The weeks leading up to Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) are always full of rumors and speculation. But so far this year, leaks have been rare, and most of those made public have been inaccurate.
For example, Mark Gurman of Bloombergwho is generally very knowledgeable, said last week (without giving further details) that iOS 16 would arrive with “refreshed Apple apps”.
Suppose, for a moment, that the company intends to release new and/or updated versions of some of its built-in iOS apps. The thing promises and, as you can imagine, I have some ideas of what Apple could (or should) do.
Time
About time, Apple. After 12 years, the iPad deserves a weather app. I know it’s not the most exciting development, but come on: you’re already offering widget for the home screen with updated interfaces that are practically apps themselves.
And I find it hard to believe that Apple spent money on Dark Sky to not enjoy it on all of its platforms. While we’re at it, some integration with macOS wouldn’t hurt either, especially in the form of, say, a widget similar to the Mac menu bar.
He always surprised the absence of the Weather application in the Tablet. Does Apple think people who use the iPad don’t care about the weather because they usually use the device inside their homes?
Either way, the latest version of Weather for iPhone shows that the company can compete with the best other companies have to offer. So Apple should bring the iPad into the modern age now. Just in time for summer.
Bag
In recent years, Apple has fully immersed itself in the world of payment systems with Apple Pay and the Apple Card. Even the recent minor iOS 15.5 update brought the interesting change of adding send and payment request buttons to the Wallet app, a feature that was previously buried in Messages.
But there is one subject in the world of finance that we always miss: analysis and budgeting tools.
Yes, if you have an Apple Card, you can see this section that tells you what areas you spend your money on or export your transactions as documents to import into another tool. But it would help if the company also provided more substantial tools for your financial health, helping consumers understand exactly where their money is going.
It would therefore not be so much a portfolio as an accounting book. Apps like Mint and Personal Capital are big names in this regard, but Apple should seriously consider expanding the ways it offers to work with money.
It has already announced that it will open Tap to Pay access in the coming months. By expanding the functionality, it can be positive that Apple is providing a more holistic view that helps consumers manage their money responsibly.
Mail, Phone, Messages, Calendar
The virtue of built-in iPhone apps is that they meet most people’s needs. The email? You have it. Telephone? Checked. Posts? Yes. Calendar ? Sure.
These apps (and, for the most part, the tasks they perform) are deeply mundane. And yet, this worldliness also means that users trust them to get things done. They are essential.
This makes the balance tricky, because you don’t want to change them just for the sake of changing, but you also don’t want to let them stagnate to the point where they seem archaic.
Mail and Calendar are examples of such applications that have hardly changed in recent years and, therefore, are about to age. While third-party mail apps have been revamped with features like smart filtering, nap reminders, and more, Mail has finally added multicolored flags.
Likewise, Calendar, which is the most basic application that can be found on the platform, has finally added the possibility of recognizing video calls (two years after the pandemic), but this could improve, for example, the way it displays events in multiple calendars, improve natural language processing, or add support for scheduling events across multiple users.
Finally, Messages, one of Apple’s most popular apps, should improve its cross-platform compatibility with Android (instead of punishing iOS users themselves with a barrage of messages every time someone “likes” a message), implement a better spam filter for unwanted texts (either SMS or iMessage) and expand the tapbacks to include any emoji.
These things may not be very attractive, but they can improve the quality of life for users who use these built-in apps, which are probably the majority of iOS users, since many don’t bother to use apps third parties.
Original article published on igamesnews.
