With Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference set to kick off, the faithful are doubtless excited about what new features are slated for fall's iOS update. But while some of the new functionality will surely bring excitement, it's important to remember that for all its success, Apple's operating system has significant issues that degrade the iPhone experience. Through conversations with friends, family, and strangers I've encountered across the country, I'm going to highlight three things in iOS that need to be fixed, ideally once and for all. Your list of what's broken might not be mine, but it probably comes from a similar set of frustrations.
It just works
The popularity of the iPhone among both the least and most tech savvy is often described in three simple words: "It just works." That's a very simple philosophy that guides nearly every product Apple offers. It's an idea that you take it out of the box (or sign up online), and you can just get on with it -- new wireless headphones, an iPad with a keyboard and stylus -- without futzing or struggling. It's a promise of simplicity, but also of reliability. When the iPhone came out a decade ago, it meant that you could open a web page that wasn't crippled on mobile. But before you jump in and say, "so long as it didn't run Flash", that's fundamentally part of the same ethos.
Apple didn't believe Flash could run well on mobile and was ultimately vindicated by Google coming to the same conclusion. "It just works" wasn't possible on the original iPhone with Flash, and it still might well not be possible today. My current generation Macbook Pro doesn't love Flash either.
But "it just works" has to deliver the vast majority of the time. If you went to download something from the App Store and half the time it didn't work, you'd be less inclined to try anything new, get updates, etc. Like many of you, I use my iPhone for hours each day and most things are more like the reliability of hooking up that iPad keyboard than failed app downloads. But not everything (we can talk about Apple Music another time).
Wi-Fi that doesn't work
There is rarely a day I don't leave home in "mid iPhone", whether that's checking Twitter, dashing off a message, or just reading the latest news. This means I exit my apartment and slowly lose touch with the Wi-Fi hotspot that sits near my door. There's an iOS feature called Wi-Fi Assist that ostensibly will "Automatically use cellular data when Wi-Fi connectivity is poor." When it first rolled out, it caused folks problems because weak Wi-Fi led to a great deal of unintended data usage with their carrier (less of an issue now as unlimited plans have become commonplace again).
Many folks turned it off, but I leave it on because in theory it's really quite useful. I could walk out the door and seamlessly transition between Wi-Fi and Verizon. In reality, the experience is terrible. And for me, this means terrible multiple times each day. The iPhone seems to have no idea that the Wi-Fi network is no longer responding properly and yet also seems to have no urgency about using Verizon's network.
This leads to timeouts and endless frustration that seemingly could be fixed technically. It's the same spots nearly every day where this happens, and the phone knows both where I am and what networks I'm using. Also worth mentioning, this is over several iPhones and multiple residences. It's not a new problem, but it's also not any better than it was several years ago.
But Wi-Fi troubles aren't just limited to this. There's also the "phantom network" issue. This is where your iPhone connects to a so-called known network, stops using cellular, and then proceeds to provide you zero data. Why? Because you have to authenticate on said network (e.g. the one at your local Starbucks or the magnificently useless 'xfinitywifi') and that only happens when the stars all align and it deigns to. Sometimes, you can force the authentication page by opening Safari, other times you have to just manually disconnect and reconnect -- so much for those known networks.
Given that all you have to do on most authentication pages is accept terms (again? really?) or enter a known password, this is an abominable user experience. If anyone can work with Wi-Fi vendors, network providers, and the iPhone itself to fix this it's Apple. If there's available networks and I'm able to reach them, my phone should be online -- unless I explicitly want it otherwise.
What's the @$#!*& password?
If you want to see a frustrated iPhone user, just log them out of everything. Or ask them to log onto a site they haven't used in a while. Chances are that they will fail -- multiple times -- to type in the proper magic incantation and utter an obscenity or two along the way. Why? Because even though there is some rudimentary functionality for password management via the iCloud Keychain, authentication is still stuck in the 1980s on iOS (and elsewhere, yes).
Without discussing all the security implications of eliminating passwords -- we could and mostly should do that; they aren't very secure especially when humans have to make them easy to memorize -- let's just note that iPhone has the makings of a much better system already. When you pick up your phone and place a finger on the TouchID sensor, iOS and the phone have determined it's you who did that. Once it has done so, the operating system allows you full access to the phone and everything else already logged in with passwords.
The fundamental difference here is that by authenticating the person instead of an individual app, Apple required you to only prove one critical thing. Yes, it's fair to note that TouchID isn't perfectly secure against spoofed fingerprints and it's a safe bet that future version of "two-factor authentication" will likely combine other biometric measures -- iris scan, voice matching, along with your fingerprint. But still there are many apps today that allow for login via a second TouchID match. Amazon, Evernote, LastPass (which holds my passwords), and many banking apps come to mind.
The implementation of those ranges from really reassuring (LastPass makes me do it pretty much every time, there should never be a window where someone could easily find my passwords) to downright bizarre (Citibank insists on a re-entry of the actual password to deposit money, but many other tasks are TouchID only). But overall, when I get to use an app like that I'm almost never caught trying to remember my password just to use it.
Apple can help here a lot. First of all, it can implement password management that extends beyond the browser to apps. iCloud Keychain could auto-enter passwords on compatible apps all apps, not just some (thanks to a helpful Twitter user for correcting that). Second, Apple could mandate that authentication offers a TouchID-instead-of-password option. New app updates after a certain date would be required to offer this or else they wouldn't be accepted. Taking this further would be guidelines on why/when apps should even log you out in the first place, but those seem better left to optional "best practices".
If Apple wants to, it can eliminate the password and its frustrations in two years or so. TouchID has already been around for twice that long and so far hasn't offered us much other than a better version of the 2-5-8-0 unlock code.
'I lost all my photos'
Most readers here know that Apple offers a limited, but otherwise free backup of the contents of your device via iCloud. And critics aside, iCloud is remarkably reliable, backing up hundreds of millions of devices without losing data or failing to restore when needed. But iCloud has a major flaw: If it isn't in use and your phone is lost, stolen, or otherwise destroyed, your data is gone -- often irretrievably.
Apple could go a long way towards fixing this problem via its many resources, including marketing, on-phone reminders, retail store associates, et al. It should be hard to opt out of your iCloud backup (but not impossible, certain secure users might want that) and even harder for a regular user to go unaware that they're flying without a safety net. Apple needs to up the inadequate 5GB of storage you get with an account to 20GB or more; it should strongly consider unlimited photo storage as competitors like Google offer.
Whatever the base plan, though, when you are using up your allotment -- I pay 99 cents a month for 50GB, the next level is $2.99 for 200GB -- the phone should warn you an offer an upgrade. If Apple were smart, it would encourage annual pricing here. Give me $25 for 12 months of that $2.99 plan, a nice discount but surely affordable in Cupertino.
In short, the iPhone should "just work" here and make sure your data is safe and sound -- somewhere. Apple shouldn't discourage the few who still back up to iTunes on a computer, but the unreliability of that method makes it a poor choice for most. It's not that it doesn't work, it's that the process requires the phone to meet up with that computer and for many of us that never happens.
Too many folks have told me about an iPhone that stopped working or disappeared and their real sadness being the graduation photos, or the baby pictures, or whatever they can't get back. This should stop happening in the vast majority of cases, and Apple could go a long way there with some very small fixes: Make it central to iOS to guarantee that the contents of the device it's running on are also somewhere else, whatever that takes.
Too much to do, too little time
One thing we generally learn each year at WWDC is that Apple couldn't fix everything on even its own to-do list. In order to offer annual upgrades to iOS, MacOS, WatchOS, TvOS, etc. the company makes choices about what to work on and what to postpone for the future. The above three items aren't sexy because they are rooted in past failures to fix them. But if Apple wants to hold onto the "it just works" mantle, these updates are long overdue.
