What "killer features" do you suggest?
People scream for new features, but have no idea what those should be.
Besides how many features do you need?
It's a PHONE for goodness sakes!
You know, its funny.
Apple come out with a phone with all sorts of bells and whistles, and everyone wonders what the hell they used to do with their little grayscale 'dumb phone'. Yet the second you mention improving the product, the argument becomes "its a phone".
By your very own logic, we may as well ditch Safari, 3G, LTE, apps, the lot
The feature request list for the iPhone is massive - you only need to look in the iPhone forum area to see that.
It's more a case of keeping the product fresh, which Apple has failed to do for a couple of years now.
For me, I'd like to see:
1) NFC
2) 802.11ab
3) Replacement for SpringBoard with something a little more flexible
4) An 'app draw' type thing where you can see ALL apps, then just keep the ones you use regularly on your springboard
5) A UI overhaul would be nice, but probably wont happen
6) API hooks for the notifications window - currently through Cydia hacks you can add things like the option to quickly enable/disable wifi,celular, etc, change brightness, turn the light on/off, etc
7) API Hooks for the Spotlight search, with more search options (e.g "in:appstore" tags and "web:some search" and such)
8) Redesign the multitasking area with a snapshot preview (like the one from Cydia)
9) Option to close all apps in multitasking
10) Set default apps (i.e set Chrome as your default browser for example)
11) Remove standard apps (there is zero reason why Stocks, Reminders, Weather, Notes and Maps need to be on the phone to begin with - if they were moved to the AppStore, updates for them would be MUCH easier to handle, and we wouldnt have unwanted junk on our phone)
12) Either the removal of Siri, or open it up to allow apps to interact with it, at which point it may be a bit more useful.
13) Option to auto-update apps in the background, replacing the existing one once the new one is downloaded
14) Option to revert back to old app versions (the recent buggy chrome release being a prime example of when you'd want to do this)
15) Screen splitting for the iPad (so you can have more than 1 app open at a time - realistically there is no reason why it cant be done).
16) A minor thing, but it would be cool if there was a WebOS style multitask switcher, where when you double tap home, instead of a bottom menu, the app window shrinks and shows all of them in a fan, you then push the app away to the top of the screen to close it.
17) Maps. Better data, nuff said.
18) OS X Companion app or control app to let you do things like remotely locate your mac, turn it on/off, change settings, share network connection, open a local network between the two, etc
19) A detailed battery status screen (like iStat Pro for OS X)
20) Save maps route so it works offline
21) Safari downloads
22) Multiple user accounts for the iPad
I could go on and on.
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Several variations of this have been posted. It's ludicrous. iOS is one of the fastest evolving, and innovating, OSes I've ever seen. Every year significant features are added and apparently they are so seamless that people don't even notice even as they use them constantly. OSes usually take years between significant releases. Admittedly, most of these innovations are in the platform, not in the app launcher interface.
Yes, the most visible feature of the interface is pretty much the same (icons on a grid with multiple screens) but that doesn't have to change for innovation to happen. The mouse / icon /window interface is 30 years old and you could argue that it hasn't really changed much in that time.
For the non-developers out there who don't see the massive innovation going on, a quick way to gauge is to look at how quickly and how widely applications shift to requiring a new OS version. Developers don't do that just because, they do that because the new OS has compelling features that they want to take advantage of.
I am a developer
Look I'm not saying things havent been done. But out of a massive list of items that have been suggested since 2007, Apple has tackled the mainly easy ones. Look at a few of the wishlists out there and you'll see what I mean.