I wrote an article on April 11th 2022 titled iOS 16 What’s coming to IOS next? which took what was being floated around as rumours for iOS next big released and added my own thoughts and opinions on what I personally hoped and what I thought the community wanted from the next big release of iOS.
Looking Back
So I think the best place to start is by going over the bullet points from last years post and seeing what was added, what I think should still be added and what was not added but isn’t required anymore.
Synced Notification Center
Notifications apparently got a number of updates and changes but this was not one of them, I often end up opening up the iPad and getting hit with a flood of notifications that I have already dealt with one the phone or watch - so this one is still viable and it does feel like notifications still need further work.
Messaging Quality of live improvements
This one is a touch awkward as I wanted updates to mail that made it less boring and really the only thing I could cite was Mailbox and Sparrow which were both fantastic minimal clients. The one gripe I had was purely a misconfiguration on my part as with a little bit of tinkering I managed to get things exactly as I wanted.
Anti Spam
Still a big issue in SMS and while the government were I live have introduced sim registration, it does not as yet seem to be helping, perhaps in time it might but at the moment - spammers still spamming.
App Locks
Still not a thing, at least in the core applications it could be, third party apps obviously can add it as we have plenty of apps which have biometric id as an option, Apple has stepped things up a lot with end to end encryption which is great for user privacy but I still think they could take it a little further.
Interactive Widgets
This one didn’t happen or at least not in the way most people would have wanted, but we did get some form of interactive widgets… if you so happen to have an iPhone 14 which provides ‘live widgets’ not interactive (yet they are, sort of)
This is probably something that should still come to iOS - but the question is when, with RealityOS apparently taking up a good deal of the development teams time, so possibly not in the main release but in a 17 dot release.
Camera App Update
This has to happen sooner or later, Apple has gone out of it’s way to keep the camera simple and easy to use, but in doing so the camera app has become clunky and tends to hide it’s features from users making them harder to find.
I’m not pushing for splitting the video/photo sides of camera into two apps - but it seems that we need a simple mode switcher (video/photo) with controls and options added within those modes or something better than the dust thats rattling around inside of my head…
Other issues have been brought to light recently in the iOS camera setup by popular YouTuber MKBHD in the video below
The camera did get a huge megapixel bump on the iPhone 14 and above but aside from video where the iPhone dominates.. the iPhone is struggling to fend off competition with the photo side of things..
Siri
Siri was an idiot in April and it’s not improved all that much since, simplistic questions it’s perfectly fine with, however a good deal of questions tend to be “here is a weblink - open in safari”
The rumours suggest that a new HomePod is on the way but the last version was a fancy speaker with an incompetent assistant - not much has changed in that regard - Google now, assistant or whatever it’s called destroys Siri and all the other voice assistants, perhaps in part due to the amount of data google collections from analytics and search requests - Apple to finally launch some search engine perhaps ?
NAH! Apple Maps launch and first year was fairly horrible, I still know people to this day that will not use Apple Maps “because it’s buggy” despite how it’s grown and become quite reliable since the iffy launch.. no way they launch a search engine and risk masses of users tweeting @Apple how great @google is
So thats a breakdown of what was mentioned last year and my thoughts on them at the moment, the only thing I really feel I need is a better camera app or perhaps they introduce a pro camera app as an App Store download/additional app similar to how Apple does the Clips app
What they say we want
Now we move onto the part of the article where we look into some of the most popular tech, apple tech websites to get a grasp on what they think we want..
So we get started with MacRumours and they suggest (among others) that Apple is going to relax the major feature push in iOS 17 as they will be putting heavy developer focus on xrOS (also known as RealityOS) which if the rumours are true will be released alongside the iPhone 15 - of course most of this information comes from Mark German.
Mark German wrote
Apple’s focus on the xrOS operating system — along with iOS 16 snags — has also cost it some new features in iOS 17 and iPadOS 17, the next major iPhone and iPad software updates. That software, codenamed Dawn, may have fewer major changes than originally planned. The same goes for macOS 14, which is codenamed Sunburst.
Sadly they don’t dive too much into what features they think will be coming or won’t be coming, just that less features are coming in iOS and iPadOS.
I did find an article that may fall into the iOS 17 realm of feature sets but it’s more - stuff that was announced that we don’t have yet or stuff that needs improved.
The first is web-based push notifications in Safari (across its multiple platforms) - this was announced to be coming in iOS 16, alongside a new web extension API(s).
https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-16/features/
This is still listed in the features for iOS 16 and normally if Apple planned on not bothering they would have removed it from this page by now, it’s still listed so it could be that some minor work comes into iOS 16 with a bulk of the work appearing in iOS 17 instead so it’d still be a new feature, just heavily delayed if this is the case.
Apple Pay Later is another feature previously announced and while this is likely great for the US, probably Canada later in the future and maybe bits of Europe, the rest of us will never see these features and it’s still listed as an iOS 16 feature.
This is about it really, with not much being discussed about whats next
Going over the comments a lot of the MacRumours commenters are curious how a company as large as Apple cannot focus on multiple products and why Apple is putting so much effort into a product line that as of yet has not taken the world by storm. This is not the whole audience however as some are going with the line that a lot of features have been introduced in the past two years and they would appreciate a stability focused version of iOS with iOS 17s main goal to be locked down and tighten things up.
Over at 9to5mac the negativity continues over the idea of pushing the AR/VR headset as many users are still unsure they need or want it - one users going as far to say it’s a solution in search of a problem. - skepticism is quite high on the tech community side, but everyday users/gamers are likely to snap the thing up, the AirPod Max was seen as an overpriced well engineered accessory by most but they have sold extremely well despite some fallbacks in what are very expensive headphones.
They also report that one feature which has to go hard in the just a rumour bin would be that Apple plans to allow third party app stores on IOS, this comes from this article on 9to5Mac which itself is built from an article on Bloomberg
Both articles put the focus on requirement over desire as Apple are being pushed into these changes by EU law makers, similar to the USB-C argument - unlike USB-C however I’m not sure everyone will bother with third party stores, but I’m confident that USB-C will be well received .. if perhaps not at first - the one cable to rule them all logic is hard to resist .. although Apple has done everything it can to resist
Third party App stores present an interesting change for iOS and I have no doubts that it won’t take long for a very sketchy store to popup thats either leads to privacy problematic installs or just straight dodgy apps, although I’m fairly certain Apple will make it as difficult as possible for third party stores to get installed.
Engadget have also run with a similar story that third party app stores will be a thing in the near future.
Lifewire has gone with the traditional post of as soon as iOS 16 releases start a long thread on iOS 17 that details what they expect to come and here is what they went with:
- More lock screen widgets - This one is bound to happen but I wouldn’t expect a flood of new apps more a few that fill in a couple of voids left open
- Interactive widgets - This was expected by most to be coming last time out however it never arrived so most are expecting this next time around… if we still had 3D Touch it’d still be here
- Split screen - A lot of users have been asking for this for a long time and they are still asking for it and I suspect after iOS 17’s release, they will still be asking for it 😛
- Call recording - This flies in the face of the whole privacy goals Apple has laid out - not happening
- Dual apps - For those of you that need two facebooks or two of the same app, it’s also known as app cloning, I do not see this happening.
- Third-party app stores - This might happen as virtually every outlet has highlighted that they want this to happen, I would expect it announced in the next release but pushed way back into the dot releases, 17.3 is my guess.
- Shorter Siri phrase - Siri needs a lot more important work in other areas but sure.. Siri - imagine being named Siri, hard timed!
- iMessage redesign - I’m not sure this is accurate to be honest, iMessage works fine, has even works on legacy devices just fine, Apple has resisted complete overhauls to its Mail, Message and even calendar apps for years with only minor feature changes and removing of stitched leather making up the bulk of changes.
The list reads like click bait with the bulk of features just being the usual recycled wet dream list that iOS users have asked for since the iPhone 6plus dropped and they go to even tell you what devices will be supported - feels like a stretch for some of them - dropping the 8 and X but not the XR odd call.
Appleinsider is as well as virtually every tech outfit is advising that Apple wants to create it’s own networking card which will combine wifi bluetooth and cellular radios and perhaps a few others into a singular chip created by Apple themselves - this probably will not come in the next iPhone but we know apple has been unhappy with Bluetooths bandwidth being limited which restricts audio quality.
AND oddly thats about it, the rumour mill has been really slow so not much in terms of gossip but it does seem more and more like Apple will put out a stability release but the biggest question remains - what do you want to see in iOS 17 ?