palpable from very early in the morning. Tim Cook himself kicked off the festivities with his tweet at 4.21 am:

Rise and shine, developers! #WWDC15

— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) June 8, 2015

The morning greeting was retweeted nearly 3,000 times just two hours after it was posted, and by the end of the day, that number had risen to almost 6,000.

Hot topics from WWDC 2015

If we use the Visibrain platform’s Focus feature to search for top expressions used in tweets on the day, certain words stand out in the word cloud below.

1.iOS9

The unveiling of iOS9 was by far the most retweeted expression of the day, with 59,745 tweets. We can see in the screenshot below that the Visibrain feature was used to select only tweets containing the exact expression “iOS 9”, or tweets containing “ios”, or “ios9”.

The new version brought several interesting features to the table. Siri’s latest update, Proactive Assistant, is Apple’s answer to Google Now, and will be able to provide reminders and suggestions throughout the day. As data is exclusively taken from existing content on your phone, without needing to connect to the cloud or other Apple services, Proactive Assistant should appeal to the more privacy-conscious.

Siri’s latest upgrade benefitted from extensive high-influence press coverage. The news was posted by accounts such as @TechCrunch which guaranteed a high number of impressions.

iOS9 also unveiled the possibility of multitasking on your iPad, by simultaneously running two apps side-by-side. Full split screen with any app is only available for the new iPad Air 2, however a basic version of this will run slimmed-down apps on the most recent iPad models.

2. Apple Music

Although it was actually the final item of the Keynote, Apple Music was the second most-tweeted subject of the day, with over 54,366 tweets. To get our result here, the Visibrain feature filtered all tweets containing the word “music”.

It’s easy to see why it was such a hot topic. The brand pulled out all the stops to wow fans with the launch of their new music streaming service, with a live performance from The Weeknd and a presentation from R&B star Drake.

Apple Music will compete with existing services such as Spotify. For a monthly subscription of $9.99, users will have access to a large music library and the new Beats1 online radio station, as well as the social tool Apple Connect. The new concept was pitched by Drake, who used his own past experiences of engaging with fans online to explain how Apple Connect will allow musicians to interact with their fans more easily.

Drake’s appearance caused quite a stir on Twitter, and was mentioned in almost 8,850 tweets in just two hours. Although the fact that he was wearing a vintage Apple jacket may have had something to do with it…

3. Mac OS X: El Capitan

In spite of being the first subject of the Keynote, the announcement of Mac OS X: El Capitan wasn’t what got us tweeting the most, with a modest 17,717 tweets.

Contrary to last year’s Yosemite update, no major changes to the visual design were announced, but several new features aim to improve the user experience. As well as some new gestures, users will be able to multi-task by splitting their screen into separate windows.

Upgrades have also been made to the natural language processing on Spotlight, allowing the user to make more contextual searches by simply describing what they’re looking for.

Gamers will be delighted to learn that the Metal API, which improves graphics performance on iOS devices, will also be included.

4. Swift

Last year, Apple launched its new programming language, Swift. This year, Apple announced that it would be going open source, which is big news for developers around the world. The expression earned 11,763 tweets.

5. Apple Watch

The Apple Watch didn’t steal the limelight as much as last year, but still racked up a respectable 10,487 tweets.

Apple revealed several new features, along with the native app SDK, which will allow developers to create apps that run within the watch itself, rather than through a paired phone. They will also be able to work with many of the watch’s features, which will lead to more complex and exciting apps in the future.

6. Apple Pay

Apple Pay was also a recurring topic, with 10,454 tweets.

It was announced this year that upgrades to Apple Pay should mean that it will be supported by more businesses in 2015.

Top influencers at WWDC 2015

So who were the top Twitterers of the day? Using the Visibrain feature, we can filter users whose posts were retweeted the most on the day of the Keynote. Not counting online media accounts of course, here are the top 6 influencers of WWDC 2015:

1. @Tim_Cook. Of course. With 1,24 million followers, anything tweeted by Apple’s CEO was a sure crowd-pleaser. His top tweet had over 6,900 retweets.‏
2. Founder & CEO of Tech Pills Productions @falsaif, 112,000 followers, gets second place with 1,764 retweets.
3. TV presenter Faunglada Saranee @faunglada, 113,600 followers, comes in third with 1,713 retweets
4. Software engineer Johnathan Kingsley is our fourth top influencer for WWDC2015 with 1,680 retweets. Interestingly, by zooming in on tweets from this influencer, we can see from the screenshot below that @JFKingsley tweeted 90 times over the course of the day. Most of these tweets were only retweeted a few times, but as we can see below, one tweet stood out from the rest and was retweeted a staggering 1,556 times. In spite of having just 5,776 followers, a relatively small number in comparison to those mentioned above, @JFKingsley was one of the top influencers of the day.
5. Brian Koerber @bkurbs is Web Culture reporter for Mashable and is our fifth top influencer at 1,350 retweets
6. @SMHassani comes in at number six with 1,293 retweets and a following of 574.

The WWDC attracts attention from all over the world, and we can use the Visibrain feature to find out which countries tweeted about it the most. As we can see below, the United States take up nearly 30% of overall Twitter activity. The UK comes in second with 8.6%, followed by Japan, India, and Mexico.

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That’s it for 2015. The WWDC is always a much-anticipated event, but this year proved that even when there are no new iPhones, iPads, Watches, or MacBooks to be unveiled, Apple still knows how to get our attention.

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