One thing missing (and has been for years): fine-tuned Contacts access control. Like the one for Photos.
Apps want to access contacts and it’s all or nothing right now. But Contacts also is quite integrated and is better if you fill in more details such as addresses and birthdates.
So an app requesting access gets everything if you grant it.
For Apple‘s pro-privacy stance, this oversight is quite painful.
In conjunction, I would love the ability to have a flag that tells anyone that adds me to their Contacts in iOS to not give my info to any apps. Basically, take me off the share list.
I'm not saying the end-user shouldn't be able to ignore this, but as part of these controls that would be great. I don't need or want a shadow-profile on Clubhouse or anything else.
This seems like something that would need state-level legislation to get done, but I don't see who'd cough up the money you'd need to buy the politicians necessary to make this happen though.
Absolutely. I'd add that we also need a privacy-preserving way to see that contacts have accounts on a given social app (aka contact matching).
A standard pattern for social apps is to ask for access to your contacts to see if anyone you know is on their app. This is important to creating a healthy and diverse ecosystem of social software, because these apps are really up against the natural network effects of existing offerings.
Contact matching is the best shot app creators have at bootstrapping new social offerings, but right now the experience sucks. Just to see if you like a new social app you have to either a) give up lots of private data in perpetuity to an entity you don't know, or b) have a subpar experience of manually finding people.
One solution may be for Apple to offer an API that helps social apps match users. Apple acts as the escrow system to match contacts so that the apps never have access to private contact data, and the apps just get notice when there's a new contact match to offer the user.
On the user side, the user has a simple privacy setting that says 'find matches once' or 'always look for new matches when app is open'. Users may also toggle whether they wish to be discoverable by others.
In a world with this feature, we get to try new social apps without concern, and apps only have access to an anonymized user ID for our contacts that are also using the app.
Hopefully Apple listens and implements something like this. They've already shown that they'll bend to their users even if it means screwing over developers and other large companies. App tracking transparency and precision location [1] come to mind.
Much simpler would simply be the ability to exclude certain contacts (your doctor, therapist, or teacher etc).
Additionally, it would be great to not share metadata about contacts (ie, don't share that I have this person listed as my sister).
It's quite difficult to have a privacy preserving API system that's on-device because people could pre-compute a rainbow table (phone numbers are only 10-ish digits long). If the API is provided by Apple using their servers, this might work.
iOS 9.0+. The blunder is Apple not deprecating CNContactStore, but then many apps really only work if they get your full contacts list (e.g. knowing when a friend joins Snapchat)
> many apps really only work if they get your full contacts list
Too bad for those apps. They should be able to work whether I have 1000 contacts, 0 contacts, or any number in between.
If they want to have a cool feature like alerting me when a friend joins, they are more than welcome to persuade me to provide my full contacts list so I get the most out of a feature.
> many apps really only work if they get your full contacts list (e.g. knowing when a friend joins Snapchat)
Offering a privacy-preserving alternative to that would be a huge iOS feature. It seems like Apple even already has most of the necessary pieces for that in place (e.g. the contacts app already knows whether my contacts have FaceTime enabled, Messages knows who has iMessage etc.)
I’m not sure what your feature request exactly is but I guess it’s one of the following:
- Access to all contacts
- Access to selected contacts
Additionally, for any of the two options above:
- Access to all details
- Access to selected details (e.g. phone, email)
Lastly:
- Access to all labels
- Access to selected labels (e.g. home, work)
So, finally, all Germans will be able to sleep at night knowing that they gave WhatsApp only permission to access their friends’ non-work phone numbers and nothing else.
Good germans have a business phone, so they can justify to be reachable 24/7!
Obviously, the companys data protection office will prevent WhatsApp on the business phone, so no work phone numbers were at risk!
I miss no access control for speaker. There is global default. I turn on speakers for one music app and at next launch another social media app plays their ads on full volume.
I really wish all the voice dictation/transcription had better language support. I'd really like to be able to say "Send a message to <my wife> in Spanish" and have it use Spanish dictation, and similarly to say "Read the last message in Spanish" when I'm using CarPlay. Perhaps at some point soon it will just get good enough that it'll detect which language is being used automatically, but right now it's pretty annoying for dual-language households.
To this day I never bothered with speech reckognition, I am not going to talk to my devices in english, and understanding Portuguese, Spanish and German, never really works.
But I’m surprised they’re still sleeping in this considering Apple expects it’s highest growth markets to be outside the English speaking part of the world
I think it’s less about revenue stream and more about dev’s languages. There are many tech companies who’s primary revenue stream is China, for example, but in those cases they still don’t need multilingual support nor even devs who speak Chinese.
Yeah. And the keyboard support for multi-languages is horrible, too. The prediction is nowadays so bad, I have to tiền it off or must use a single language only. Alone the notion that it should predict words in a different language than the current setting is baffling for me.
Overall smaller languages is abysmal. Microsoft translated Windows to my native language decades ago. MacOS still not translated. Nor iPhone. While Android phones come with translation out-of-box for most manufacturers UIs.
How I wish Apple's core apps weren't tied to the OS. Apple Music needs a ground up redesign so badly. It's not quite as bad as it used to be, but it's such a core part of the iOS experience, and it really feels like they put in the minimum they could get away with.
It’s so inefficiently designed. Wasted space on oversized album artwork or (even worse) generic playlist covers. High friction to resume listening/browse by recency. Lazy loading everywhere, slow load times. Cluttered menu drawers.
The only thing it has going for it is general ecosystem integration (and lossless), which still is the deciding factor for me unfortunately, despite the qualms above.
What are your issues with it? For me it’s still 100x better than Spotify’s last 3 redesign disasters. And the integration with my own library of bootlegs and bandcamp purchases is brilliant. I have no UI issues with it, but they could spend a bit more time on QA. It’s a bit too buggy from time to time.
Being better than Spotify is an incredibly low bar, and not really what I was comparing against. The iOS music player was very pleasant to use before they haphazardly added Apple Music to it.
As you mentioned, it's full of bugs. Bugs happen, but they seem to have gotten out of control lately.
Top issues:
- 3/5 tabs use lazy load and anything less than great cellular/wifi means waiting to see anything.
- Speaking of cell/wifi, it really shows that this app was designed in a lab under perfect conditions. Music just... stops if the connection is weak when streaming. Was it another bug? My airpods? My car's bluetooth? Who knows, and who needs feedback anyway.
- Listen now tab can show a grand total of one (!!) full item before needing to scroll. On my phone with 1,483,776 pixels. It's also sorted in an arbitrary order that I cannot change.
- The Browse and Radio tabs are not at all personalized to me, so I don't have much to say about them and are mainly ignored.
- My library tab, my mainly used tab, is littered with album views of "Recently Added" in favor of adding a bunch of taps to things I actually want to listen to (Playlists> Playlist Name> Song/Play button) requires 3 taps.
- The album view in Recently Added makes no sense outside of downloading complete albums, which seems exceedingly rare. The music topping the charts is a bunch of singles and maybe EPs, not full albums. Even if one is not into pop music, adding music from a newly discovered artist, it's probably not a full album, rather a song or maybe a few tops. On top of this, it requires two taps or a long hold gesture to play it!
- Search is weirdly segmented for no reason, and is a step backwards from what Apple already solved with Spotlight. I always want results from my music first, and Apple Music second. A "no results" screen is useless for me, just show me Apple Music results, don't add yet another tap. Oh and search has Browse categories of course.
I could go on for a lot longer, but these issues grate me every day. Everything just requires too many taps or scrolling to get what I want.
I’m not an Apple Music subscriber. The other day I was in the car and my daughter wanted to hear a particular song, so I asked Siri to play it (since I knew it was on my phone, I didn’t think this would be a difficult thing for Siri to do). Siri instead announced it was signing me up for a 10 day preview of Apple Music and then tried to stream the song. :/
But I also bought the Marvis Pro iOS app. It’s like $10 or something. It’s fantastic and the developer is incredibly active/responsive online. Worth checking out if you’re unfamiliar
Why would Apple intentionally worsen the experience of Apple Music and then advertise people to sign up for that very same platform? What does that accomplish?
I've thought it surprising they don't put more effort into the core apps and don't remove them from the iOS upgrade cycle. They could really leverage the iCloud subscription to turn it into a money maker.
Don’t worry, as a native speaker it’s not much better. While it can transcribe your request well, it very rarely can actually do anything more than search the internet.
Well, it's even so idiotic than WHEN it understands me (it can't handle any environmental noise.), it will actively change the name of people I call regularly into the name of people I haven't speoken to in 5+ years.
Still no phone and SMS anti-spam features :/ I would have thought Apple would add something similar to Android's speech to text transcription feature or anything more compelling than the current user experience.
From my perspective iOS already has pretty good call/text blocking. Are you sure you know all the existing features?
For calling, there’s a built-in contacts only mode behind a single opt-in switch, this is what I use. There’s also a privacy preserving app system that allows you to install third party apps which provide block lists and labeling to the phone app.
Messages is similar, except with unknowns being put in a separate list and an older and simpler static block list, though it does also support reporting the message as junk which presumably means all iOS devices have a bit of a shared message spam filter.
People want to be called from unknown numbers from time to time. A pizza delivery being outside, my doctor with test results etc. Blocking everyone but contacts is in the realm of "you're holding it wrong" kinda excuse.
Messages going to a different list helps little when iMessage is full of 0-day exploits that happen as soon as your phone receive the message.
> From my perspective iOS already has pretty good call/text blocking. Are you sure you know all the existing features?
For context I'm comparing what's in place in iOS with what Android has had for at least a couple releases. With that familiarity, iOS's anti-spam features appear rudimentary at best.
> For calling, there’s a built-in contacts only mode behind a single opt-in switch
Contacts-only incoming calls and texts is a clunky design. Businesses (doctors offices, delivery services come to mind) frequently use random 1-800 numbers for their outgoing calls. Having those _and_ spam clutter up one's voicemail is far from ideal; the expectation is that the user will spend their time going through voicemail and delete spam. Live voicemail is definitely an improvement but even if I choose to block an incoming spam call, the voicemail is still left on my phone. Android lets one end the call as soon as spam is detected and there's no action needed after the fact.
> There’s also a privacy preserving app system that allows you to install third party apps which provide block lists and labeling to the phone app.
This is what I was referring to in my original post. On Android suspected spam calls and texts are labelled as such by default. Why does Apple expect users to install third party apps for this? It should at least be an opt-in feature that ships as part of iOS.
The problem I have with these is that unknown but wanted senders get squelched with the spam. I get MFA tokens via SMS from assorted random numbers, or worse calls from them (looking at you Citibank).
Is this feature globally available? Because I receive an embarrassing amount of spam calls and never had a single of them blocked. The same goes for SMS.
In some locales, you want to do all of your internet use over one unlimited or high usage internet plan and handle SMS/calls over another carrier or plan. This is appealing for business users and regular people alike in some places that have high tariffs, highly asymmetrical usage limits, or other uneven plan limits that don't align with how you use your mobile device.
For example, I once had a lot of automated alerts sent by SMS to my phone for the early rollout of an IoT device I was working on. My regular unlimited voice and data plan was very cheap but only included a couple hundred SMS per month and I was going to blow past that during alpha testing, so I got a SIM from an MVNO with unlimited messaging for ~$5/mo and sent all the alerts to that number and had the company pay that bill, which was a nice way of isolating the expense as well.
It's also great if you are an international jewel thief and need a second line for taunting the Interpol agents hot on your trail without having to add them to your friends & family plan.
I have 4 SIM cards due to living in different countries. Sadly only 2 can be active at all times.
It also a diversification for telco shenanigans. Just to give an example, Singapore regulator just ordered telcos to stop accepting incoming SMS from entities not registered with local regulator. This affected a lot of overseas services OTP.
Work number and personal number on the same device. I’ve friends that switched their number completely to their work number because of the lack of dual sim phones back in the day. That is just a poor decision all around. I know someone who had to negotiate a release of the phone number to him in the compensation package when they were let go
Data privacy. one esim I use for all these websites requiring a phone number as 2FA or when it's unclear to me why they need a phone number. It's off all the time, unless I expect an SMS on it. It reduce how much my real phone number spreads and hopefully reduces the amount of phishing I get...
I currently have my personal and company SIMs. Data goes through the company one, calls through my own.
People who travel a lot usually have their "native" sim as the eSIM and just grab whatever prepaid they can get for the country they're travelling in. Easiest way to avoid insane roaming fees.
To be fair, it's not really all that early if you're doing the public release. I've been on iOS17 for months as part of the beta, and I'm not even using the developer beta, just the public beta.
During the beta the 16 AirTag limit was still enforced with every shared AirTag counting towards it (and individual AirPods as well).
I’m glad to see that they’ve seemed to upped the limit or don’t count the shared AirTags against that limit anymore.
16 seems like a lot, but if you’re traveling with a couple of items you want to track and share with your party as backup, you start hitting it pretty fast.
Only potential problem (at least when I checked on the state of the beta) is that the person you share it with has to be on iOS 17 too. This was the reason I didn't bother with the beta (although it was the feature I needed asap) since the person I was going to share with wasn't going to use the beta.
The most annoying new thing over the last few months for me was that my Android phone started giving privacy alerts for my physical key chain which has an AirTag which is registered to my wife (a present from her to me).
Upgraded yesterday. I’m loving the improvements to the keyboard. The autocorrection is a lot, lot better. And I never get ducking now when I’m trying to write something else.
But the real new shift is resizable windows and such on ipadOS 17 and watchOS 10 looks really nice on my series 7.
That’s great news and maybe the only reason I might upgrade. Ever since I went back to an iPhone I’ve had trouble with typing. I don’t know why but the Android keyboard was always much more accurate.
And yet I still can not get any of the more "advanced" features (like predictive text) for my native language keyboard.
It's been, what, at least five years(?) since predictive text was launched. I never expected to be the first to be supported, but starting to feel a bit ridiculous when some languages with a few tens of percents more speakers have had support from nearly the start.
Meanwhile third party keyboards have had support for ages. I'd rather use the stock keyboard, but can't bear it in its current state.
Readit News
Apps want to access contacts and it’s all or nothing right now. But Contacts also is quite integrated and is better if you fill in more details such as addresses and birthdates.
So an app requesting access gets everything if you grant it.
For Apple‘s pro-privacy stance, this oversight is quite painful.
I'm not saying the end-user shouldn't be able to ignore this, but as part of these controls that would be great. I don't need or want a shadow-profile on Clubhouse or anything else.
A standard pattern for social apps is to ask for access to your contacts to see if anyone you know is on their app. This is important to creating a healthy and diverse ecosystem of social software, because these apps are really up against the natural network effects of existing offerings.
Contact matching is the best shot app creators have at bootstrapping new social offerings, but right now the experience sucks. Just to see if you like a new social app you have to either a) give up lots of private data in perpetuity to an entity you don't know, or b) have a subpar experience of manually finding people.
One solution may be for Apple to offer an API that helps social apps match users. Apple acts as the escrow system to match contacts so that the apps never have access to private contact data, and the apps just get notice when there's a new contact match to offer the user.
On the user side, the user has a simple privacy setting that says 'find matches once' or 'always look for new matches when app is open'. Users may also toggle whether they wish to be discoverable by others.
In a world with this feature, we get to try new social apps without concern, and apps only have access to an anonymized user ID for our contacts that are also using the app.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2020/08/12/ios-14-precise-location/
Additionally, it would be great to not share metadata about contacts (ie, don't share that I have this person listed as my sister).
It's quite difficult to have a privacy preserving API system that's on-device because people could pre-compute a rainbow table (phone numbers are only 10-ish digits long). If the API is provided by Apple using their servers, this might work.
iOS 9.0+. The blunder is Apple not deprecating CNContactStore, but then many apps really only work if they get your full contacts list (e.g. knowing when a friend joins Snapchat)
Too bad for those apps. They should be able to work whether I have 1000 contacts, 0 contacts, or any number in between.
If they want to have a cool feature like alerting me when a friend joins, they are more than welcome to persuade me to provide my full contacts list so I get the most out of a feature.
Offering a privacy-preserving alternative to that would be a huge iOS feature. It seems like Apple even already has most of the necessary pieces for that in place (e.g. the contacts app already knows whether my contacts have FaceTime enabled, Messages knows who has iMessage etc.)
- Access to all contacts
- Access to selected contacts
Additionally, for any of the two options above:
- Access to all details
- Access to selected details (e.g. phone, email)
Lastly:
- Access to all labels
- Access to selected labels (e.g. home, work)
So, finally, all Germans will be able to sleep at night knowing that they gave WhatsApp only permission to access their friends’ non-work phone numbers and nothing else.
LOL
If I book an event let an app save it and read it’s own data, but not every event ever.
Someday, they’ll start focusing on the rest of the world and we’ll see real advancements in this space…
This is great! I assume prediction gone wrong on "tiền". :)
It matches my experience as well, to the point that I also have it turned off.
Deleted Comment
Just look at this: https://www.apple.com/v/ios/ios-17/a/images/overview/music/p...
The only thing it has going for it is general ecosystem integration (and lossless), which still is the deciding factor for me unfortunately, despite the qualms above.
As you mentioned, it's full of bugs. Bugs happen, but they seem to have gotten out of control lately.
Top issues:
- 3/5 tabs use lazy load and anything less than great cellular/wifi means waiting to see anything.
- Speaking of cell/wifi, it really shows that this app was designed in a lab under perfect conditions. Music just... stops if the connection is weak when streaming. Was it another bug? My airpods? My car's bluetooth? Who knows, and who needs feedback anyway.
- Listen now tab can show a grand total of one (!!) full item before needing to scroll. On my phone with 1,483,776 pixels. It's also sorted in an arbitrary order that I cannot change.
- The Browse and Radio tabs are not at all personalized to me, so I don't have much to say about them and are mainly ignored.
- My library tab, my mainly used tab, is littered with album views of "Recently Added" in favor of adding a bunch of taps to things I actually want to listen to (Playlists> Playlist Name> Song/Play button) requires 3 taps.
- The album view in Recently Added makes no sense outside of downloading complete albums, which seems exceedingly rare. The music topping the charts is a bunch of singles and maybe EPs, not full albums. Even if one is not into pop music, adding music from a newly discovered artist, it's probably not a full album, rather a song or maybe a few tops. On top of this, it requires two taps or a long hold gesture to play it!
- Search is weirdly segmented for no reason, and is a step backwards from what Apple already solved with Spotlight. I always want results from my music first, and Apple Music second. A "no results" screen is useless for me, just show me Apple Music results, don't add yet another tap. Oh and search has Browse categories of course.
I could go on for a lot longer, but these issues grate me every day. Everything just requires too many taps or scrolling to get what I want.
But I also bought the Marvis Pro iOS app. It’s like $10 or something. It’s fantastic and the developer is incredibly active/responsive online. Worth checking out if you’re unfamiliar
At least to non-native English speakers, Siri is really atrocious. Most of the time, it doesn't even get the simplest queries right.
Which means Apple is likely going to just replace it entirely with a new LLM based system which we know they are working on.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2023/03/15/apple-engineers-working...
It's plain stupid.
Deleted Comment
From my perspective iOS already has pretty good call/text blocking. Are you sure you know all the existing features?
For calling, there’s a built-in contacts only mode behind a single opt-in switch, this is what I use. There’s also a privacy preserving app system that allows you to install third party apps which provide block lists and labeling to the phone app.
Messages is similar, except with unknowns being put in a separate list and an older and simpler static block list, though it does also support reporting the message as junk which presumably means all iOS devices have a bit of a shared message spam filter.
Messages going to a different list helps little when iMessage is full of 0-day exploits that happen as soon as your phone receive the message.
For context I'm comparing what's in place in iOS with what Android has had for at least a couple releases. With that familiarity, iOS's anti-spam features appear rudimentary at best.
> For calling, there’s a built-in contacts only mode behind a single opt-in switch
Contacts-only incoming calls and texts is a clunky design. Businesses (doctors offices, delivery services come to mind) frequently use random 1-800 numbers for their outgoing calls. Having those _and_ spam clutter up one's voicemail is far from ideal; the expectation is that the user will spend their time going through voicemail and delete spam. Live voicemail is definitely an improvement but even if I choose to block an incoming spam call, the voicemail is still left on my phone. Android lets one end the call as soon as spam is detected and there's no action needed after the fact.
> There’s also a privacy preserving app system that allows you to install third party apps which provide block lists and labeling to the phone app.
This is what I was referring to in my original post. On Android suspected spam calls and texts are labelled as such by default. Why does Apple expect users to install third party apps for this? It should at least be an opt-in feature that ships as part of iOS.
Deleted Comment
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iph203ab0be4/io...
https://www.hiya.com/products/app
Deleted Comment
Probably the best change imo
For example, I once had a lot of automated alerts sent by SMS to my phone for the early rollout of an IoT device I was working on. My regular unlimited voice and data plan was very cheap but only included a couple hundred SMS per month and I was going to blow past that during alpha testing, so I got a SIM from an MVNO with unlimited messaging for ~$5/mo and sent all the alerts to that number and had the company pay that bill, which was a nice way of isolating the expense as well.
It's also great if you are an international jewel thief and need a second line for taunting the Interpol agents hot on your trail without having to add them to your friends & family plan.
It also a diversification for telco shenanigans. Just to give an example, Singapore regulator just ordered telcos to stop accepting incoming SMS from entities not registered with local regulator. This affected a lot of overseas services OTP.
People who travel a lot usually have their "native" sim as the eSIM and just grab whatever prepaid they can get for the country they're travelling in. Easiest way to avoid insane roaming fees.
I alternate between a Google Fi sim, and an AT&T business.
I’m glad to see that they’ve seemed to upped the limit or don’t count the shared AirTags against that limit anymore.
16 seems like a lot, but if you’re traveling with a couple of items you want to track and share with your party as backup, you start hitting it pretty fast.
But the real new shift is resizable windows and such on ipadOS 17 and watchOS 10 looks really nice on my series 7.
It's been, what, at least five years(?) since predictive text was launched. I never expected to be the first to be supported, but starting to feel a bit ridiculous when some languages with a few tens of percents more speakers have had support from nearly the start.
Meanwhile third party keyboards have had support for ages. I'd rather use the stock keyboard, but can't bear it in its current state.