Coronavirus: Apple makes WWDC 2020 online-only amid coronavirus fears

Apple's WWDC is one of the big tech events among many other significant tech events who decided to call off the live event this year. WWDC is the Worldwide Developers Conference, which has been moved online entirely.

In its 31st year, WWDC 2020 will be an online-only event instead of the meet that is hosted every year in San Jose. This decision came amid the mounting apprehensions over the coronavirus outbreak that has been spreading across the world.

Apple said, "We are delivering WWDC 2020 this June in an innovative way to millions of developers around the world, bringing the entire developer community together with a new experience," said Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. "The current health situation has required that we create a new WWDC 2020 format that delivers a full program with an online keynote and sessions, offering a great learning experience for our entire developer community, all around the world. We will be sharing all of the details in the weeks ahead."

Apple is planning to make its online event a chance for developers to get early access to "the future of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS" and engage with Apple engineers as well.

Apple will be sharing details and additional program information about what we might expect to see through emails from now till June and also on the Apple Developer app and the website.

So, moving an event offline means an enormous loss of revenue for the venue and the people involved in the event. To make up for this loss, Apple announced to commit $1 million to local San Jose organizations to "offset associated revenue".

WWDC 2020 is one of the most significant events in technology, and it joins other big shots like Facebook's F8, Mobile World Congress, E3 2020, Game Developers Conference, SXSW, Google I/O, Microsoft Build etc. that either cancelled the events entirely or postponed or moved the events online.

Tech companies are moving their launches to online-only events from on-ground events.