WWDC 17 Wish List

Apple’s WWDC keynote is this Monday already. There has been a surprisingly big number of hardware-related rumors (new iPads, refreshed MacBook lineup, a Siri Speaker), bit almost no leaks about software, which makes the upcoming event even more intriguing.

While new hardware is always great, I believe that the heart of Apple products is software, and I really hope Apple will announce a big number of software and services improvements next week. I’ve assembled a wish list of features I would be somewhat upset if I don’t see addressed at WWDC.

macOS

I have a feeling Apple will demonstrate a renewed focus on Mac after multiple claims by executives that Apple keeps investing heavily in the category across software and hardware.

• Apple needs to catch up, or in some ways to keep maintaining lead over Windows that has been progressing incredibly rapidly lately thanks to Microsoft’s aggressive strategy of going after Apple’s core Mac user base. Recent Windows 10 updates have been aping more and more features previously reserved for macOS, so I hope Apple will reveal a list of new tricks that will keep its desktop operating system truly most advanced, as Apple likes to claim. That would be particularly welcomed and timely due to rumored MacBook refresh.
• One of the areas Apple has been particularly struggling lately on macOS is first party apps and services, which I believe play an absolutely vital role in defining the user experience. Core apps such as Mail, Notifications and Calendar require significant improvements.
• What requires a total rewrite is of course the iTunes macOS app that has grown into a heavy behemoth over the years. While I don’t share the overwhelming negativity towards iTunes as many vocal Apple users tend to express, I think that iTunes needs to be split into smaller apps such as Music, Video, Podcasts, etc, similar to iOS. Standalone macOS iBooks app is a great example that this can be done quite efficiently.
• Apple has been turning its eye back to its professional line of software recently, and I expect the company to double down on it. Hopefully Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro and iWork suite will receive significant updates and will keep doing so more frequently than once in many months.
• Apple has launched several services lately, but some of them haven’t reached macOS at all or were implemented in a somewhat rushed way. Apple News might fit Mac well. Perhaps Apple Music can finally be unbundled from iTunes app. Apple Maps app is due for redesign. Apple Photos need to step up and include some more pro photo editing functionality. Siri seems to be not particularly useful on the Mac in its current state. Messages app is almost abandoned — why not bring full iOS functionality to the macOS counterpart, at the very least? It’s time to finally merge Spotlight with Siri and let us control the OS and search for stuff not only through voice, but with text input as well (after all, most of us use Macs in offices surrounded by people, where the last thing we want to do is to talk to our computers).

iOS

There is no doubt iOS will be the headliner of the event and will enjoy most of the runtime.

• One thing that is getting incredibly frustrating and old-fashioned with Apple’s software is its tendency to update it slowly. And by slowly, I mean usually once in year. For example, if the new Apple’s app refresh or redesign doesn’t bring some functionality you were hoping for, brace yourself for another year’s wait — Apple is unlikely to do any significant updates until the next major revision of the underlying OS. This needs to be rethought. Seriously, guys — while Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon constantly update their apps and services (sometimes weekly, if not daily), Apple still keeps its apps bundled with OS releases and just minimally patches them a few times a year. With such pace of development, Apple will never be able to fully compete, and I hope they will unbundle core first party apps and services and start updating them radically more frequently. Apple desperately needs to finally start thinking about its software as a service, not as a product.
• As we are rapidly moving into an ambient world, notifications are becoming more and more UX-defining feature of using any tech product, let alone smartphone. I hope Apple will keep moving the notifications layer of iOS forward and think of notifications as more of a platform (maybe even cloud-based), rather than simple extensions of already installed apps.
• iPad is rumored to be a heavy focus of this year’s WWDC, and I fully expect Apple to introduce a whole lot of software improvements for iPad productivity specifically with iOS 11. Multitasking needs significant improvement — perhaps, more than two apps on the screen at a time should be allowed, drag and drop should finally work across apps, and the file picker / iCloud Drive interface needs improvement as well. App picker in the split screen/multitasking mode needs to be replaced with a full-featured app grid and app search. And overall search for data throughout the entire iOS (including data within apps) needs to become more functional.
• Professional grade iPad apps are few and far between, not in the least due to severe business limitations imposed by App Store. I hope Apple will keep refining and reviewing its App Store policies to let developers finally build sustainable businesses of developing and selling pro apps. However, Apple needs to lead by example and finally bring its lineup of first party apps to iPad. I can’t believe that current iPad hardware can’t cope well with complex apps such as Final Cut and Logic (maybe even Xcode), and by not bringing them to iOS, Apple is doing a disservice to the platform and its long-term credibility among professionals.
• iMessage is in desperate need of a redesign. Since iMessage App Store was introduced last year, it hasn’t been touched upon since despite very vocal outcry from users and app developers alike (yet another example of Apple’s very bad habit of updating stuff once a year instead of incremental improvements), and there are signs that iMessage App Store hasn’t exactly set the world on fire as it meant to. Overall app’s UI and discoverability of apps and content are a big issue which Apple needs to address.

watchOS

I don’t expect many breakthrough announcements for Apple Watch software next week — more likely the company is set to keep incrementally refining watchOS, while core innovation is for now expected from future hardware.

• The one and only big focus I wish Apple would show for the Watch is shifting from App Store and app-centric model to passive context/notifications paradigm. It’s quite clear at this point that apps just don’t work so well within the context of the Watch. Apple Watch should learn to notify me about stuff not only from apps installed on the Watch and/or iPhone, but from some kind of cloud-based unified center of knowledge. As on iOS, notifications need to become a cloud-based platform.

tvOS

I expect few exciting news on Apple TV front — in spite of the fact that the platform clearly doesn’t live up to anyone’s expectations.

• If apps didn’t work well on Apple Watch, boy they failed on Apple TV! The tvOS App Store is a ghost town, and this is mostly due to two reasons:

1. Apple TV currently is a platform that failed to live up to its potential. Mostly, it comes to gaming. Siri Remote is by no means a capable gaming controller, and unless Apple starts designing and selling a proper controller bundled wth the Apple TV box, things will hardly change. Also, hardware needs to be much more capable. I hope Apple keeps removing roadblocks from developers’ way of making proper games — and overall rich entertainment experiences — for Apple TV, but given Apple’s track record, I would be surprised if they do it anytime soon.
2. Apple’s hope for content brought over to platform by third-party providers via apps hasn’t worked out very well. Apple needs to tank this by bringing a slim bundle or some other form of curated video content (an Apple Video service), but I don’t expect any related announcements at WWDC this year.

• I wouldn’t be surprised if tvOS is tailored to the new Siri Speaker. I’ve already written separately about how tvOS can potentially turn into homeOS.

Services

This is the most important topic for me as I deeply believe services, above everything else, define Apple’s long-term stickiness and value for users. While there has been some progress, Apple needs to triple down on services to successfully compete with Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. I would be really disappointed and worried if services would not be the headlining focus of this year’s WWDC.

• Siri needs to finally start reliably understand speech and, even more importantly, return relevant and useful results. Apple faces some significant challenges here as it doesn’t maintain a search engine and data mining capabilities of Google, but after all, Amazon doesn’t have a leading search engine as well, which doesn’t stop them from maintaining Alexa that currently smokes Siri in terms of reliability and functionality. One thing that Apple needs to copy from Amazon is the paradigm of a centralised, cloud-based knowledge “hub”/API to which developers would be able to plug in by helping Siri learn new “skills”. Current Siri implementation, where users need to directly install Siri-supporting apps on every device, is incredibly cumbersome — which also means I have different siloed Siri experiences on each of my devices, which is not good. Imagine how better Siri experience could be if, say, Uber would talk to Siri in the cloud and provide me a useful service without me even needing to download the Uber app on my iPhone. Counting on users to download dozens of apps to make Siri more capable is a very questionable approach from Apple.
• Apple Maps not only lags behind Google Maps in terms of data accuracy and search, despite the need to catch up, it actually moves slower than Google Maps does. Long story short, this needs to change, otherwise Tim Cook will probably need to fire someone yet again. Perhaps Apple Maps should fully embrace a platform model and also provide a cloud-based API, similar to what I suggest with Siri above, for data providers and developers to plug into? Last year’s opening of Maps to developers for apps locally installed on devices was not fully embraced by developers.
• Apple News has been receiving a positive feedback from users and publishers lately. Too bad that after two years on the market, the service is still available for just one language and in three countries. The pace of the service’s development and rollout could certainly improve.
• iMessage — it needs to be updated frequently, not once a year, and regularly introduce new features and effects (including seasonal and related to local holidays and events) if Apple wants to hope to compete with Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat and many others. Apple needs to radically move iMessage to a full platform state, similar to what WeChat has long been doing in China — with apps, money transactions and many other things; if it doesn’t, I suspect Facebook soon will for the Western markets. Also, I think Apple is doing a disservice to iMessage by not bringing it over to Android. As much as I might love iMessage experience on my iPhone, I keep spending my time in WhatsApp and FB Messenger just because half of my family, friends and colleagues are not using iOS. By making iMessage cross-platform and industry-leading messaging service in terms of features, Apple can once again make iMessage the only messaging app I would have installed on my iPhone.
• Apple Music — it wouldn’t hurt if Apple finally provides decent tools for emerging musicians to share their work with the world similar to what SoundCloud has long been doing, instead of massively failed Connect. Apple Music also desperately needs to become a social experience — I want to know what my friends are listening to and like, I want shared playlists, and I want to be able to share songs with the world via social networks for people to start listening these right away, right from Facebook/Twitter app or website in the browser (yes, this is a big stretch). Finally, Spotify has been doing a lot of great stuff around machine learning and intelligent playlists recently — Apple needs to catch up.
• Apple Podcasts — it’s been years since Apple last moved the needle with podcasts. Syncing podcasts across devices is still a pain in the ass (the system is very unreliable). What Apple really needs to do is to provide podcasts’ creators a full 360-degree platform and tool to produce and publish podcasts — I need to be able to talk to my friend over FaceTime audio, record the talk, edit it in GarageBand and then upload it to Apple Podcasts servers by clicking one button — instead of the current ancient and incredibly frustrating system of messing with RSS feeds and such.
• Apple Photos — Google Photos launched after Apple’s offering, but it managed to leapfrog it in just a couple of years in terms of functionality and intelligence. Apple can’t allow Google to hijack yet another layer of user experience on iOS. Object recognition in Apple Photos works way worse than in Google, and face recognition is just broken (and this data doesn’t sync across devices, which is plain ridiculous).
• As I mentioned above, Apple services need to be unbundled from core OS and have to be improved and updated incrementally and frequently, not once a year. To put it simply, if Apple maintains the pace of improving and updating its services software in the current pace, the company would better call it a day instead. Google, Microsoft and Amazon all move so much faster.
• Apple needs to finally get its act together and embrace collecting and analyzing users’ data if it wants to compete with Google and Microsoft in software and services. Differential privacy is promising, but it will not help much if Apple keeps users’ diagnostics and usage data opt-in rather than opt-out, as it is the case currently. Apple can’t allow to not only get anonymous user data (which cripples services already to an extent), and also not getting big enough amount of this data. Starting from iOS 11, data sharing with both Apple and developers should become opt-out by default.
• Finally, services by definition rely on much data, and there is always limited amount of user data if services are not cross-platform. I would welcome news of iMessage, Apple Maps, Apple News, Apple Photos and other Apple services coming to Android and/or even Windows. Also, doing this will show Apple how these services compare to competition on fair and common ground, rather than enjoying the spotlight of being pre-installed defaults. Cross-platform competition will improve Apple’s services’ quality, which will benefit Apple products’ users at the end of the day.