What Apple needs to do if they don't want to fall behind

Posted by henmartins on June 2, 2012 11:23 pm 39

With WWDC just around the corner, tech geeks are trying to guess what Apple is going to unveil in San Francisco. Here is what I think they need to do to catch up with 2012 platforms (Mainly Windows 8, Windows Phone Apollo and Android Jelly Bean)

iOS 6 - iPhone

Is on the smartphone market where Apple should feel threatened. Android phones have a considerably bigger market share than the iPhone and the newest Androids are really catching up with iPhone, offering some advantages (let me warn you: you're probably NOT going to agree 100% with me) like bigger screens, LTE (even though these networks aren't avaliable here in Brazil, where I live) and some software advantages (as well as disadvantages). The hardware is probably going to discussed in October, but Apple could get iOS to catch up with Android advantages by doing some little tweaks to the system

Share button: Seriously Apple, you can't even discuss that this is useless. I use it on my Galaxy S II a LOT.

"Widgets": Notification Center "Widgets" aren't widgets. And an API would be great. Just imagine a 15-minute-syncing widget showing the latest headlines. It would save some time and feel beautiful in our notification trays. (if they IMPOSE tight guidelines)

Siri API: Samuel Iglesias wrote a really good take on a Siri API and how they would be a challenge for developers. If Apple gives some pre-made semantics and trust developers on creating some new ones, I think it would be a big hit IF they give the user complete power on choosing which apps could access Siri.

New UIKit: I totally agree with Marco Arment's note on this - including the Tweetie part.

Filesystem:

  1. Apple is not giving up on their cruzade to kill filesystem as we know it
  2. I like their take on this. Filesystem management is by far the most complicated thing on computing and "saving files on the apps" just feels right.
iTunes: DITCH IT NOW!! iTunes became way too big! Reactivate and revamp iSync for people that don't want to use iCloud for Address Book and calendar syncing, put App Store together with Mac App Store, create an iBooks version for the Mac (it would be useful if we are researching for something we write) and separate music and videos into different, memory-efficient apps.

iOS 6 - iPad

I personally think that Apple's biggest asset on "controlling the future of technology" is the iPad. The app gap between the iPad and Android/W8 (a priori) is getting bigger day after day and I think that the only changes they need to do specifically on the iPad is enabling Siri on the new iPad and adding support for mouse input (I dream on they making such thing, even though I kinda know they are never going to make it), as well as the iPhone tweaks. And "complete widgets", as well as an OS X Mountain Lion-like Notification Center would be great too.

Sorry for the bad English and thanks for reading!