Feature Request

If you’re an iCloud Photos user, you’re probably already familiar with the “Optimize Storage” option that keeps only the most recently downloaded photos and videos on your device, while the rest are only downloaded when you need them. On the other side, there’s iMessage with a terrible caching system – and Apple should do something about it.

iPhone voice transcription is already included in iMessage, and is available in some other chat apps – but not always for free. In Telegram, for example, you have to pay for a premium membership to get the feature.

The latest Bloomberg piece says that Apple is finally bringing audio transcription to the Voice Memo app, and this seems a perfect opportunity to make it a system-wide feature …

I’m sure it’s been said countless times before, but—now that would be a good name for a column!—iMessage could use a send quietly option that’s always available. Send quietly is a feature today, but it’s only available when the recipient is in a Focus mode.

The iPhone has become an increasingly capable camera over the years for both still photos and video, but there are still a number of big differences between an iPhone and a dedicated camera.

Sensor size is the biggest of these, of course. That has greatest impact on low-light photography, and can be challenging for video in particular. But the difference between hardware and software controls is another …

One macOS feature I really like is the ability to hide all the apps you’re not currently using with a single keystroke: CMD-Option-H.

I use this a lot when I’m writing and don’t need to reference materials in other windows. But there’s one significant issue with it …

It’s been reported that Apple is working on making iOS 18 the biggest update in years, and I’ve argued that it needs to do so, with artificial intelligence at its heart.

In particular, I’d like to see Apple bring AI smarts to HomeKit. That is, make Apple’s smart home ecosystem truly smart …

The vast majority of my smart home control comprises asking Siri to activate a scene – or having one automatically triggered by a time or event. For example, when going to bed, a single command switches on low lighting in the bedroom while switching off all other lights in the home.

Most of these scenes are created from scratch, thinking about exactly what I want to happen in particular circumstances – but there’s another approach I’d like to be able to take …

You know something’s bad when you’re about to write a feature request and then realise you already did do, more than a year go. Some 18 months after I asked Apple to fix the awful iPhone jiggle mode, nothing has changed, so consider this my renewed plea.

It was travel which brought it to mind last time, while this time around it was just doing a small rejig of my Home screen to remove a couple of apps I use less frequently, replacing them with ones I now use more often …

Apple Watch sleep tracking is the reason I decided to hold onto my old Series 4 model when I bought a Series 5. It was worth so little that I figured I’d hang onto it and simply swap watches when I got into bed to use the S4 as a dedicated sleep tracker.

Monitoring my reported sleep patterns in the Health app, however, has revealed that the Apple Watch isn’t actually very good at the finer details – like telling when I’m in bed, when I’m asleep, and when I’m asleep in bed …

As I sit in the Apple Park Visitor Center ahead of tomorrow’s WWDC keynote, I realized there is one last-minute iOS 17 feature request I want to make. In the era of bigger phone screens – and rumors that phone screens are about to get even bigger – it’s long overdue that Apple adds some sort of split-screen multitasking to the iPhone.

This week we heard about a new way Apple plans to let us use the iPhone 14 Pro always-on display in iOS 17. If you’ve ever wanted your iPhone to present more info panels in landscape, well, you’re in luck.

I hope there are more updates to customizing the standard Lock Screen as well. Specifically, there’s one thing about the Photo Shuffle version of the Lock Screen in iOS 16 that I hope changes in iOS 17.

Back in 2019, Apple introduced a new feature to iPhones, as part of iOS 13: Optimized Battery Charging. This is intended to protect iPhone batteries from unnecessary charge levels, in order to prolong their life.

The same feature subsequently came to AirPods, Apple Watch, and the Mac. But one Apple product doesn’t yet have it, and that’s the Apple Pencil …

One of the handy capabilities of Siri on HomePod that’s been available since 2018 is Personal Requests. It allows users to make voice commands that deal with what can be more private information from their specific iPhone and iPad. However, as it turns out, Personal Requests are still broken with Siri on HomePod often replying “I’m not sure who is speaking.”

I know, it’s about as ironic a request as could be made: a way to help us find AirTags! Specifically, a way to find AirTags with low batteries, which no longer have enough power for the sound alert or precision-finding function.

I explained recently why I’ll in the future do my AirTag battery replacement en masse, but didn’t mention one small piece of entertainment involved in this …

iPhone 14 Pro comes with a 48-megapixel wide-angle rear lens for the first time on an iPhone. It’s the first upgrade in megapixels since the iPhone 6s in 2015, which came with a 12-megapixel rear camera. However, the only way to take a 48MP photo with iPhone 14 Pro is to use ProRAW or third-party apps – but I wish I could take compressed 48MP photos using Apple’s Camera app.

If there’s anything in the Photos app I’m likely to want to view on my iPhone, it’s going to be my recent and favorite photos. Yet currently, the only way I can be sure of being able to do so with or without a mobile data connection is if I keep local copies of everything.

That’s because Apple offers only a binary choice: Keep all photos and video in local storage on your phone, or let the iPhone automatically manage things, deciding for itself when to offload storage to iCloud-only …

As always, Apple users have high expectations of iOS 16. In a few days from now, the company will preview during the WWDC 2022 keynote the future of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and other operating systems. 

Personally, if the company finally revamps the Low Power Battery pop-up on iOS 16, I’d already be satisfied. Here’s how Apple could do it. 

Universal translation on iPhone is a fantastically useful feature when traveling. Arthur C Clarke famously said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and this is one capability that still feels that way to me.

I’m in Buenos Aires at the moment, with extremely limited Spanish, and it’s incredible to me that I can point my iPhone camera at any Spanish text and have it instantly translated into English. But there is one big limitation that requires an extremely clunky workaround …

It shouldn’t have come to this, but here we are. It’s becoming impossible to browse Twitter on your iPhone while listening to music or a podcast. The app just interrupts what’s playing every time you scroll over an ad. It’s not just Twitter either – this is a common frustration across lots of apps with ads. There has to be a better way.

A few nights ago, I was a few ocean wave crashes away from falling asleep when a thought populated my mind. I desperately wanted to capture the idea without breaking the dark with my iPhone screen. Easy, I have a HomePod mini in the bedroom, so I’ll just use Siri! That’s when I realized the HomePod still has a handy voice feature left to learn.

There was a time when tech news was full of talk about long-range wireless charging using a technique known as RF power harvesting – using radio waves to charge devices around the home, without the need for charging pads.

While companies like Energous and Powercast made big promises for the tech, what’s currently possible in the real world is far more modest. But Samsung has demonstrated that trickle-charging a TV remote by Wi-Fi is possible today, and the very compact nature of the tech means that it could similarly be used to keep AirTags charged …