What I Want to See at WWDC 2020
By: Frank Brodie
Tags: WWDC, Apple, Software Development, Technology, Gadgets

Photo by Yura Fresh on Unsplash

iOS

It’s a guarantee we’ll see iOS 14 announced at WWDC. Each year at WWDC, Apple has announced the next version of iOS. Shortly before iOS 13 was announced, it was rumored the major updates that were originally planned for that release had been pushed back into iOS 14. Let’s hope we actually see those big updates this year.

New Home Screen

The Home screen on iOS has remained largely unchanged since the introduction of the very first iPhone back in 2007. I’d love to see some new organization options for my apps. While it’s rumored we may see an option to view our apps in a list, I don’t know if this is really what I was hoping for but I’d be willing to try it out if it means cleaning up my Home screen.

What I’d rather see instead of a list view is a more fluid Home screen. I’d like app icons to be more interactive. Or better yet, give us the ability to add widgets right to the Home screen. Widgets can be extremely useful but they are limited to the single widget screen. Apple should allow us to combine app icons and widgets on any page of the Home screen instead of forcing us to split them up.

Updates to iMessage

Each year Apple has continued to add more functionality to iMessage. The addition of iMessage apps is great and allows me to send GIFs to my heart’s content without the need for a separate GIF keyboard.

I’d like to see Apple expand this even further and add more first-party support to iMessage, like with Maps. It would be nice to easily share my location from within iMessage without having to first go to the Maps app. I know Google offers this with its Google Maps iMessage app but alas, I am an Apple Maps user.

I’ve never been a huge fan of the super themed Messaging apps we’ve seen from third-party apps and messaging apps on Android. I appreciate the clean look and readability of iMessage. iMessage is super simple but it works. That being said, it might be nice to see some customization options.

I recently came across a post on Reddit that showed the text within iMessage as black instead of the standard white. It appears this may be related to Smart Invert but still, I think it looks pretty slick and made me think maybe some customization could be nice.

Widgets

As discussed before, I’d like to see widgets freed from their Apple-impose isolation. In addition to being able to place widgets anywhere on the Home screen, just go ahead and make them more useful and resizable while you’re at it Apple.

Take a weather widget for example. Want to be able to take a quick look and see what the current condition and temperature is? Then maybe that’s a widget that takes the space of two to four app icons. Want to be able to see the five-day forecast? That takes up a row or two. I want more flexibility with my widgets to make them more useful to me.

Updates to Control Center

Control Center is great. I use it to access my Apple TV Remote, control things like brightness and volume, control my smart home devices, and access my alarms. It allows me to get quick access to various actions or apps without having to find and open the corresponding app itself. I want to see more. Give me more controls to add to Control Center.

Give me more options for how those controls are displayed and organized too. Right now, we can only organize the bottom half of Control Center. I want to organize all of it.

Instead of a static button or requiring 3D/Haptic Touch to access additional options, I want to be able to choose different formatting options that provide additional functionality. Think of what we see with Tiles in the Windows 10 Start Menu. Larger Tiles provide more functionality. Give me that.

Improvements to Notification Center

I haven’t been a huge fan of Apple’s combining of the Notification Center and the Lock screen. I get that it could potentially bring more simplicity by having fewer “places” to view notifications but it’s hasn’t been perfect.

First, it is far too easy to access the camera when trying to dismiss a notification. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to swipe away a notification just to be brought to the camera. Too many times. And too many expletives.

Second, when you have a long list of notifications, the shortcut buttons for the flashlight and camera that were added with the iPhone X, get in the way. This is obnoxious. This is a side-effect of combining the Notification Center and Lock screen. These shortcuts either shouldn’t display when in “Notification Center” or they should be smart enough to know when a notification is under them and react accordingly.

Lock Screen Updates

Like I mentioned above, Apple added two shortcuts to the Lock screen with the introduction of the iPhone X. We could now quickly access the flashlight and the camera with the press, a firm-press at the time, of a button.

These shortcuts are very helpful. I like them. But it’s been a little while now and it would be nice to explore the possibility of customizing what these shortcuts do. Give us the ability to choose quick access to different apps if we want. And this brings me to my next point.

Why are there two ways to access the camera from the Lock screen? Like I said before, I am constantly going into the camera when I’m trying to dismiss notifications. Apple just needs to bite the bullet and get rid of the swipe gesture to get to the camera on the Lock screen.

The Lock screen is the perfect place for quick, glanceable pieces of information. Apple should add complications courtesy of watchOS. There are already popular jailbreak tweaks that allow you to add watchOS-like complications to the iPhone’s Lock screen, so we know this is possible. The complications look slick and would decrease the number of times we need to open our phones. At least a little bit.

Siri Improvements

A lot of people have been calling for a less intrusive Siri experience, more on that later, but what I’d rather see with Siri on the iPhone is a more capable assistant. I want to be able to ask her more things and have her be able to answer them without throwing me into Safari. Give me the answer right there and let me decide if I need more information. If I do, then I can head to Safari for a more thorough explanation.