Pocket Gamer's ultimate iOS 8 wish list

Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference will take place on June 2nd. During the 5-day conference, Apple's already promised that we "will learn about the future of iOS".

Yes, Apple will take the wraps off iOS 8 early next month. You can bet our house on it.

Many of you probably don't give a hoot about a bunch of techy types packed into an air-conditioned conference centre, whooping and hollering and talking about code and interface design.

But, really, if you're an avid pocket gamer, the chances are you own an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Which means that you probably interact with Apple's mobile operating system on a daily basis.

As such, what Apple decides to do next with iOS may well matter to you more than you think.

There are numerous rumours and reports surrounding some of the things Apple may be including in iOS 8, but here's a list of eight things - large and small - we'd really like to see in it.

It's far from the biggest addition we'd like to see in iOS 8, but we'll start with the one that would have the most benefit to gamers. Yes, even more than changing the weirdly nebulous Game Center design.

Go into the Google Play Store on an Android device and navigate to a game. Next to the familiar scrolling screenshot thumbnails, you'll notice one with a 'play' symbol on it. It's a video.

Yes, prior to purchasing or downloading a new game, you can watch a preview video of it in action, right there and then on your device. It's great for getting a quick overview of a game about which you may not know that much. Apple should - ahem - copy this idea.

People have been asking for Apple to address this for years, but it remains one of the chief irritations with iOS.

Click on a web link in an email and it'll open in Safari. Click on a set of co-ordinates in a web page and you'll be whisked off to Maps. Click on a date in an SMS and it will open in Calendar.

Do you see the problem here? A lot of people don't use Apple's own apps, preferring third-party alternatives. In the case of web browsing and maps, for example, Google is widely held to be the king (with Chrome and Google Maps, respectively).

While you can use such alternative apps freely on iOS, you can't set iOS to recognise them as your default selection when shortcuts crop up, such as in the above everyday examples. This is rather annoying.

It's also not, we should add, something with which Android users have to put up.

Sticking with the theme of Apple's first-party apps, we'd love more control over which apps come pre-installed on iOS 8.

Who here uses the Stocks app? Anyone? How about Compass? I see. Passbook? That figures. Then why on earth can't we delete them? Or at the very least disable and hide them?

I suspect large numbers of iPhone users have a folder on their Home screen containing all of the Apple apps they never use. I've called mine "Apple apps" for the sake of brevity, but I'd like to put something ruder.

One third-party app 'category' Apple won't even consider allowing onto its App Store is the alternative keyboard. That's fine. I can respect that.

After all, you can't really praise Apple's tightly integrated design philosophy and then moan when it doesn't let you tinker with it.

But if you're going to insist on your own keyboard, Apple, at least take steps to improve it to level of your rivals. As it is, Apple has hardly touched it since the days of the first iPhone, beyond a few minor cosmetic tweaks.

Where's the swipe-based (and Swype-like) input option that lets you effectively indulge in some joined-up typing? Where's the intelligent word suggestion system that offers multiple possible words based on your initial letter inputs?

Again, all of Apple's main rivals have such options up their virtual sleeves, making for quicker and more fluid text input.

Being someone who uses a spread of iOS and Android devices for my work, I was one of those bores who kept whining about the lack of a notification centre in Apple's mobile OS.

You see, having experienced what a useful tool it can be in Android, it seemed imperative that Apple incorporate something similar into iOS.

Well, Apple's Notification Center debuted in iOS 6, and was improved considerably in iOS 7. And you know what? I don't really use it.

It's just not as clear, concise, or useful as the Android equivalent. There's that whole fiddly three-tabbed setup that never seems to show you quite what you want at any one time. Then, there's the annoying ordering by notification type rather than time.

And the amount of text shown on the screen isn't frequently useful enough for figuring out whether you need to deal with the notification or not.

Oh, and please could we have the ability to launch quick actions from within the notifications, such as initiating message replies? On the subject, a dismiss-all button would be handy.

Just make Notification Center BETTER, okay, Apple?

Touch ID works. In fact, it works well. And this isn't something that should be dismissed lightly. Just check out Samsung's own botched attempt at fingerprint authentication for proof of that.

Yep, Touch ID is great. But it needs to employed for more tasks if it's to be truly useful.

At present, all Touch ID does is unlock your iPhone and authorise App Store payments. In iOS 8, we would hope that it would allow you to do additional things, like authorise wider mobile and web payments or gain access to secure third-party apps and web accounts.

Just to be clear, this doesn't have to mean giving your biometric data to a whole bunch of companies and financial institutions. Apple's Keychain system can already play the part of custodian to your various passwords, so your fingerprint could simply be used to get access to that.

Proper downloaded file storage


We know that Apple is never going to grant you a desktop-like file access system with a vast tree of folders containing all the pictures, MP3 files, and documents you've ever viewed on your iPhone. Frankly, we don't want it to.

But we would like a single location in which all of our downloaded documents are stored for later reference.

Think of those documents you've download from emails, all those PDF menus you've downloaded from restaurant websites, and the like. Wouldn't it be good if you could just nip into a single location to view all of these files, rather than have to navigate to specific source apps or locate the original email or link?

iMessage is great, isn't it? We'd like it even more if we could use it like Messages on Mac and have it deal with our Google account chats, too.

The more external chat and messaging accounts Apple can pull in to iMessage, the less switching between multiple chat apps we'll have to do.

And that can only be a good thing.