Here are the iPhone & iPad features Apple didn’t give us with iOS 11

Earlier this week, Apple officially unveiled iOS 11 with a host of new features. The update brings things such as a redesigned Control Center, an all-new App Store, and much more. As is the case every year, however, there were things that many users hoped for that ultimately didn’t make an appearance…

Multiple Account Support

iOS 11 was this year chock full of iPad improvements, but one notable feature that didn’t make an appearance is multiple account support. Many concepts imagined the iPad with support for more than one user, but ultimately the feature didn’t make the cut.

Multiple account support would give the iPad Pro a more computer-like feel, while offering users a way to keep their work and relaxation files and applications separate from each other. It was also improve the iPad’s use case in enterprise if more than one employee could easily share an iPad.

Dark Mode

One feature that tops many wish lists every year is dark mode, but alas, another iteration have iOS has been unveiled without such feature. One thing that is new, however, is a “Smart invert” accessibility feature that turns the iOS interface dark, but doesn’t affect things such as photos and videos. This feature, however, is more aimed helping accessibility rather than a so-called dark mode feature.

Group FaceTime

Another feature that many have requested is Group FaceTime. This would allow users to group chat either over video or audio with one another. The feature, however, is nowhere to be found within iOS 11 despite being rumored earlier this year.

Just to rub salt in our wounds, TV show Modern Family actually simulated group FaceTime calling in an Apple-centric episode back in 2015 as part of the plot.

Here’s hoping this long overdue feature will find its way to iOS with iOS 12.

Mouse Support

A feature that many request and many firmly label as pointless is mouse support for iPad. Such a feature would undoubtedly give the iPad Pro a whole new set of capabilities, but Apple has said time and time again that iOS is optimized for touch and macOS is optimized for mouse, which is likely the reasoning for mouse support not being present in iOS 11.

Mouse support would no doubt give more weight to Apple’s pitch of the iPad Pro as a PC replacement, but despite the new iPad Pro models, this won’t be the year.

Meal logging in Health

Something that Zac wrote in detail about earlier this year is meal logging within the Health app. While a variety of applications exist in the App Store, many of them, such as MyFitnessPal, but first-party integration into Health would certainly be nice. Nevertheless, it looks like we’ll have to wait a until next year for such a feature.

Apps like MyFitnessPal offer HealthKit integration, but you’re still using a standalone app and giving your nutritional information to yet another company.

Read more:

• Feature Request: Meal logging from Apple’s Health app

Default apps

Something that has seemingly been requested since the inception of iOS is support for changing the default applications. For instance, you could change your default web browser to Chrome to have all web links open directly in Chrome. The feature is support on macOS, but why not iOS?

iOS 11 unfortunately doesn’t change that and it’s starting to look like this is a feature we’ll never see. While you can finally hide stock applications, you can’t change defaults and that’s what really matters.

Read more:

• Feature Request: Choosing default and Control Center apps

Multiple timers

A small feature that would be considerably useful is multiple timers support with Continuity support, as Zac outlined last month. Such a feature, however, is not supported in iOS 11.

This feature would mean that you could have a 60 minute lasagna timer then add a 15 minute mixed vegetables timer along with a 5 minute bread timer, with label support and Continuity so the timers sync across devices.

Read more:

• Feature Request: Multiple timers with labels, Continuity, and Mac support

Anything else? 

One thing to note is that these features may come with iterative updates or be limited to later hardware. For instance, Apple could be saving dark mode for the OLED iPhone 8 later this fall. But for now, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Nevertheless, these are just a few of the features that have been atop wish lists for a while, but there are certainly more things that you may have wanted to see introduced with iOS 11 but that ultimately didn’t make the cut.

Let us know down in the comments what feature(s) you’re still waiting to see Apple add with iOS 12 and beyond…