Improving the iOS 9 Videos App
I find the iOS Videos app frustrating to use. It’s almost unbelievable that in the 9th major version of the OS it’s missing what seem to be some pretty basic features. However, this also means that it should’t be hard to make it a lot better:
Add a list view. Right now it shows multiple columns of thumbnails. A simple iPod-style list of titles would make it much easier to see what’s in my cloud library. iBooks gets this right, letting you choose between grid and list views.
Currently, there is a partial workaround in that if you go to the iTunes Store app ‣ More ‣ Purchased ‣ Movies you can get a list of your purchased movies. However, this only lets you download the movie from the cloud; to play it, you still have to find it in the Videos app.
Show movie and TV show titles as actual text. Right now, you can only see them within the movie poster thumbnails, all of which have different designs and so are difficult to scan quickly.
Add a search box. Yes, there really is none, except for the OS-wide Spotlight search that is full of results from other apps. You can’t even jump to different letters when scrolling.
Show the Watched state. It’s really handy to be able to see which videos I’ve already watched. iTunes and the Apple TV can do this.
Let me filter which videos are displayed. For example, just show the Unwatched movies. Or show the ones that have been downloaded to the device (or not). Yes, if you go to the Settings app you can tell Videos not to “Show iTunes Purchases.” That can lead to a confusing situation if you don’t have any videos downloaded; the tab bar goes away, and the app gets locked to the Shared screen, where it keeps trying to connect to your Mac’s iTunes library.
Show a list of recently purchased videos, or allow sorting by purchase date. Otherwise, you have to go hunting through the list—or, rather, grid—after purchasing on a different device. (The iTunes Store app does have sorted lists of recently purchased music and TV shows, but not movies.)
Add a list of favorited or starred videos. If I’m browsing and find a video that I want to watch next, I just be able to quickly mark it for later. Or, better yet, support multiple playlists so that I can make different queues for where, or with whom, I plan to watch each video.
Of course, ideally we wouldn’t have to wait for Apple to improve the Videos app. After all, we have the App Store. Lots of people don’t like the new Music app, but fortunately there are excellent third-party alternatives such as Ecoute (App Store). However, as far as I can tell, none of the many video apps in the store are a viable alternative to Apple’s Videos app. It looks like there are APIs for apps to get a list of locally stored videos, but there’s no way for apps to see which videos were purchased and to selectively download them from the cloud. The same limitations are in place for music, but that doesn’t matter so much because the iPhone has plenty of space to store my entire music library. It’s not feasible to store one’s entire video library on an iOS device. My iPad only has enough free space for one movie at a time. An app for managing videos must be able to manage videos that are stored in the cloud.
Update (2016-01-10): Actually, it appears that there is an API for accessing music in the cloud, and Ecoute lets you control whether non-local songs are shown. You can stream them but not manage the local copies.
Re: Videos․app, this unforgivable caching bug introduced with iOS 7 is still around on iOS 9
TL;DR “Streamed” playback is downloaded in full resolution, not cleared, nor manually clearable w/out signing out/back in.
