WWDC 2024 Wish Lists
I always want releases focused on bug fixes, but we all know that isn’t going to happen. If we’re dreaming big, how about something like virtual memory for iOS so that it stops losing my Safari tabs?
From a SportsKit API and .zoom modifier in SwiftUI, over improved SwiftData and source control in Xcode, to my biggest pain points in tvOS and visionOS, and much more! Blending long-standing requests with fresh ideas.
In particular it would be rather nice if the courts decide that Apple uses Photos lock-in as a part of its monopoly.
[…]
Here are two ways that Apple could free photo management from their iron control and provide options for the tiny sliver of the Apple base that cares.
I think they have too much power in too many industries and the more they spread out the less they can focus on the parts of their business that I personally enjoy the most.
If all macOS 15 does is remove that stupid emoji-palette-blocking autocomplete popup that Sonoma added, I will be happy. Adding an extra step to something I do a hundred times a day, without giving an option to turn it off? Genius.
My number 1 wish for macOS 15 is support for SMS filtering in Messages. I have an app that works great on iOS but all the spam still shows up on my Mac unless I shut off text message forwarding altogether. But if I do that then I can't autofill two factor codes on my Mac. Grrrrr.
All I want for WWDC is for this to be fixed.
I still want them to fix the thing where just looking at a xib without changing anything modifies it.
Are we absolutely sure we want AI features in Xcode?
- iMessage group typing indicators
- iMessage draft sync
- iMessage emoji tapbacks
- First tap works on Always On Display
- Mail secondary inbox
- iMessage expiring threads
- Photos stack similar pics
- Siri reboot
- paste hyperlinks on text
- Warn about high refund rate apps
- AI merge group photos for smiles
- Rotation lock except video
- Live Activities queue offline events
- Don’t offload recent photos!
- “5G Minimal” option
- AI emoji suggestions
- AI Memoji
- Native spam call filter
This is my short list of what I’d love to see added to SwiftUI and Xcode.
It is the time of the year that I start compiling my list of HomeKit feature requests that will be promptly be ignored by the team at Apple.
Move the iPhone call and end call buttons away from each other on the screen.
Just fix Xcode so that it works again!
Smart charging reminders. They’ve got all the usage data and calendar info, it’s all right there!
Just remind me to charge my watch because I’m gonna go to sleep and then off to the gym as soon as I wake up.
I know it’s a really hard thing to do well, and it isn’t in the top 10 things I hope to be improved in Xcode, but I still wish Xcode could handle Arabic string literals without getting so confused.
Below is a list of possible macOS 15 features. NOTE: You can only pick 2.
Hopes for a better Control Center:
- Big clear single tap audio output
- Pick home controls
- Any shortcut
- Hide less in long presses
- Rotation lock except video
- All buttons are customizable
- No double button in Focus Modes
- Mini TV Remote at first level
For tvOS 18, Apple should just add whatever format/codec support is needed to get BBC iPlayer to stream in 4K and with subtitles.
- documentation that isn’t header regurgitation written by people who think only incompetents need documentation.
- Apple actually dogfooding beyond their own convenience.
- full-throated support for automation, both Shortcuts and AppleScript/JXA (or even a more swift-based language)
[Make] it easier and more reliable for Siri to do basic things.
iOS SMS filtering needs to apply to messages that are forwarded to my Mac.
It’s a straight-up bug that things that I’ve explicitly said to block on my phone are still causing alerts and badges on my Mac.
[Bring] back speed and stability to LLDB
These are minor annoyances or little things which have bugged me in the last year.
Every time I see some B-roll with a MacBook entering Mission Control or Exposé, it makes me wish iPad had that instead of Stage Manager. Unlimited windows, that can be tiled on a key press, and Fullscreen Spaces that you can flip through with the trackpad
WWDC is almost here, so it’s a good time to talk about the @1Password browser extension for Safari, its history, challenges, and the future — what we’re working on and what we’d like to see from Apple, Safari, and the web platform.
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Safari’s implementation of the spec is new. There are missing/incomplete APIs which must be worked around, and others which simply do not work.
[…]
This mandatory layer of indirection has unique bugs and reliability issues, most of which are outside of a developer's control, on both Mac and iOS.
I really want only one thing from WWDC24 and that’s One True Gear (I vote VisionOS)
Every year my wish for WWDC is that they DON’T release a new version of the macOS, just fix the bugs in the current one.
Next year, release an optimized version that cuts the bloat, and improves performance.
Swift Package Management that works like Ruby Package management.
Apple still has not fixed the bug in Mail where the All Inboxes view does not show huge numbers of recent emails.
Mine keeps loading today with a near three-month gap in which messages are visible.
For a few years (2016, 2017, 2018) I wrote a specific post before WWDC about updates I was hoping to see for tvOS. These were never requests for those features to be built in a few days, but things I was hoping had already occurred to Apple, like the many years I put picture-in-picture on the list before it occurred to someone at Apple to ship it in 2020.
I stopped writing these posts because fewer and fewer updates were coming out for tvOS, in general, and those that were were often tied to new hardware launches usually occurring late in the Fall.
[…]
Knowing that it’s very unlikely we’ll see anything from Apple for the Apple TV this summer, I’ll offer a critique of where things are at instead, and offer some possible solutions ranging in complexity.
I’m hoping for thoughtful integration of LLMs across the OSes, performance and reliability updates for core services, and the introduction of a few power-user tweaks and long-missing features.
Some of these ideas have been inspired by others’ wishlists, and where applicable, I’ve included those references.
Previously:
Update (2024-06-07): Craig Grannell:
A switch in Settings to turn off the Home indicator.
[Overriding] the daft iCloud Photos sync. Drives me bonkers.
Fix the handling of bug reports!
It’s been 12 years since “Fix Radar or GTFO” but little (if anything) has improved.
Apple’s iCloud has gotten so much better since its initial debut, but these problems remain and keep getting put off year after year. Most notably, users aren’t freely allowed any control over syncing when things appear stuck.
„Build better document-based apps" with a „real" app example, not a simple Markdown editor. One that uses NavigationSplitView in the UIDocumentViewController
Another thing added to my WWDC wishlist for macOS: video controls in picture-in-picture videos. I mean... does somebody at Apple even use this?!
Search option on the Journal app.
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@Nicolas More default search engines, but users should also be able to add their own!
I'll drop in mine just for fun in case something shows up :D
iOS:
* Shortcuts-like scripting in Playgrounds
* Choose default camera app
* Choose default voice assistant
* HomePod remote control app
* Smarter notification management
* Hardware: pro model for 3D capture with lenses on both sides in landscape
iPadOS:
* Multiple users + guest mode
* AirPlay to iPad (heck, AirPlay all to all)
* Home kiosk mode or Standby mode
* More Pro apps (Xcode!)
* Run Appkit apps natively or hypervisor
* Hardware: larger form factor, more memory
macOS:
* Better App store
* Bring Health app over from iPadOS
* Fix the Home app. It's terrible
* Improve how iPad compatible apps behave on macOS in general
* Fix Time Machine, it's become a mess. I wouldn't mind Time Machine-to-iCloud.
visionOS (I don't own one):
* Guest mode
* Multiple Mac virtual displays
* Run AppKit apps natively on device
* Breakout virtual display apps into separate windows
* Location persistence - remember where around the house an app was placed
* Mac Virtual display over iCloud w remote hosted Mac
* Create much more content to attract users & kickstart app ecosystem
tvOS:
* Home view - see mockup by @jimmylittle
* 3rd party screen savers (pretty please?)
* Fix the broken App Store
* Better multitasking (e.g. watch TV while using Zwift)
* Richer iPhone & iPad remote apps
* Hardware: Apple TV Ultra / Game edition w more RAM, faster chip, 1st party controller. They're introducing more high-end SKU's in all the other product lines, why not aTV?
watchOS:
* Not much - it's pretty mature.
* 3rd party watch faces pretty please?
* In general, open up more things to 3rd party devs so they can push the boundaries of the platform. It's become pretty stale.
@Michael Exactly! Without the need of some weird extension.
@Michael — Does iOS Safari *lose* your tabs, or flush them (so that they need to reload when going back to them)? I don’t think even with VM it’d be feasible to keep all Safari tabs in memory unless they greatly reduce the maximum from 500. (Which would annoy me greatly, I’ve got … 347 right now.)
@John I just mean that it flushes them. I typically only have 4 or 5 tabs, which should definitely fit in the available flash. I think they could pick a good middle ground based on system conditions where you can still keep 500 (URLs, essentially) but for the most recent n it would keep the whole page. I want to be able to count on something that I just opened still being there so that I can quickly flip back to it or not lose it when my phone is out of range. Now I have to remember to take a screenshot…
All I want is for Bluetooth to reliably work so my Logitech mouse will reconnect every time I wake up my MacBook Air.
-Paid app upgrades for real to give devs an alternative to the subscription model. It’s ridiculous that I can’t seamlessly offer users a paid upgrade in an update. Instead we have to create a new app listing, lose all customer reviews and your app rank and start over. Plus you have to link out to the new app to tell the customer to get the new version but it would be much better to offer it from the updates screen. And you can’t offer current customers a discount for a paid upgrade currently (at least not easily). We also have to do dumb things like create a new app name (MyApp2 or MyAppPro). It’s a pain in the ass.
Paid upgrades would help prevent the thousands of abandoned apps in the App Store. I understand the concern that developers could abuse paid upgrades but they could limit a paid upgrade to say, one per year to protect against that abuse. If you reject the paid upgrade you can still use the current version you have.
If you have an app with thousands of users that’s been on the store for ten years it’s ridiculous to be expected to provide lifetime software updates for a $9.99 purchase. Many devs could/would be motivated to keep improving their apps if they could offer current users to pay for an upgrade in a straightforward way.
You have an app with 5000 users, asking them for another $9.99 after a year or two could make a huge difference for indy devs. At a 50% conversion rate that would be $25k.
The current way to offer paid upgrades has too much friction.
That’s the only feature I want but I know it won’t happen (we’ve been asking for years).
"Does iOS Safari *lose* your tabs, or flush them (so that they need to reload when going back to them)?"
This is a distinction without a difference. The problem isn't that I can't reopen the same page, the problem is that in some cases, flushing the page causes problems like state loss or data loss.
For example, a payment page that opens an app to execute the payment, if the original page is flushed, the payment can fail. In one case, I was charged, but the original website never learned about it because it relied on client-triggered polling to check the payment status, but was flushed before the payment went through. Is this terrible design? Yeah. But would it have worked, had the page not been flushed? Also yeah.
Browsers should never flush pages that were just actively used.
[ios / iPadOS] Share sheet initiated emails (also texts etc?) to persist when you have started typing a lot into them but have to switch to another app to check some important info to include - and NOT DISCARD EVERY DAMN THING YOU HAVE TYPED when you switch back to the app you are sharing from.
Better still, when you choose email from the share sheet you should actually switch to the email app so when you start typing you actually have created a draft that wont disappear just because you had the audacity to briefly refer to something.
As it is I have to remember to select all, copy before switching away and that means I cannot copy the thing I am referring to
For tvOS, I mostly want Apple to back off of pushing their Apple TV app. I don't want it to be the home page and specifically removed it from the top bar in the apps listing so that I don't see their autoplaying ads.
Flushing tabs seems a poor design choice to me: Flushing only makes sense for fast networks -- which presumably is the case in Silicon Valley, but not everywhere. Instead, Safari could compress the state associated with a tab when a low memory warnings occurs, and save this state to flash. Sure, if flash runs out, then it would have to delete the least recently used saved states, but if one has 347 tabs, in my experience, some of them have not been looked at in a couple of months. They're just there for the day they are needed.
@gildarts It seems like all of the streaming apps show their own shows' previews when you have the app selected. I've discovered to good shows to watch from all of them, including Apple's. I find that the "up next" queue is useful too, for the streaming services that participate (including not-Netflix). I'd like to see more manageability in the "up next" queue (sorting, filtering, etc.).
Ugh. Proofreading would help. "I've discovered SOME good shows to watch..."
Only wishes for WWDC:
- no more poor animation and sound at the beginning of each WWDC video.
- no more awkward white office background in each WWDC video.
- fracking full session title in the mp4 session file names.
- less Tim Cook and Craig Federighi in the Keynote.
If we're dreaming big, push notifications from third-party IMAP/CALDAV/CARDDAV servers! ManageSieve support!
Of course it won't happen ...
I expect all ~OSes to be layers of ostentatious nonsense with few if any bug fixes. There will be something in iOS and iPadOS to make the experience a little less shit. My watch will be updated whether I want to or not. My AppleTVs may not support the next update (and no, Apple, I will not be replacing them with new AppleTVs). I will not update my Mac ... I won't move off of Ventura until forced too or if the next version gives me free Chat GPT or on device only translation system wide (meaning anything I can highlight I can translate from Korean to English without an internet connection).
These are my wishes though:
Watch OS / iOS
I want to be able to give custom names to my watch faces; this would help a lot when making a focus mode or shortcut.
iPad OS
Force all apps into supporting split screen or be booted from the app store.
More battery info not just on par with iOS, but on par with Coconut Battery.
ABM, ASM, ABE
Fix the MDM bug where the user can utilize focus modes on a supervised device to change the wallpaper (this is an issue in some schools where students figured out they could make a "cheat focus" with text answers as the wallpaper).
MacOS
A full UI for all menubar options; new options to make the menubar useful again, like control over hiding and showing things; the ability to remove any item including the fucking clock!!
Control center: more control
And of course the WWDC 2024 videos are worse than the 2023 ones when it comes to being able to find one very quickly in the Finder:
- the name is still using only the fracking session number nobody cares about.
- the thumbnail now displays the presenters and their colored shirts instead of the fracking session titles.
Sigh.
Side notes: the presenters are still presenting from their pristine white holding cells. The numerous drone transitions in the Keynote are just dumb.
@someone They want us to use the Developer app instead of downloading the videos. :-(
All I want is for Safari to offer more default search engines, and maybe a redesigned “wind” lock screen widget because the current one sucks. Oh I could use a quiche emoji thank you very much. Not sure if these features would last 90 minutes though.