IOS 6: Higher Hanging Fruit

While we're playing the speculation game...

The ability to arrange home screens in shapes other than grids

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview has shown me that the merits of arranging app icons in shapes are numerous. It's easier to find things.

Likelihood: Low

 

Sync galleries between devices via iCloud

I love the Photo Stream. Photos I take on my phone show up on my iPad and I can select the good ones to make galleries from... fantastic! Only downside is those galleries don't sync back to my phone, so when I want to show a friend on my phone the sweet gallery of photos from Friday night's party I can't.

Likelihood: Medium

Sync notifications between devices via iCloud

If I look at twitter on my phone, when I look at my tablet four hours later the same @mention notifications shouldn't be waiting for me. Ditto to every other app I use on both devices.

Likelihood: Medium-low

 

Gratis turn-by-turn navigation

Android does it, Nokia Windows Phones do it. iPhone should do it. Perhaps I'm just a cheapskate or perhaps navigation has been devalued so much by Google Maps' ubiquity but I don't want to pay for an app in the app store to do this. Apple bought a mapping company a while back - let's see something happen with it!

Likelihood: ????

Reply to texts, etc without switching away from the current app.

"He's holding it wrong."

I don't have particularly large hands, yet have no issue with 4.3" screens. I wouldn't go back to anything smaller—the larger text (or ability to fit more text/contents of the same physical size) is worth the occasional thumb stretching (not that I have a lot of reason to ever reach to one of the top corners on my screen, anyway).

I'm not a fan of huge displays but 4" is actually pretty tame by today's standards. Apple may have come up with the perfect screen size for a SmartPhone circa 2007 but today the vast majority of SmartPhones sold in the world have larger displays so clearly 3.5" cannot be the only perfect size. I do think they have stood by 3.5" in part to see if this trend was just a temporary divergence. Now that is has endured for a couple years it's hard to ignore.

The other factor here is I think as Apple has scaled iOS to include more features they have begun to hit the wall of physical UI space. Let's use Safari as an example. If Apple wanted to add 2 new major features to Safari that had to be quickly accessible where would they even put them? The UI is just about full. They would have to increasingly rely on pop-out controls and other less-than-obvious UI tricks which adds extra taps. The situation is even worse when the keyboard is active taking up half the screen. With the status bar and maybe a visible app toolbar you have about a quarter of the screen available. Reading text messages on an iPhone has actually become painful. You can rarely see the entire message without scrolling or hiding the keyboard. A taller screen fixes that. They may just really need an extra ~170 pixels of height to keep scaling these apps with new features that require UI space.

I think the major mobile operating systems are rapidly approaching maturity. I don't expect any radical changes in Android, iOS or WP at this point. iOS in particular hardly looks different than what Steve demoed in 2007.

This is also why I think Android's upgrade problem may not turn out to be so important in practice. Even if the carriers utterly fail to roll out OS upgrades, the 2-3 year device churn cycle will eventually get new versions in play and ICS has fixed most of the glaring problems with the OS and is "good enough". Once Google makes major components like the browser upgradable as apps it won't be that important to rev the base OS.