Intro
I’ve been using the iPhone since the 3G came out back in 2008 and the Apple Watch since it came out in 2015. Both OSes have come a long way in that time, but I’ve noted a bunch of ways that they can be improved.
My vain hope is that someone at Apple will see this and implement my suggestions… 🤞
Index
Overview of and links to sections:
iOS
Photos: Store favourites locally
The iPhone’s maximum storage capacity currently maxes out at 1 TB, but I have 1.4 TB of photos.
iCloud Photos has the following 2 options:
“Optimise iPhone Storage”, described as:
”If your iPhone is low on space, full-resolution photos and videos are automatically replaced with smaller, device-sized versions. Full-resolution versions can be downloaded from iCloud at any time.““Download and Keep Originals”
Option #1 is useful, but (1) the downloading speeds are surprisingly slow and (2) it seems to only keep recent photos and videos.
What I’d like to see is favourited items to always be downloaded at full quality, if possible
Photos: Screenshot source
Photos and videos can have special metadata describing where the media came from. For example, sent from a certain person via iMessage.
I’d love to see this kind of thing to display which app a screenshot came from.
Photos: Manual people tagging
Recognition of people is getting better and better, but sometimes someone is clearly in a photo or video, but the system hasn’t recognised them for whatever reason.
It’d be nice to be able to manually tag the person, for a complete and reliable collection.
Reminders: Default list bug
For the past couple of versions of iOS, when using the Reminders app with an Exchange account that has multiple to-do lists, there’s a bug where the default list resets every now and again. This seems like an easy fix.
Battery: Additional filters
In Settings, the battery usage report is useful, but the only filters are “Last 24 Hours” and “Last 10 Days”.
I’d like to see additional filters “Today” (as in, since midnight) and “Since Last Charge” to make it easier to figure out what is draining the battery so much.
Siri Shortcuts
As you can see from my blog post “My Siri Shortcuts“, I am now quite an experienced developer in this app, so this is my collated feedback.
A bunch of new features that I’d love to see:
The option to simply disable an action.
The ability to insert a new action at a specific line, rather than having to always drag up from the bottom.
The ability to detect whether an action was successful.
The ability to stop parent shortcuts / all shortcuts in a chain.
The ability to get the current shortcut’s name as a magic variable.
Support for If, Else If, Else. Keeping track of extensive nested Otherwises is difficult.
Support for While loops.
Actions for managing battery charging options. This would allow me to do things like “If connected to the car then set the maximum charging limit to 80 %” or “If charging and not at home then disable Optimized Battery Charging (which charges faster)”.
Actions for managing camera settings. The iPhone tends to drastically overexpose at night, and I’m the type of person who likes photos and videos to look how they actually looked in the moment, so I use the settings “Preserve Settings” and “Exposure Adjustment”, but I often forget to change them back to 0 in the morning. This would allow me to create an automation where this is done for me.
An action for getting a photo or video’s iCloud upload status.
The ability to set and see an action’s variable name on the action itself. It’s confusing having to do so in later actions which use the variable.
The ability to simply type in a string - rather than have to use a text field’s magic variable - into things like shortcut inputs or variables.
Allow autocorrect in comment fields.
An action for getting the ambient light level.
Sync automation rules across devices.
Secure secret management. For API keys, etc so that they can’t be extracted from iCloud.
Show the name of the output variable above the step / action, rather than having to find an action that uses the variable to get the option.
Bugs that need to be fixed:
Transcribe for audio files doesn’t work properly. It only does so for the first few seconds.
As the size of item counts / Repeat With Each loops increases, performance decreases by roughly a factor of 7.
Selecting a variable randomly jumps up or down, particularly in large shortcuts, resulting in you constantly losing your place.
If statement often have misaligned displayed and actually set data types. For example, even if the variable’s data type says it’s set to “Text”, the only operators will be “has any value” or “does not have any value” until you change it to something else then back to text, and then you’ll have the operators like “is”, “contains”, etc.
Operator “does not have any value” doesn’t work for text variables.
When tapped into an action’s field, the bar for available variables is random - sometimes it’s ones from the start, other times it’s ones directly above, etc.
When using File objects, changing the property from “File” to anything else (e.g., “File Size”) causes the property name, rather than the variable name, to be displayed.
Crashes are relatively frequent.
Extended use causes the performance to slowly degrade, resulting in you needing to force quite and re-open the app.
Widgets: Other device batteries
The batteries widget allows you to display the status of the current device (e.g., iPhone) and any connected devices (e.g., AirPods), but it cannot do so for other Apple devices of yours that aren’t directly connected (e.g., iPad).
It’d be nice to be able to see the status of all batteries on all devices.
Battery: Show charging rate
It’d be great if the iPhone, iPad, etc would report the current Wattage that it’s charging at, like Android does.
Wallet: Pin item to lock screen
Not all Wallet items have the data required to automatically appear on the lock screen (e.g., Emirates boarding passes), so it’d be useful to have the option to manually pin an item to the lock screen.
Mail: Create calendar item from email
Sometimes, I’d like to be able to add an event to my calendar with the contents of an email (e.g., a concert from a Ticketmaster email with the details of our seats), but this is currently two separate processes - create event, copy and paste email contents. Another quick win.
Photos: iCloud Photos sync speed
I was recently on holiday in South Africa and Dubai where I took a ton of photos and videos (over 1,500 / 22 GB), and they didn’t upload the entire time that I was there on 50+ Mbps Wi-Fi connections which was frustrating because I wanted to show people them on my iPad.
iCloud Photos sync speed needs to be dramatically increased, or offer the ability to sync directly between devices. (I ended up temporarily using AirDrop and then undoing that via the Duplicates category.)
Contacts: Match to key photo
In the Photos app, you’re able to choose a key photo for a person, but even what the person is linked to a contact profile, their contact photo will not be synced to this, which seems like an obvious quick win.
Mail: Keep selection
In the Mail app, I often select multiple emails and then (1) mark them as read and (2) move them to a folder.
The issue is that performing either of these actions removes the selection, when it could so easily be kept.
Mail: Copy email
In the Mail app, I sometimes like to store the same email in two different folders, but to do that you need to be able to copy - not move - an email, like you can in Microsoft Outlook.
FaceTime: Landscape mode
When on a FaceTime video call and holding the iPhone in landscape orientation, the UI doesn’t rotate to match. This seems like a quick and easy fix…
Photos: Remember last tagged locations
I recently undertook a mini project to import all of my old (we’re talking 2000s here) photos into iCloud. As part of that, I manually added locations to all of the photos, and the process would have been significantly easier if iOS remembered and offered my recently used locations, but I had to type them in every single time.
iPadOS
System: Profiles
I probably don’t need to spend a lot of time on this because practically everyone has been asking for it since day 1, but the ability for multiple people to use a single iPad with their own individual profiles.
watchOS
System: Customise Double Tap
The double tap gesture was added in 2023, but I actually often find it less useful than the old version that was available as an accessibility option. For example, you can’t customise what UI element it triggers (I never want to reply to a WhatsApp notification on my watch - I always want to dismiss it), and it’s a lot slower to actually complete the action like dismissing.
System: Customise vibration pattern
I’d love the ability to set up a custom vibration pattern for different apps and contacts so I know what it is without even looking at it.
Workout: Step counter
It seems rather bizarre to me that if you’re doing a walking or running workout, the active statistics / metrics don’t show your step count. It’d be nice to at least have the option of including this.
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