Why Can’t iOS Have Smart Folders?
The only apps I know about that have added them for both macOS and iOS are Reminders and Notes, although I’ve found the implementation of them to be a bit weird. In both of those, you can’t add sub-conditions, so you can say all or any of a list of conditions, but you can’t say “all of these conditions and any of these conditions.” It might sound like a small thing, but it’s not.
Anyway, back to the topic. I want this, and I want Apple to add it. Part of me wonders if it’s just a matter of there not being an equivalent to NSRuleEditor in UIKit or SwiftUI, and so every app would have to implement the control on their own.
I was just thinking about this yesterday when reading about News Explorer 2.0 and how its complex filters can sync and work on iOS but can be edited only on macOS.
5 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Marvis Pro (an iOS Apple Music player) has its own equivalent of smart folders. It supports nested boolean logic of the kind Collin mentions. Of course it's a totally custom UI since there is no iOS-provided framework. I wish Apple would add support for this type of thing more broadly to iOS.
@Nigel Yeah, actually I have tried that out in Marvis (great app), and I think it shows that this can totally work on an iPhone-sized screen.
I think a bigger problem is that Smart Folders don't have any political backers within Apple.
Once Siri became the new religion, Apple stopped pushing Smart Folder development. You only have to look at how vestigial the suport has remained on macOS - open / save dialogues can't navigate smart folders, unless they're in the finder sidebar. There's no good GUI editor for them (imagine a Finder that had Aperture's Smart Album GUI) - you still have to use boolean language commands for many things.
Podcasts on iOS lost Playlists support, which had originally included Smart Playlist syncing from iTunes.
That goes to the bigger problem that Apple has effectively neutered user-level automation for non-programmers. Shortcuts is a programmer's idea of an "easy" automation tool, and is MUCH harder for a non-programmer to use than Automator. Smart Folders allowing users to make an abstracted view of their whole filesystem, and buld automation upon that effectively died in the pursuit of a half-baked dream that Siri would become a voice command system that would understand context enough that it could become your smart seach interface.
News Explorer 2.0 smart folders are pretty nice! Exactly what I need to follow my work RSS feeds.
It took me a bit of time to set things up though. I wish we could use a tokenized syntax with AND NOT OR and parenthesis (e.g.: (contains:mjtsai AND contain:"smart folders") NOT contains:dinosaur ).
It seems to me that Files has a kind of limited Smart Folder with Labels. I'm not sure how it is implemented or if it could be expanded but as someone who is using the iPad as my primary computer I do miss this feature and would love to see it added to Mail, etc.
I'll add to the list of third party apps that do this very well, ReadKit has very easy to use Smart Folder set-up. Just tap new Smart Folder in pop-up menu and then tap to add criteria ranging from content to title, includes, does not include, etc.
