2016 Wishlist: iOS

With 2016 just around the corner, I’m taking some time to think about what Apple could do in the next year that would bring advancements to their products. Today, let’s talk about the iPhone and iPad.

Split View Management

I love Slide Over and Split View on my iPad Pro, but using them can be really frustrating. The drawer that contains all apps that can be used with the new window management is comically bad, only showing a handful of giant icons at a time, making finding the app I want slow and tedious. This could be a lot better.

Likewise, it can be confusing to switch between apps quickly and have the previously-used app on the right stick around. I’d like to be able to tie apps together somehow, like Mission Control allows for on OS X El Capitan.

Lastly, I’d like Apple to work on some way to share text and images between apps that are side-by-side. If I’m working in a text editor, I’d like to send a selected portion right into Slack, without having to worry about a share extension or dropping back to copy and paste to get the job done.

3D Touch on the iPad

I was surprised by how quickly 3D Touch has become part of my workflow on my iPhone 6S Plus. It’s a great — and natural-feeling — addition to iOS.

So much so, that I keep finding myself smashing my fingers into my iPad’s screen, thinking that it a deep press will do something.

Rumor is that 2016’s iPad may not have 3D Touch, but I’d sure love it if they did.

More RAM

The iPad Pro’s a beast, and a lot of that performance stems from the 4GB of RAM onboard. Safari keeps its tabs open longer, app switching is smoother and iOS just feels like it can breathe better. While the 2GB of RAM found in the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus are a welcome improvement over 2014’s phones, it’d be great to see Apple to continue to push this.

Improved Keyboard Support

With iOS 9, keyboard support on iOS saw huge improvements. For the first time, using a Bluetooth keyboard with an iPad doesn’t feel like a hack.

There’s still a lot that could be done here, however. Keyboard shortcuts are still hit or miss across applications, and Apple’s own keyboard offering doesn’t include basic support for things like going Home without invoking a hard-to-remember shortcut. Most importantly, I’d like the ability to tell iOS to disable its in-built predictive text engine when I’m typing on a hardware keyboard.

On the software side, the iPad Pro’s keyboard is still a mess. You can’t change the layout if you are used to a non-American keyboard, and it’s still tricky to start a sentence with certain characters, as silly as that sounds.

Lastly, it’s time we have a way to search emoji. OS X has had this for a while now, and apps like Slack have built their own systems. It’s time to make finding that perfect emoji fast and easy.