When Apple’s WWDC was first started, it was a program to help third party coders deal with tasks on the new 512K Macintosh. Since then, it has grown to one of the largest developer conferences in the world.

By 1996, many were describing the event as Apple’s “annual attempt to lie to developers,” but that attitude radically shifted when Steve Jobs returned to the company and stalled a number of projects, retargeting Apple. Until 2006, the conference was all about the operating system on the Mac, with Apple focusing heavily on their OS X operating system. With the release of the iPhone in 2007, the focus of the conference was divided between OS X and the iPhones iOS.

In 2011, iCloud was introduced, bringing a number of new services to the table. Apple strived to create a system capable of saving every step users made, allowing documents to automatically be saved. This system would become cross-platform, and Apple demonstrated how this would take place in Pages, Numbers and Keynote.

2010 saw Apple taking over new markets with the introduction of the iPad. This also meant 93 percent of new corporate apps were being targeted at iOS. This amount of iOS app development also reinvigorated Mac app development.

This year, WWDC will start with a Keynote Address open to the media, and streamed to the public. The rest of the week-long event, however, will take place behind closed doors, with developers who have signed a non-disclosure agreement.

While Apple has announced hardware at the WWDC in the past, since then Apple has optimized product launches to occur during peak sale seasons.

The WWDC normally ends Apple’s annual “quiet period” which is normally the first half of the year. The event is now targeted at what has become the worlds most important mobile development platform, iOS.