Three features I would like to see with iOS 18.
With iOS18 expected to have a radical redesign and more ambitious features, I would like to see these three features added in iOS 18 to make a more personal, consistent, and professional experience.
1. Extended Dynamic Island Capabilities
All notifications should be coming through the dynamic island, no exception. With its ability to expand to multiple heights and widths, it is a no-brainer for all notifications to come through the Island.
It would make it more seamless, and quite frankly, more dynamic.
All the different sizes of the dynamic island.
2. Fully functioning icon packs that are easy to configure
You can get custom icons for your iPhone, but in its current state, this is sort of a deal-breaker for me since custom icons cannot show the red badge notifications, making me think that I have no messages or emails when I have a ton to read.
I have certain icons that are clean and nameless, but I don’t need red badge notifications for them. Other apps I do need notifications for, so there’s a mix of apps with text and shortcuts without text. It’s too inconsistent and not as personal as I would like it to be.
The process for adding custom icons is also very cumbersome and time consuming with the shortcuts app.
Lastly, 3rd party icons should have access to the proper APIs to be dynamic icons, just like Apple’s Calendar and Clock icons.
Current setup (left) vs desired setup (right)
3. More Pro camera features
The stock camera app has been practically the same since its redesign in iOS7, but it needs more Pro features. A Pro iPhone should have the ability to set your white balance manually. There’s nothing worse than a video constantly changing color with auto white balance.
The biggest handicap of the Pro iPhones is that you can’t manually pick which lens you are using. Apple uses its algorithm to determine if your zoomed shot will be better with a crop of the main sensor vs the actual telephoto lens itself. This is very frustrating in awkward light situations where the telephoto lens will objectively be the better lens, but the phone still decides to use the main lens with a 5x digital zoom. I had to try to have the phone switch to the telephoto lens (which it finally did) in this grim scene below:
Main camera 1x zoom
Main camera cropped to 5x zoom - the iPhone thought this would be a better picture…
When the 5x telephoto lens here has sharper details and better bokeh.
I’m sure I will have more ideas on what I would like to see in iOS 18.