7 ms·

The real advancements majority of users would notice: - Get rid of green text when messaging Android phones - More battery life. - Better camera (arguably al

The real advancements majority of users would notice: - Get rid of green text when messaging Android phones - More battery life. - Better camera (arguably already achieved) - lesser issue but fix the stupid bugs with storage/duplication with pictures and messages. I am already paying for a TB level plan with iCloud. How can my phone possibly run out of storage? That’s it. All the AI stuff is marginal at best and useless at worst. The new UI stuff they introduced sometime ago? Doesn’t really get used by anyone I know. Control center was probably the last useful feature added. If they did a release where they removed features to simplify iOS I would upgrade.

peab 2y ago
where'd you see no more green text?
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  iOS 18 (available for all iphones since 2nd gen SE) will support RCS I don't actually know how this will be implemented into iMessage but it's supposed to bring feature parity between android and apple. EDIT: looks like still green bubbles https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apples-rcs-texting-starts-improving-green-bubble-chats-with-ios-18-beta/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apples-rcs-texting-starts-i...
  - inferiorhuman 2y ago
    RCS brings plenty of new monetization and spam opportunities but doesn't bring feature parity. Or did Google decide to open up their proprietary extensions to non-Google RCS clients?
    - vel0city 2y ago
      There's a massive feature benefit: finally allowing multi-megabyte attachments. Hopefully pictures and videos won't be compressed to fit into 600KB.
      - inferiorhuman 2y ago
        This is entirely possible with MMS but for most carriers refusing to adopt 3GPP's current recommendations. This is also entirely possible with other messaging apps available on iOS but for American android users refusing to use other apps.
        vel0city 2y ago
        That's like suggesting it's entirely to run jumbo frames it's just ISPs don't support it. Like, sure, yeah it's possible but all the stacks in between are too heavily ossified. > but for American android users refusing to use other apps. As if it's just those pesky Android users that won't just use another app. Lots of my contacts only want iMessage. Show me the APK signed by Apple, the Google store page managed by them, and I'll install it.
        inferiorhuman 2y ago
        You realize iMessage and RCS are two different things, right?
        vel0city 2y ago
        > but for American android users You realize it's not me, the Android user, being unwilling to use something other than iMessage/SMS? It is the iPhone users I wish to communicate with that don't want to use Whatsapp/Signal/LINE/Facebook Messenger/Element/Telegram/WeChat/Threema/Viber/GroupMe/Discourd/Teams/Allo/Discord. Give me an app that actually directly supports iMessage on Android and I'll use it. Not something which is trying to proxy through some other device. Something either made or directly blessed by Apple. Messages is the app. It currently supports SMS/MMS and iMessage protocols. It will soon also support RCS. So soon all those people who will only use Messages on their phones will be able to send and receive high quality videos and images with me. I'm quite excited for the change. Suggesting RCS doesn't bring any new features other than advertising and spam is being extremely disingenuous. Larger attachments and other extensions, while not quite feature parity with iMessage, are leagues ahead of what was available by SMS and MMS. Effectively available, not just what was theoretically allowable by a spec but not actually possible due to limitations with service providers.
    - jazzyjackson 2y ago
      You know better than I - can I ask what RCS is doing that leads Google to disable it on devices with unlocked bootloaders? Are devices meant to only accept messages that have been signed by a vendor or something? I thought it was just a new messaging standard but I guess there's a lot that goes into the security of it. But why can Signal run e2ee messages on unsavory devices but googles won't let me send a text message unless they've signed the whole stack?
      - inferiorhuman 2y ago
        No idea.
  - criddell 2y ago
    Unless the RCS messages are end-to-end encrypted, they should stay green IMHO.
    - sneak 2y ago
      iMessage isn’t meaningfully end to end encrypted either, so it shouldn’t get a different color by that logic. The automated backups (which are not e2ee) serve as endpoint key escrow (to the middle service), backdooring the e2ee of iMessage.
      - ndeast 2y ago
        i am surprised (am i really?) that apple never implemented a toggle to E2EE your icloud backup, just like you can backing up locally through itunes. thankfully you can just completely disable iCloud Backup.
        edualm 2y ago
        iCloud Backups can be E2EE encrypted if you enable advanced data protection.
- paxys 2y ago
  They are talking about features they'd like to see.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
iteratethis 2y ago
Agreed on battery life. It's such a pity that advances in battery tech is never given back to the user. As for green text, this is purely a US thing. Most of the rest of the world uses Whatsapp.
- lloeki 2y ago
  Most of the rest of the world doesn't give a rat's ass about bubble colour and just use SMS, including for sharing pictures. I don't have WhatsApp and literally nobody ever asked me to use it, even if I know they have it. they just flat out don't care as long as a message gets across.
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    I don’t know any part of the world still using SMS. What part of the world is that?
    - mattnewton 2y ago
      Countries where telecom competition lead to unlimited sms early enough and/or iPhone/iMessage adoption meant people weren’t motivated to install third party apps. The US and to a lesser extend the UK are the only countries I’m aware of this happening? But the UK plans added unlimited sms later and so WhatsApp has >50% market penetration there unlike the US.
      - lloeki 2y ago
        (responding to both) France. We've had unlimited SMS plans since what, 2005? It's been a guaranteed solid 10-15+ years nobody thinks that SMS used to be a paid-per-unit (whether you got a package or not) thing. Sure people use a variety of messenger apps, Whatsapp, Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, Signal, Snapchat. Since you don't have a guarantee that any one person is using this or that the default messaging app (Messages on iOS, whatever it is on Android) SMS is the safest bet that always works. That's typically what people use when they get someone 's contact: hand over phone, ask to type number in focused input field, send $firstname SMS; bam, handshake done. > WhatsApp has >50% market penetration there Lots of people here have WhatsApp. Doesn't mean it's their go-to, they still don't ditch SMS[0] nor dunk on "green bubbles". And then if both parties have an iPhone it just so happens that they obliviously converse over iMessage as a side effect. [0] Except for group chats. But then they just create groups in whatever's at hand, which may or may not be WhatsApp. And that's mostly because SMS group messaging is thoroughly broken (as in it works more like email than IRC and people want the latter). But for 1:1? SMS is brutally consistent.
Tepix 2y ago
Also, AirDrop and mobile hotspot are unreliable, if Apple could make them always work, that‘d be noticeable.
- mhink 2y ago
  For AirDrop, at least, I've found it to be very reliable, with one caveat that always tripped me up before I realized it: *the recipient's phone needs to be unlocked*. This completely changed the game for me, and now me and my wife use it all the time.
  - nickthegreek 2y ago
    Tapping the top of your phones together is the best way I found.
inferiorhuman 2y ago
Get rid of green text when messaging Android phones Do you mean green background? Because the non-iMessage bubbles are the white text on a green background for outgoing messages only. Given that the most vocal folks seem to be Android users who care about the background color of someone else's messages I doubt the majority of iPhone users care, would notice, or are even using the Messages app in the first place. Certainly if you're calling it green text you're not paying much attention either. Better camera (arguably already achieved) Apple can still get rid of that hideous camera bump.
dividedbyzero 2y ago
> Get rid of green text when messaging Android phones I don't think iMessage is big anywhere outside the US (which appears to account for about 9% of iPhone users). I don't think a majority of global users even knows there are different colors.
- epolanski 2y ago
  I know virtually nobody using iMessage in southern Europe.
- naming_the_user 2y ago
  Completely not a thing in the UK. The app is a portal for SMS based auth and that's it. Everyone uses WhatsApp or other social network based messengers.
  - jascination 2y ago
    Australia / Asia too, no one cares about iMessage
  - ghosty141 2y ago
    Same in Germany. Everybody used WhatsApp
- mportela 2y ago
  I have lived in Brazil, Australia, Spain, and France. iMessage was never a thing in these markets.
- synicalx 2y ago
  RCS messages are also still going to show up in green bubbles as far as I know.
  - artursapek 2y ago
    they are. the intentionally-low-contrast tone of green that Apple passive aggressively punishes Android users with.
treflop 2y ago
The AI stuff could be useful if it makes Siri more useful. Like when I'm listening to a Spotify playlist and I want to like the song or save it to a playlist while driving, it would be amazing if I could just tell Siri to do it for me. As-is, sometimes it tells me it doesn't how to play songs on Spotify. Or they were showing how you would be able to look for photo by describing it.
- knodi123 2y ago
  I have a beta of the new Siri, and it's still less impressive than the the OK Google I gave up half a decade ago. The capability set is indistinguishable.
- dwaite 2y ago
  > Like when I'm listening to a Spotify playlist and I want to like the song or save it to a playlist while driving, it would be amazing if I could just tell Siri to do it for me Spotify already supports liking a song via Siri. https://support.spotify.com/us/article/siri-and-spotify/ https://support.spotify.com/us/article/siri-and-spotify/ Unfortunately adding to a playlist would require Spotify to add that capability. Siri doesn't learn how to navigate third party UI and infer potential actions, the context of what is currently going on and the actions which can be performed need to be codified by the developer. Siri is a hybrid dictation and command-and-control system (at least today), which is why it sometimes decides the closest action to what you said is something obviously different from what you asked for. Unfortunately this is done via a dynamic vocabulary, so it leads to situations where something you were able to ask for before (like the local weather) suddenly changes behavior because you installed an app with "weather" in its metadata. This also poses a unique problem for streaming and downloading media services, because the valid targets for the command aren't locally known - it's all the media on Spotify in this case. So "play enter sandman" won't know to infer whether you are asking to play an album in the cloud vs a game which hasn't been installed vs the "Sandman" series on Netflix - it may instead decide the best guess was you meant you wanted to "read" the books you have locally installed.
makeitdouble 2y ago
> Better camera (arguably already achieved) I feel the later generation of phones went back a bit as they have more aggressive processing. It can work great, but the hit or miss ratio is worse, in particular noise processing can be way off. That's crazy the budget Pixel a lone gets overall better photos than a top of the line iPhone.
- tuatoru 2y ago
  I don't see a need to upgrade my Xs. I can print publishable photos to A2 size, and that's big enough for me.
- sosuke 2y ago
  I’ve searched and searched for a way to turn off the extra processing. The only methods are third party camera apps or doing burst mode for every picture. I preferred it when they saved the original and processed photos. Now there is no way to turn it off. Worst part for me is when I get to see a perfect picture that gets processed a blink later and can never be recovered.
  - trinix912 2y ago
    > Worst part for me is when I get to see a perfect picture that gets processed a blink later and can never be recovered. This has happened to me way too many times. I take a picture, it looks great, then shortly after it gets processed so badly it's all blurred up with no return because of some forced long exposure low light compensation feature that cannot be disabled.
    - sosuke 2y ago
      If you want to try out the “fix” goto camera settings and turn on “prioritize faster shooting” then in the camera app on the take picture button: tap, hold, drag left. It should stay white and play a shutter sound. There is a chance to do a similar action that just starts a recording but the button goes red for that.
      - 2y ago
jm4 2y ago
How about getting rid of that stupid back button in the top left corner when an app opens another app? It drives me crazy seeing it every time I click a link in a message. It's the most useless thing. There's already a good app switcher. What is the point of the back button?
- idle_zealot 2y ago
  I would hate that change. I usually hold my phone in my left hand, and can reach the back button with my thumb. Using the swipe gesture at the bottom of the screen to switch apps would require switching to a two-handed grip for that one common action. It's not ideal; I'd like to see more attention given to multitasking in general, the re-arranging deck of cards system has always been counterintuitive and clumbsy in my opinion.
  - jm4 2y ago
    So is it mainly for lefties? I hold my phone with my right hand and that button is inaccessible. Based on the downvotes, I feel like I must be missing something.
    - idle_zealot 2y ago
      iOS is kinda a mess when it comes to what's easy for people who hold their phones in their left versus right hands. That back button is definitely for left-handers, but then the control center is clearly better for right-handers. The slide-from-screen-edge-to-go-back gesture is only usable in the left hand, and the slide-from-screen-edge-to-go-forward gesture is only usable with the right hand. My conclusion is that iOS is only really designed to be used with both hands gripping the edges of the phone, which meshes with their ever-increasing screen sizes. The new Pro Max is 6.9"!! That's basically a tablet.
  - eviks 2y ago
    you wouldn't hate it since a proper implementation would make it optional
baby 2y ago
Or a folding phone? That would be huge
- IgorPartola 2y ago
  Only half as huge :)
ksec 2y ago
>Better camera (arguably already achieved) For the Pro Model. Yes. Not for the normal iPhone though. 2x Optical Zoom is barely enough. Especially when I default to taking photos with 1.8x which fits my view point a lot better. So when I get 5x optical zoom it is more like 2.5x only. And if there is one thing I would add to the list is weight. The Pro model is too heavy.

peab 2y ago

where'd you see no more green text?

jazzyjackson 2y ago
iOS 18 (available for all iphones since 2nd gen SE) will support RCS I don't actually know how this will be implemented into iMessage but it's supposed to bring feature parity between android and apple. EDIT: looks like still green bubbles https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apples-rcs-texting-starts-improving-green-bubble-chats-with-ios-18-beta/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apples-rcs-texting-starts-i...
- inferiorhuman 2y ago
  RCS brings plenty of new monetization and spam opportunities but doesn't bring feature parity. Or did Google decide to open up their proprietary extensions to non-Google RCS clients?
  - vel0city 2y ago
    There's a massive feature benefit: finally allowing multi-megabyte attachments. Hopefully pictures and videos won't be compressed to fit into 600KB.
    - inferiorhuman 2y ago
      This is entirely possible with MMS but for most carriers refusing to adopt 3GPP's current recommendations. This is also entirely possible with other messaging apps available on iOS but for American android users refusing to use other apps.
      - vel0city 2y ago
        That's like suggesting it's entirely to run jumbo frames it's just ISPs don't support it. Like, sure, yeah it's possible but all the stacks in between are too heavily ossified. > but for American android users refusing to use other apps. As if it's just those pesky Android users that won't just use another app. Lots of my contacts only want iMessage. Show me the APK signed by Apple, the Google store page managed by them, and I'll install it.
        inferiorhuman 2y ago
        You realize iMessage and RCS are two different things, right?
        vel0city 2y ago
        > but for American android users You realize it's not me, the Android user, being unwilling to use something other than iMessage/SMS? It is the iPhone users I wish to communicate with that don't want to use Whatsapp/Signal/LINE/Facebook Messenger/Element/Telegram/WeChat/Threema/Viber/GroupMe/Discourd/Teams/Allo/Discord. Give me an app that actually directly supports iMessage on Android and I'll use it. Not something which is trying to proxy through some other device. Something either made or directly blessed by Apple. Messages is the app. It currently supports SMS/MMS and iMessage protocols. It will soon also support RCS. So soon all those people who will only use Messages on their phones will be able to send and receive high quality videos and images with me. I'm quite excited for the change. Suggesting RCS doesn't bring any new features other than advertising and spam is being extremely disingenuous. Larger attachments and other extensions, while not quite feature parity with iMessage, are leagues ahead of what was available by SMS and MMS. Effectively available, not just what was theoretically allowable by a spec but not actually possible due to limitations with service providers.
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    You know better than I - can I ask what RCS is doing that leads Google to disable it on devices with unlocked bootloaders? Are devices meant to only accept messages that have been signed by a vendor or something? I thought it was just a new messaging standard but I guess there's a lot that goes into the security of it. But why can Signal run e2ee messages on unsavory devices but googles won't let me send a text message unless they've signed the whole stack?
    - inferiorhuman 2y ago
      No idea.
- criddell 2y ago
  Unless the RCS messages are end-to-end encrypted, they should stay green IMHO.
  - sneak 2y ago
    iMessage isn’t meaningfully end to end encrypted either, so it shouldn’t get a different color by that logic. The automated backups (which are not e2ee) serve as endpoint key escrow (to the middle service), backdooring the e2ee of iMessage.
    - ndeast 2y ago
      i am surprised (am i really?) that apple never implemented a toggle to E2EE your icloud backup, just like you can backing up locally through itunes. thankfully you can just completely disable iCloud Backup.
      - edualm 2y ago
        iCloud Backups can be E2EE encrypted if you enable advanced data protection.
paxys 2y ago
They are talking about features they'd like to see.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

iteratethis 2y ago

Agreed on battery life. It's such a pity that advances in battery tech is never given back to the user. As for green text, this is purely a US thing. Most of the rest of the world uses Whatsapp.

lloeki 2y ago
Most of the rest of the world doesn't give a rat's ass about bubble colour and just use SMS, including for sharing pictures. I don't have WhatsApp and literally nobody ever asked me to use it, even if I know they have it. they just flat out don't care as long as a message gets across.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  I don’t know any part of the world still using SMS. What part of the world is that?
  - mattnewton 2y ago
    Countries where telecom competition lead to unlimited sms early enough and/or iPhone/iMessage adoption meant people weren’t motivated to install third party apps. The US and to a lesser extend the UK are the only countries I’m aware of this happening? But the UK plans added unlimited sms later and so WhatsApp has >50% market penetration there unlike the US.
    - lloeki 2y ago
      (responding to both) France. We've had unlimited SMS plans since what, 2005? It's been a guaranteed solid 10-15+ years nobody thinks that SMS used to be a paid-per-unit (whether you got a package or not) thing. Sure people use a variety of messenger apps, Whatsapp, Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, Signal, Snapchat. Since you don't have a guarantee that any one person is using this or that the default messaging app (Messages on iOS, whatever it is on Android) SMS is the safest bet that always works. That's typically what people use when they get someone 's contact: hand over phone, ask to type number in focused input field, send $firstname SMS; bam, handshake done. > WhatsApp has >50% market penetration there Lots of people here have WhatsApp. Doesn't mean it's their go-to, they still don't ditch SMS[0] nor dunk on "green bubbles". And then if both parties have an iPhone it just so happens that they obliviously converse over iMessage as a side effect. [0] Except for group chats. But then they just create groups in whatever's at hand, which may or may not be WhatsApp. And that's mostly because SMS group messaging is thoroughly broken (as in it works more like email than IRC and people want the latter). But for 1:1? SMS is brutally consistent.

Tepix 2y ago

Also, AirDrop and mobile hotspot are unreliable, if Apple could make them always work, that‘d be noticeable.

mhink 2y ago
For AirDrop, at least, I've found it to be very reliable, with one caveat that always tripped me up before I realized it: *the recipient's phone needs to be unlocked*. This completely changed the game for me, and now me and my wife use it all the time.
- nickthegreek 2y ago
  Tapping the top of your phones together is the best way I found.

inferiorhuman 2y ago

Get rid of green text when messaging Android phones Do you mean green background? Because the non-iMessage bubbles are the white text on a green background for outgoing messages only. Given that the most vocal folks seem to be Android users who care about the background color of someone else's messages I doubt the majority of iPhone users care, would notice, or are even using the Messages app in the first place. Certainly if you're calling it green text you're not paying much attention either. Better camera (arguably already achieved) Apple can still get rid of that hideous camera bump.

dividedbyzero 2y ago

> Get rid of green text when messaging Android phones I don't think iMessage is big anywhere outside the US (which appears to account for about 9% of iPhone users). I don't think a majority of global users even knows there are different colors.

epolanski 2y ago
I know virtually nobody using iMessage in southern Europe.
naming_the_user 2y ago
Completely not a thing in the UK. The app is a portal for SMS based auth and that's it. Everyone uses WhatsApp or other social network based messengers.
- jascination 2y ago
  Australia / Asia too, no one cares about iMessage
- ghosty141 2y ago
  Same in Germany. Everybody used WhatsApp
mportela 2y ago
I have lived in Brazil, Australia, Spain, and France. iMessage was never a thing in these markets.
synicalx 2y ago
RCS messages are also still going to show up in green bubbles as far as I know.
- artursapek 2y ago
  they are. the intentionally-low-contrast tone of green that Apple passive aggressively punishes Android users with.

treflop 2y ago

The AI stuff could be useful if it makes Siri more useful. Like when I'm listening to a Spotify playlist and I want to like the song or save it to a playlist while driving, it would be amazing if I could just tell Siri to do it for me. As-is, sometimes it tells me it doesn't how to play songs on Spotify. Or they were showing how you would be able to look for photo by describing it.

knodi123 2y ago
I have a beta of the new Siri, and it's still less impressive than the the OK Google I gave up half a decade ago. The capability set is indistinguishable.
dwaite 2y ago
> Like when I'm listening to a Spotify playlist and I want to like the song or save it to a playlist while driving, it would be amazing if I could just tell Siri to do it for me Spotify already supports liking a song via Siri. https://support.spotify.com/us/article/siri-and-spotify/ https://support.spotify.com/us/article/siri-and-spotify/ Unfortunately adding to a playlist would require Spotify to add that capability. Siri doesn't learn how to navigate third party UI and infer potential actions, the context of what is currently going on and the actions which can be performed need to be codified by the developer. Siri is a hybrid dictation and command-and-control system (at least today), which is why it sometimes decides the closest action to what you said is something obviously different from what you asked for. Unfortunately this is done via a dynamic vocabulary, so it leads to situations where something you were able to ask for before (like the local weather) suddenly changes behavior because you installed an app with "weather" in its metadata. This also poses a unique problem for streaming and downloading media services, because the valid targets for the command aren't locally known - it's all the media on Spotify in this case. So "play enter sandman" won't know to infer whether you are asking to play an album in the cloud vs a game which hasn't been installed vs the "Sandman" series on Netflix - it may instead decide the best guess was you meant you wanted to "read" the books you have locally installed.

makeitdouble 2y ago

> Better camera (arguably already achieved) I feel the later generation of phones went back a bit as they have more aggressive processing. It can work great, but the hit or miss ratio is worse, in particular noise processing can be way off. That's crazy the budget Pixel a lone gets overall better photos than a top of the line iPhone.

tuatoru 2y ago
I don't see a need to upgrade my Xs. I can print publishable photos to A2 size, and that's big enough for me.
sosuke 2y ago
I’ve searched and searched for a way to turn off the extra processing. The only methods are third party camera apps or doing burst mode for every picture. I preferred it when they saved the original and processed photos. Now there is no way to turn it off. Worst part for me is when I get to see a perfect picture that gets processed a blink later and can never be recovered.
- trinix912 2y ago
  > Worst part for me is when I get to see a perfect picture that gets processed a blink later and can never be recovered. This has happened to me way too many times. I take a picture, it looks great, then shortly after it gets processed so badly it's all blurred up with no return because of some forced long exposure low light compensation feature that cannot be disabled.
  - sosuke 2y ago
    If you want to try out the “fix” goto camera settings and turn on “prioritize faster shooting” then in the camera app on the take picture button: tap, hold, drag left. It should stay white and play a shutter sound. There is a chance to do a similar action that just starts a recording but the button goes red for that.
    - 2y ago

jm4 2y ago

How about getting rid of that stupid back button in the top left corner when an app opens another app? It drives me crazy seeing it every time I click a link in a message. It's the most useless thing. There's already a good app switcher. What is the point of the back button?

idle_zealot 2y ago
I would hate that change. I usually hold my phone in my left hand, and can reach the back button with my thumb. Using the swipe gesture at the bottom of the screen to switch apps would require switching to a two-handed grip for that one common action. It's not ideal; I'd like to see more attention given to multitasking in general, the re-arranging deck of cards system has always been counterintuitive and clumbsy in my opinion.
- jm4 2y ago
  So is it mainly for lefties? I hold my phone with my right hand and that button is inaccessible. Based on the downvotes, I feel like I must be missing something.
  - idle_zealot 2y ago
    iOS is kinda a mess when it comes to what's easy for people who hold their phones in their left versus right hands. That back button is definitely for left-handers, but then the control center is clearly better for right-handers. The slide-from-screen-edge-to-go-back gesture is only usable in the left hand, and the slide-from-screen-edge-to-go-forward gesture is only usable with the right hand. My conclusion is that iOS is only really designed to be used with both hands gripping the edges of the phone, which meshes with their ever-increasing screen sizes. The new Pro Max is 6.9"!! That's basically a tablet.
- eviks 2y ago
  you wouldn't hate it since a proper implementation would make it optional

baby 2y ago

Or a folding phone? That would be huge

IgorPartola 2y ago
Only half as huge :)

ksec 2y ago

>Better camera (arguably already achieved) For the Pro Model. Yes. Not for the normal iPhone though. 2x Optical Zoom is barely enough. Especially when I default to taking photos with 1.8x which fits my view point a lot better. So when I get 5x optical zoom it is more like 2.5x only. And if there is one thing I would add to the list is weight. The Pro model is too heavy.