I think it's so stupid that people say feature x doesn't get added because it is a battery drain.
So?
Any feature like that should be able to be turned on and off. Bluetooth is a battery drain. So is wi-fi. So is a bright screen. How are widgets any different? How about Apple let me decide what is worth draining my battery and what isn't. I happen to have a charger at home, in my car, and at my office desk so I rarely dip below 90% battery most days.
My biggest overall ripe with iOS is that I can't set third party apps to be the default in the OS. The camera app is laughably bad. If Apple doesn't want to let me use Camera+ or something similar as my default camera app, how about making the camera app suck less? There's dozens of features that should've been there years ago that just aren't. Same with Safari. I'd be fine if I was forced into Safari being the default browser if it was as powerful as other mobile browsers, but it just isn't. The same goes for the weather app, and several others.
In addition, here is a list of other things that I believe are missing from iOS. There are thousands upon thousands of employees working on this kind of stuff. Most of these should be able to be hammered out by a small team of programmers in just a few days. Many of them should've been in iOS years ago. It is astounding at how little freedom Apple gives its users:
1. Ability to set camera access from the lock screen to a different app. Or better yet, just make the camera app a lot better (doesn't hold a candle to Camera+; Apple's app still has no timer, no ability to take pictures/videos at reduced quality if desired, still with very limited editing options)
2. Ability to hide 'photo library'. No need to have it if it is all duplicates
3. Ability to disable iMessage for specific contacts.
4. In messages, make the camera a general attachment button with the ability to attach a picture, location, contact, etc.
5. An icon next to the 3G/Wifi signal on the top bar for the notification center telling me how many notifications I have
6. Ability to add data usage in current billing cycle as a sticky in notification center much like stocks/weather.
7. Better 3rd party access to notification center. The Yahoo! weather app sucks. Let me put a Weather Channel or Accuweather widget in there instead. There’s tons of untapped potential in the notification center. At the moment, all we have is a decent start.
8. Ability to have the camera light blink every so often when you have notifications. Could be a battery drain? Every 30 seconds? Maybe every minute? Or (gasp) customizable?
9. Be able to password protect certain apps (mail, photos, settings, facebook, etc) or folders but allow anyone to play games, etc.
10. Ability for more customization. Something similar to SBSettings from jailbroken devices needs to be native.
11. Ability to hide apple's default apps like stocks, camera, weather, newsstand, etc.
12. Ability to close all 'suspended' apps running in the background at once. Not significant, but no reason I shouldn’t be able to.
13. Ability to move more than 1 icon at a time when changing the layout of the home pages
14. Ability to sort reminders by due date
15. Ability to display next X calendar items, regardless of when they are. Truth be told, the entire calendar app could use a bit of a makeover and feature addition.
16. Ability to 'snooze' a reminder from the lock screen
17. Ability to send playing now in music app to services like last.fm. This could be a failure on the app developers part, but I’d be willing to bet Apple is somehow tying their hands.
18. In music app, ability to play a song and go back to a list of music and select 'add to playing now'. Basically be able to create a playlist on the fly.
19. Voice memos – don’ t have them start playing automatically after the recording is finished. Also, it changes my volume back to max when it starts playing, even when I have previously reduced the volume. Annoying.
20. Be able to swipe from top to bottom on any app that uses the keyboard to hide it (doesn't work in notes, etc)
21. Option for a 5th row keyboard with numbers, or even let us fully customize out keyboard.
22. Ability to have line returns in keyboard shortcuts. This would be useful for addresses.
23. Ability to rename apps on the home screen.
24. Ability to add more than 12 apps to a folder. Let it scroll horizontally or vertically horizontally. It seems silly for me to have a Games folder, Games 2 folder, and Games 3 folder. I can't remember which games are in which folder. This is just silly.
25. Improve the YouTube app with subtitle support and other newer YouTube features.
26. Be able to drop pin in ‘Find Friends’ and see street view. (This I had written after iOS 5. I guess street view at all would be nice now.
27. Ability to merge Apple IDs. Isn't bothering me, but clearly some people need this.
28. Don't force us to have an internet connection for all of Siri’s functionality. If I’m asking for the weather, fine, but for simpler speech to text, come on. Why do you need a connection to set an alarm, calendar appointment, etc? I’d actually go ahead and say put Siri/Voice-to-text on older iPhones, but I know Apple won’t do this because they want to force people to spend their money buying their latest and greatest products, even if they aren’t that much greater under the hood.
29. Guaranteed money back on app purchases for something like 30 minutes. I haven’t needed it, but there’s quite a few paid apps that I’d like to see how they work hands on before I commit to buying. I don’t think offering a 15 minute, 30 minute, or an hour trial would be so terrible. This is in the Android marketplace and I think it is the one (and only?) thing I like about the Android marketplace more than the Appstore.
30. Put some kind of weather feature on the lock screen instead of having to go into a weather app or notification center.
31. Ability to get Google Contacts to sync ‘groups’. I have my contacts divided into friends, restaurants, family, rarely used, etc. Would be nice to be able to click on contacts and just have numbers I actually use (friends) and if I need to step back a directory and go to restaurants or whatever, I could choose to do that.
32. When you edit a contact, have twitter handle (and facebook url?) be default fields. After all, we are integrating these things into the OS, right?
33. Remember contact-specific ringtones. I've got about 20 different ringtones for different friends and family members. It is quite annoying to have to program all of these in again when I get a new device.
34. The ability to throttle the system if your device reaches a certain battery level. For instance, if the battery drops below X%, it reduces the CPU speed by Y%, or screen brightness by Z amount, or disables bluetooth automatically, or however else you want to set this up. This would allow us to program what we need the most and what we don't need the most, and let us squeeze a little extra battery life out of our devices.
35. Since Apple maps is being integrated with services like Yelp & OpenTable, wouldn't it make sense for the directions to do a time check if you ask for directions there? For instance, if it is 8:35 and you put directions into a restaurant that closes at 9:00 and your ETA isn't until 9:15, shouldn't Apple maps alert us to such? Obviously the bigger and more accurate Yelp gets, the more reliable this would be. But it just seems like an incredibly obvious feature to include.
36. Build in GasBuddy integration into Apple Maps, sort of like Yelp/OpenTable. Being able to quickly to see where the cheapest gas on my route is would be very beneficial.
37. Ability to disable text tones and other sounds when on a call.
I could go on and on, but I'll let Apple work on these 37 first.
