6 big iOS flaws Apple really needs to fix

Meeting higher standards often comes as a price of success, especially when your basic value proposition is that you set that higher bar. That’s where Apple stands as it prepares to unveil the sixth major version of iOS, the power behind the iPhone and iPad. Apple has succeeded in making the iPhone the standard-bearer for smartphones, displacing the BlackBerry as the corporate go-to and providing the model that Google tries to copy in Android. Apple has also redefined the notion of a tablet, after a decade of failed attempts by Microsoft. Thanks to the iPad, a tablet is increasingly a junior laptop, not merely a media consumption device like a Kindle e-reader.

Therein lies the issue. People like me who rely only on an iPad when on the road have accepted the inevitable shortcomings and flaws in such new technology. With iOS 6 and the iPhone 5 all but certain to debut later this year — and perhaps even next week at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) — and the third-gen iPad introduced in March, the excuse of being new has worn thin for several of these issues.

[ InfoWorld’s Galen Gruman explains the 12 ways large and small that iOS 5 falls short. | Discover the best productivity apps for your iPad. | Keep up on key mobile developments and insights with the Mobilize newsletter. ]

What you can expect in iOS 6 At the AllThingsD conference last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook promised “incredible” advances — he called out Siri in particular — to be revealed at WWDC. The rumor mill has (correctly, I believe) concluded that iOS 6 will offer a new, Google-free Maps app with unknown enhancements, and there are indications Apple will add more third-party services such as Facebook to its Share service for apps, as well as change the color scheme for iOS apps from the blue and black toolbars to silver ones — oh boy!

Based on what’s in the forthcoming OS X Mountain Lion, we’ll very likely see both snooze and do-not-disturb capabilities in notifications, sophisticated repeating events in Calendar, a VIP feature in Mail (a filtered view of emails from just those people you designate as VIPs), a Chrome-like “omnibar” (unified URL and search bar) in Safari, an offline capability in Safari’s Reading List, and iCloud Tabs (autosyncing of open and recent browser tabs across all your Apple devices) in Safari.

Cook, like his predecessor Steve Jobs, has picked up the “post-PC” term to describe the new form of computing that Apple has ignited and that the forthcoming Microsoft Windows 8 adopts. Fair enough, but it’s time for the post-PC computing to deliver some basics of the old PC form. Here are the major flaws in iOS that Apple needs to deal with now for power users as its “post-PC” lineup becomes commonplace and, dare I say, mature.

1. Mail filtering needs to be enabled and synced We all get too much junk mail, but iOS does nothing to help address that flood. It needs to do so, just as Apple’s Mail on OS X does. Given the horsepower in recent iPhones and iPads, there’s no excuse not to use the same mail-filtering rules that OS X supports. Those rules should sync via iCloud among your Mac and iOS devices, just as email, contacts, appointments, bookmarks, reminders, photos, music, videos, e-books, documents, and notes do.

I suspect Apple will let this feature omission remain in iOS 6. Why? Because OS X Mountain Lion doesn’t sync the same mail rules among Macs in its enhanced iCloud capabilities. If Macs don’t sync such filtering rules, it’s hard to believe that iOS devices would. Of course, maybe Apple will start this capability on iOS — after all, iOS synced documents a whole year before Apple brought that ability to OS X (in Mountain Lion). But given all the attention in OS X Mountain Lion to iCloud syncing, as well as the enhancements to repeating calendar events, it seems odd that Apple would not have added mail filters to the sync portfolio in OS X Mountain Lion and followed up in iOS 6 for mobile devices.

Chances are that those of us who rely on iPads during significant portions of our day — and for multiple days when traveling — will continue to manually delete dozens of junk mails a day and move emails to their appropriate folders. It’s a real annoyance — and an unnecessary one.

2. File upload needs to be built in as a core service iOS takes a lot of heat for not having a traditional file system. I agree with Apple’s decision not to offer a file system but to instead save documents in their applications’ sandboxes, so apps decide what other apps they allow users to share with. Although a common file system is very convenient, it’s led to untold costs and frustrations related to viruses and other malware infecting the OS and software. After 20-plus years of malware on Windows and now Android, it’s clear that the security industry has no solution to this problem. We need a different approach at the core — which is what iOS’s sandboxing approach is all about and why Apple is pushing the sandboxing approach in OS X.

That doesn’t excuse iOS’s difficulty in sharing files, especially with Web-based services. iOS has a facility called Open In that lets apps say which file formats they can work with and are willing to accept from other apps — it’s a permissions-based way to enable file sharing. Open In works well, at least when developers use it. But iOS needs a Send Out facility within Open In or as a parallel service.

The need is acute on the Web. If you use a photo-sharing service, a content management system, or an FTP client, you know what I mean. You can’t transfer files from an iOS app to one of these Web-based services, even though you can sometimes transfer files from them (using Open In in Safari or iOS’s Quick Look preview facility). That “only in iOS” approach is unworkable in many cases, and as iOS adds more apps that manipulate content, it’s becoming a major obstacle.

For example, if you use iPhoto on an iPad to enhance your photos taken on the iPhone and synced via iCloud, you can’t upload those files to a Web service from your iPad or iPhone. Instead, you have to wait till you get to your computer, sync the files to it via iCloud or iTunes, then upload the photos from your computer. Ditto for an Internet-based editing app such as SharePoint or Google Docs. I experience this barrier routinely when working in InfoWorld’s Drupal-based Web content management system, where I can do almost everything on the iPad I can on my Mac. One big exception is I can edit but not upload images to the CMS, which is a problem when I’m on the road.

3. Safari needs to support common AJAX libraries completely A related issue is Safari’s partial support of common AJAX libraries such as TinyMCE. These open source libraries are essential extensions to HTML and JavaScript that function-rich websites rely on. For example, a common AJAX widget is the reordering widget that you drag to reorder elements in a list. But you can’t drag such UI widgets in iOS, so you can’t use Web services that rely on them. Similarly, the TinyMCE word processor open source AJAX plug-in is only partially supported in Safari, so you can use just some of its tools.

It’s great that Safari on iOS has the most HTML5 support of any mobile OS’s browser, beating all versions of Android, Windows Phone, Bada, and BlackBerry. But HTML5 is not the only story on the Web, nor is it likely to be. Plus, one of the hallmarks of HTML5 is its applike capabilities, so a mobile OS that supports them needs to support the complementary AJAX services almost certainly to be used in concert. Yes, I know Safari’s AJAX support beats that of its competitors, but it’s not good enough to rely on for that “junior laptop” role the iPad has taken on. Given their open source nature, Apple could in fact create the enabling technology and make it available to all WebKit-based browsers.

4. Groups creation and Mail usage need to be enabled You still can’t create groups in the Contacts app on iOS, even though you can edit group membership for groups that you created on your Mac or PC. This is silly, especially because Apple fixed the similar omission in the Photos app for albums last fall. Worse, you can’t send a message to everyone in a group in Mail by simply selecting the group name as an addressee. When you do that, the group’s list opens up, forcing you to select one (and only one) member to add to the To or Cc list; you need to repeat the process for each person in the group you want to send the email to.

5. Reminders needs an all-tasks view and a way to reorder items The Reminders app introduced in iOS 5 is the kind of app you would have expected much earlier in the evolution of iOS. Like many early iOS apps, it is a mix of cool functionality (such as location-based reminders on the iPhone) and head-scratcher omissions. The big head-scratcher is the lack of an all-tasks view so that you can see all your accounts’ tasks in one place, just as you can see all your accounts’ emails in Mail, all your accounts’ appointments in Calendar, all your notes in Notes, and all your contacts in Contacts. For a company that values consistency and universality in core functions, this omission is bizarre.

The other Reminders head-scratcher is the inability to reorder tasks in your to-do lists. Need I say more?

6. App icons need to support a widgets mode Android users love the widgets they can put on their home screens, and Windows Phone 7 users revel in its live tiles that make the big app buttons into mini-apps. Apple can — and should — learn from this love.

Right now, a few Apple app icons have live information, such as Calendar and Newsstand, and of course there are badges that let you know if you have new messages or updates. The notification tray that Apple “borrowed” from Android also provides widgetlike functionality for the Weather app on the iPhone. The tray has only so much room, so it’s not appropriate to become the widget center.

A better option would be to let app icons be widgets: Users would tap and hold (“long-tap,” in Android parlance) an app icon to have its widget version appear, then tap a Close button to return to the regular view. After all, Apple already uses the long-tap approach to reordering app icons in the home screens and to closing apps in the multitasking dock.

I don’t expect iOS 6 will do this, but iOS 7 should for sure.

Apple: Please fill in the holes even as you extend iOS’s reach There are lots of other issues Apple should address, as I’ve listed previously: the lack of a “return to app” gesture; the lack of separate signatures for each email account; the lack of an account label when viewing all emails, notes, or contacts; the lack of text-formatting shortcuts; the numerous steps needed to access Bluetooth settings; and the tendency of the onscreen keyboard to split when you type fast.

I also wish iCloud did a better job of syncing my music with iTunes Match enabled — why do so many album covers not sync to iOS when iTunes Match is in use? But that’s a minor complaint. I can live with blank album covers, but I’d prefer not to with the six major flaws described in this post.

This article, “6 big iOS flaws Apple really needs to fix,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.