I don’t know about you, but every year we look forward to Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). There’s nothing like the excitement, passion, and brand loyalty that you find with iPhone users. That’s why we reached out to a few of our iOS devs to hear what new iOS features would be most exciting from a developer’s perspective.
Volume HUD
The volume HUD (heads-up display) currently covers a significant portion of the screen. Have you ever noticed that in apps like YouTube or Netflix the volume indicator is tucked neatly into the top corner of your display? Why is it that in all of the stock apps like Photos, Apple Music, or ringer volume has to take up half your screen?
Apple has always been a huge proponent of clean/simple design so it’s about time they bring that mentality to the volume HUD. There’s just no need for it to be as intrusive as it is right now.
Siri Screen
Right now when you summon Siri, it takes up the whole screen… even more screen than the volume HUD, and you know how we feel about that. It would be nice if Siri only took up a part of your iPhone screen.
Call Screen
Are you sensing a theme? It’s exactly what we’ve said for two paragraphs. These may be simple releases, but can’t you just hear the crowds at WWDC cheering now? *SIRI SCREEN *VOLUME HUD *CALL SCREEN
Mouse Support for iPad
You hear people ask all the time, “Can the iPad be my computer?” And it can. But if you’re used to using a keyboard and mouse, it can be a big leap to make. Mouse support would make using the iPad as a true laptop replacement all the more feasible.
Parental Controls
Everyone who works in the tech industry has a deep understanding of the importance of monitoring screen time for their kids. We’ve been hearing more and more about digital well-being. As our society becomes more and more aware of the problem we have, we’ll start seeing things like parental controls become that much more important. iOS does have parental controls, but it’d be great to see them expanded to the level of platforms like Xbox. (Sorry to mention a Microsoft product in an Apple post.)
Default Apps
Since we’ve already broken cardinal rule #1, let’s keep it going. How about changing our default apps to the apps we actually use? Yeah, we’re talking about Google. We all use Gmail and we all use Chrome. Why can’t we utilize these as our default browser/mail clients? Dear Apple and Google, please don’t take your rivalry out on us… you both make great things and we want to use them both.
Dark Mode
Google just announced this at I/O and we’d be quite pleased if Apple did the same at WWDC. Dark mode being system-wide in iOS means that apps that want to support a darker UI no longer have to write their own code; instead, they can use the iOS system code and get it for free! Also… it looks cool as hell.
Xcode for iPad
This list is things developers want, after all. They aren’t all just features we want personally.We want to use the same products we code for to code on. It’d be awesome to be able to travel with just an iPad and still be able to work.
USB Storage Support
The Files app allows you to manage files in Google Drive, iCloud Drive, Dropbox, etc. It would be great if we could plug a USB flash drive into your iPad Pro and have it appear in Files so that we could work off of the drive.
What about you?
What are you hoping for? Do you have any hopes and dreams for what Apple is going to announce? Stay tuned for posts from our developers here in Detroit and those out at WWDC in California this week.