It is obvious that iOS needs an update. It is really behind the competition both in design and functionality.
Making someone the face of the brand and mentioning him a lot seems to me just some marketing trick.
Making someone the face of the brand and mentioning him a lot seems to me just some marketing trick.
* The keyboard (mainly showing the proper case) * An exposed file system * The ability to set default applications (like default browser)
- Multitasking architecture is broken for many use cases. The biggest one is any sort of messaging application - your app doesn't actually execute any code when a notification comes in, so when your user reacts to the notification and launches your app, your app has to go and re-fetch much of the same data that the notification already carried. This comes across to the user as being slow and finicky.
- Basic UI paradigms are behind what the community is pushing. This isn't a lag behind competing OSes, but rather lagging behind itself. Apple used to be the flag-bearer for the state of the art of iOS UX, but the community has largely taken over to both good and bad results. See: pull to refresh, launch screens, side menus, etc. Apple can, and should, reclaim its position as being at the leading edge of its own platform.
- Lack of a proper inter-app communications channel. Intents on Android is very powerful, something like this is totally lacking in iOS.
- Lack of customizability when it comes to core functions. I cannot associate all mailto: links in the browser to GMail for example. I must use Apple's Mail. Ditto for Maps.
There are a bunch of others, but today is a rather busy day :P
Oh and and inter-app communications channel you're after is it? http://audiob.us
But there is a middle ground. Like already mentioned, if you register for location updates you can do a small amount of processing when your device moves and the OS wakes up a (very small) portion of your app to respond to it. If your app runs for too long here it will simply be killed.
Apple has created a very small number of cases where an app is even allowed to do this, which puts a huge cap on what people can do with it. The IM case is the most egregious: I can get a push notification saying "Bob messaged you: Let's meet up at..."
You tap on the notification, your app opens. It has to load from a cold start. Then it has to go to the server and fetch Bob's message to you, even though your notification obviously already had it. All in all, it's 10-15 seconds before you're actually reading the message, which is unacceptable.