Next month Apple will hold its annual Worldwide Developers Conference, the event where it shows off its upcoming software offerings. The star this year will be iOS 18, the operating system that powers the iPhone. iOS 18 is rumored to be one of the most significant upgrades to the iPhone’s operating system in over a decade. That’s because Apple is widely expected to finally jump on the artificial intelligence train and bake AI features into iOS 18 across the board—like turning Siri from a frustrating digital assistant into a powerful AI chatbot.
But I’m hoping Apple also finally takes the time to fix many of the longstanding annoyances that have persisted in iOS for years. Here are my top five pleas.
5. Make Calendar view navigation easier
We all have places to be, and the Calendar app is terrific at helping us manage the where and when. But the app can be confusing when you’re trying to switch between views (day, week, month, year, or list). The method for switching from one view to the next and back again is so unintuitive that I’ve thought about switching calendar apps for good.
For example, to go from Month view to Day view, you tap the “Today” button at the bottom of the screen. All good, right? Not really, because sometimes the Today button doesn’t take you to the Today view, but to the List view. If it takes you to the List view, you then need to tap the button that looks like three lines at the top of the screen to see the Today view. And to get back to the Month view, you need to tap a third button in the top left of the screen.
Instead of spreading these buttons all over the interface, why not just have a dropdown menu that quickly lets us select the view we want?
4. Let us organize our movies in the TV app
I’ve written before about how the TV app offers a poor user experience on the Mac. And the iPhone experience isn’t any better, especially when it comes to managing your film collections. Specifically, the app’s ability to sort movies into their proper genres is shockingly bad. For example, the “Japanese Cinema” category in my app only shows one film from my library, despite my owning over a dozen Japanese films bought directly from Apple’s movie store. I mean, even world-renowned Japanese classics like Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon and Ikiru don’t show under the TV app’s “Japanese Cinema” genre.
Apple could allow users to clean up this genre mess by letting them sort their films into custom playlists—just like users can sort songs into custom playlists in the Music app. It’s such a simple feature and one film buffs who buy their movies from Apple’s store have long-requested. Why Apple hasn’t added it yet baffles me.
3. Stop hiding the most basic Music controls
I challenge any new iPhone user to quickly show me how to shuffle songs or repeat a song in the Music app. It will almost certainly take them a while to figure this out because Apple hides these two buttons—some of the most basic features of any music player—so deep in the interface it feels like they are trying to mess with users just for the hell of it.
The repeat and shuffle buttons don’t appear on the music control bar at the bottom of the app, nor on the mini player on the lock screen. To access them, you’ll need to play a song, then hit the bottom control bar, then on the next screen you’ll finally find the buttons for shuffle and repeat—as far away from the main player controls as Apple could position them. Just as with the Calendar app, it’s exhausting to find the right buttons.
2. Let us archive old messages
Yes, the blue bubbles in Apple’s Messages app may have some cultural cachet, but compared to other modern-day messaging apps, Messages on iOS feels like it’s stuck in the past.
There are several reasons for this, which I’ve detailed before, but perhaps the biggest is that the app still does not have an archive function. This leaves users without a way to organize their threads and only keep the most important and relevant ones front and center. Archiving messages is such a basic feature, I’m at a loss as to why Apple’s Messages still does not offer it in 2024.
1. Design a better user experience for elderly users
The number one thing I hope Apple addresses in iOS 18 is a problem that is more than a simple annoyance. Fixing it could truly help improve the quality of life for some of the company’s older iPhone users. As I wrote earlier this year, some elderly users will accidentally move apps to a new home screen or place them into folders without meaning to. This problem arises because as we age, we lose dexterity in our fingers, which means they may rest on an app’s icon for longer than they should, which activates the iPhone’s home screen editing mode—the mode that lets you drag app icons to new places on the home screen.
When elderly users do this by accident, it can leave them thinking that their app has vanished, which leads to confusion. To help alleviate this common problem, Apple needs to add the ability to lock the icons on the home screen in place. Such a simple feature would go a long way toward making the iPhone experience less perplexing for users of all ages.
Apple is expected to preview iOS 18 on June 10.