In episode 103, David, Sarah, and Donna discuss the latest rumors and predictions for Apple’s next big software release for the iPhone and iPad. The team also shares the features that listeners are crossing their fingers for.
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Episode 103 Transcript:
David Averbach: I'm David Averbach, CEO and publisher.
Sarah Kingsbury: I'm Sarah Kingsbury, senior web editor.
Donna Cleveland: Each week we bring to you the best apps, top tips, and great gear in the iOS world. This episode we're going to talk about iOS 13. It seems early to talk about that, but we're going to talk about what we want Apple to include in their next software update, which you can expect in June. Well, Apple announces it in June and then you get it on your phones in September. We got a lot of reader feedback last week on what they're hoping to get with iOS 13. We'll talk about some of our most wanted features and hopefully then we'll hear from you guys too. You can email us at podcast@iphonelife.com to let us know what features you're hoping to get with iOS 13.
Donna Cleveland: We also have a sponsor for this episode, Rokform, that David's going to tell you about.
David Averbach: Rokform makes iPhone cases. They're rugged. They're durable. They're affordable. One of the things they do that's particularly unique is they build in a mounting solution to the cases. You can then take that and they're especially great for outdoor activity if you want to mount it on a bike, things like that, but you can mount it at home as well. Really great cases especially if you want mounting solutions built into your cases, but even otherwise, they are just great cases that have solid drop protection, but they're still light. They're affordable. Make sure to check them out. Rokform.com. Rokform is spelled R-O-Kform. We will link to it too from our show notes at iphonelife.com/podcast.
Donna Cleveland: Great. I have a photography tip for you guys. Each episode, as you know, we share our favorite tip of the week. This week I have a photography tip. If you want to get the written version of our tips, you can sign up for our free newsletter, iphonelife.com/dailytips. That way you'll learn something cool you can do with your phone in just one minute a day. It's a low investment way to make sure that you're putting your phone to work for you. This is the tip, it may seem simple to some of you guys, how to fix upside down camera photos. If you're scrolling through all the photos you've taken in your photos app, you may notice that some of them are not in the correct orientation that you want.
Donna Cleveland: The easiest way to avoid this is to not take photos in the wrong orientation. The tip here, if you're taking a portrait photo, which is just holding your phone upright, make sure your phone is not upside down. If you are doing a landscape photo, this is one that's a little trickier. See, I'm holding it wrong. You want to have your camera lens in the upper left corner pointing wherever you're shooting and that will make sure that your photo then will be upright. Now, if you take a photo that is upside down or sideways, that's not a big deal. How you can correct that in the photos app, you tap edit and then you go into your cropping options and there you'll have a rotate image icon.
Donna Cleveland: It'll be a little square with an arrow pointing over it. You just tap that until it's upright and then save your changes. It's easy to solve, but it does take a little more time to have to go in and do that retroactively. Just make sure that you're taking your photos upright.
Sarah Kingsbury: The reason that this matters because Apple actually ... Your phone is pretty good ... It doesn't always work, but it's pretty good at detecting which way is up and flipping the photo for you. But what happens is when you ... Those photos then interact with Windows in some way, like you transfer them to a Windows computer or email them to someone or using like Outlook or whatever, is sometimes the text, a code that tells the computer which way gets stripped away and then all of a sudden you've imported a bunch of upside down photos. Then you have to go and rotate them on your computer.
Donna Cleveland: It's a big pain.
Sarah Kingsbury: Just always make sure that your camera lens is at the top of your phone no matter which orientation you're taking your picture in.
David Averbach: I have to say, I-
Donna Cleveland: That's a good way to remember it.
David Averbach: ... didn't know this, I always do it right.
Donna Cleveland: You do.
David Averbach: I actually find it a little bit annoying that that's what you're supposed to do because the reason why I do it wrong is intentional. It's that the volume, the plus volume-
Sarah Kingsbury: Right. Exactly.
David Averbach: ... button, takes the photo. To me, it's really counterintuitive to have the button that takes the photo be on the bottom of the phone. In other words, like when you use a standard camera-
Donna Cleveland: this is terrible.
David Averbach: ... it's always in the top right. That's how I take my photos.
Donna Cleveland: This could be part of our iOS 13 wishlist that they fix this.
David Averbach: I'm really annoyed about this, but also it's never been a problem for me because I'm in such a Mac universe that I've never tried to load my photos onto a Windows computer.
Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah. It was not really on my radar until I got some emails, some Ask An Editor emails about this very problem. Once I started researching it, then I realized.
David Averbach: Does it mess it up for Android do you happen to know? If I like text a photo to an Android phone that I took in landscape incorrectly, will it get messed up?
Donna Cleveland: That's a good question.
Sarah Kingsbury: You know, I really don't know. There's actually a setting that I want to explore a little more on for when you're transferring photos like about what format they're in. I'm wondering if that makes a difference. It didn't really occur to me to start researching that until during this podcast, so I don't have an answer for you guys-
David Averbach: Okay. Fair enough.
Sarah Kingsbury: ... but that may actually have a ...
Donna Cleveland: All right. That is our tip for today, how to make sure that your photos are not upside down. Go to iphonelife.com/dailytips to sign up for our free newsletter and get tips like that everyday in your inbox.
David Averbach: Next up, we want to talk about iPhone Life Insider. We just want to take a minute to tell you a little bit about us because we are a small independent publisher. iPhone Life Magazine and our iPhone Life brand is the only thing we publish. The main way we make money is through iPhone Life Insider. If you enjoy this podcast, if you enjoy our daily tips, if you enjoy the content on our website and you want to look for a way to support us, the absolute best way you can support us is to subscribe to iPhone Life Insider. We wanted to make that even a little bit easier for you, so we now offer a $5 discount for our podcast listeners. We have a new URL for you.
David Averbach: If you go to iphonelife.com/podcastdiscount, you will be taken to a checkout page where you have a $5 discount already baked in. Thank you guys so much for your support. We appreciate you listening to the podcast, and we really appreciate our insiders who have already subscribed. We really appreciate those of you who now hear me and go subscribe.
Donna Cleveland: Exactly. I want to tell you a little bit about what you get when you become an insider. You get a lot of great features that aren't included in any of our free products. It's the full educational service for getting the most out of your devices. You get in depth video guides that also has a downloadable PDF, so you can have your device out and follow along as we walk you through how to use your iPad, how to use your new iPhone, how to use Apple's latest operating system, things like that, how to set up family sharing, and how to make the most out of Siri. These are all examples of guides we have. You get a digital subscription to the magazine, as well as our full archive of over 30 back issues.
Donna Cleveland: You also get a video version of our daily tips. You can just watch in one minute something cool you can do with your iPhone and get the video walk through of that. We have Ask An Editor, a feature where if you're having tech problems, our experts will give you personal attention to help you find solutions to your issues. We also have an extended version of our podcast just for insiders. You get extra exclusive content, and you also don't get any ads in your podcast. Go to iphonelife.com/podcastdiscount-
David Averbach: Podcast discount.
Donna Cleveland: ... to sign up. Next up, I wanted to ask Sarah to share how she's recently helped one of our insider subscribers with a tech issue they're having.
Sarah Kingsbury: An insider recently emailed me and said, "When I delete a message from one of my devices, namely my iPhone or my Mac or my iPad, how can I get it to delete on my other devices," which, you know, I haven't figured it out perfectly myself, but what I have found ... Well, first of all, now, I think it's since maybe the last update of iOS 11, iMessage just became iCloud enabled, which means theoretically in fact when you delete messages on one device, they should delete on the other.
David Averbach: Yeah.
Sarah Kingsbury: Your device has to be using iOS I think it was 11.3 at least, but you know, if you can, update to iOS 12.
David Averbach: Do it. iOS 11 is terrible. iOS 12 is better.
Sarah Kingsbury: Yes, very true. If you can update to iOS 11, you should be able to update to iOS 12.
David Averbach: Yeah.
Sarah Kingsbury: You have to make sure that iCloud is actually enabled. You can't just be signed in to your Apple ID account. You have to enable messages for iCloud. In your iCloud settings on your iPhone or iPad, which would be you tap on your Apple ID name at the top of the settings menu in the settings app and then tap on iCloud, just make sure that messages is toggled on. On a Mac, you can go into like when you have the messages app open, click on messages in the upper left and then go to preferences or accounts. I can't remember and just make sure that that account is enabled for iCloud and then it should be deleted.
Sarah Kingsbury: Now, one thing I have noticed is when ... I'm subscribed to certain things like my pharmacy sends me an auto text when it's time to renew a prescription and then when it's ready. I don't necessarily read those. I just delete them. I have noticed if I don't open them so that they're marked as read, they don't always delete from my other devices, which is really annoying. Another thing that can keep your messages from deleting is if you don't have the latest Mac OS because Apple kind of added some security things and now your Mac won't necessarily communicate with your iPhone if your Mac isn't using the latest Mac OS. That can also be interfering, so make sure your Mac is also up to date.
Donna Cleveland: All right. Sarah, thank you for helping our insiders and for teaching us all how to use our devices. In the interest of time, I want to move into our iOS 13 section now. If we have time, we'll get into complaints and learning as well. Our theme, as we said before, is features that we want to see with iOS 13. Email us, podcast@iphonelife.com, to answer our question of the week, which is what features are you hoping to see with iOS 13? Some features requests have been going on for years now and I wanted to mention a couple of them that we still have not gotten and that's multi-user support for the iPad.
Donna Cleveland: I mean really it would be nice to have for all devices, but the iPad especially is a device that seems very conducive to being a shared device in a family or even at a school or something like that where you would want to have different user profiles. That you would be able to have your own Apple ID and iCloud content synced just with that user and not have everybody else in your family have access to that. That's something I don't know why Apple hasn't done it and we had a few people wanting that.
David Averbach: Yeah.
Sarah Kingsbury: At least for the iPad for sure.
Donna Cleveland: I know I want it.
David Averbach: I actually wrote that down too. I think for me, so my partner's six year old is learning to read. He's also learning to use my phone better, which means he can go to photos. There's all sorts of like privacy concerns when you're sharing a device with the family. We just went on a long road trip where he wanted to use our devices to play games and he's reaching an age where you kind of no longer want to give him your devices because of privacy concerns.
Donna Cleveland: Yeah.
David Averbach: Like you guys said, certainly iPads in particularly are kind of often family shared devices. HomePod is another one that should have family different recognition technologies. I'll talk about that in a second, but yeah. It's like Apple, why have you not done this yet?
Donna Cleveland: I know.
Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah. I just disabled iMessages on my iPad when my daughter was using it recently while we were traveling.
Donna Cleveland: That's a pain, yeah, to have to do.
Sarah Kingsbury: I don't keep photos that I would be embarrassed for anyone to see in my photos app, but things can slip by you and there's a lot of different features to have to disable every single time you let a child use your device. Now that everything's so connected with iCloud, it's a problem.
David Averbach: Yeah.
Donna Cleveland: Yeah, it is.
David Averbach: Definitely that's top of my list.
Donna Cleveland: I always say that's like a number one because that's been one we've been talking about for years. Like a lot of Android devices have this feature. Why does Apple not do this? Obviously Apple knows how to do it because their desktop devices have it, multi-user support.
David Averbach: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I alluded to it, so I might as well get into it. This is for ... I guess it's not iOS 13, but HomePod's new operating system. Apple seem to have just completely skipped it with iOS 12. They came out with the HomePod when they came out with iOS 11. They did no updates. I don't think they've really updated it since it came out, have they?
Sarah Kingsbury: I guess there was an update, but it was not noticeable.
David Averbach: Yeah. I'd really like for them to do updates. In particular, the same point where Siri on your phone has voice recognition that you train, right? Hypothetically, and it doesn't always work very well, but when you say, "Hey, Siri," it shouldn't actually work for anybody, but my phone. Hey, it worked for me. It didn't work for these guys. Works okay. Alexa and Google ... Google. What's Google's called now? Google-
Sarah Kingsbury: Home?
David Averbach: ... Home?
Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah.
David Averbach: They both have support for ... I am pretty sure they do. I know Google does and I think Alexa has added now for voice recognition. That's a really important one because otherwise you either have to turn off all of your text messaging and things like that or you can have anyone in the house come and listen or send a text message whenever you want.
Sarah Kingsbury: I mean I have thoughts.
David Averbach: Go ahead.
Sarah Kingsbury: Well, I mean I can see ... Like one thing about the HomePod is you can per HomePod decide which HomePods can let you access, if you have more than one, your text messages, etcetera. You might have a HomePod in your bedroom where that's allowed and then maybe your HomePod in the kitchen or the living would not have that option.
David Averbach: That would be great for those of us who have a home filled with HomePods, but they're so expensive.
Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah, I know. But the thing is like I like that multiple people can use the HomePod to turn the lights off and do other smart home things with my HomePod. If it only recognized my voice, that would be really annoying.
David Averbach: Yeah, but what I would like similar to kind of an iPhone, I would like for it to be able to recognize your voice and only provide certain functionality.
Sarah Kingsbury: Okay.
David Averbach: Anyone could turn on and off the lights, but only I can listen to my text messages.
Donna Cleveland: Yeah. I mean that seems like such a privacy concern.
David Averbach: Yeah.
Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah. I agree.
Donna Cleveland: I mean even if they had that, it would rely a lot on it being really accurate, which as you said is okay and not amazing with the iPhone, but yeah. A feature that a lot of people wrote in about, and Sarah mentioned in the last episode that she wants, is the ability to mark a text message as unread even if you've looked at it. Right now you could do that with emails. You can swipe left I believe and have the option to mark it as unread even when you've looked at it. That's like really the reason you want to do this is sometimes you peak at something on your phone, but it's not a time to address it.
Donna Cleveland: You want to have a system for being like no, this is still something that needs my attention instead of having it get lost in a sea of text messages or emails. Apple really should add that option with the iPhone. I don't know why they haven't.
Sarah Kingsbury: I can't remember, did we mention to our listeners like where we came up with this list because ...
David Averbach: No.
Donna Cleveland: No, no.
David Averbach: Let's talk about it, yeah.
Sarah Kingsbury: Every week I send out just a little message to our tip readers when the newsletter goes out on Mondays, and I really love it because it's a way I ask a question. The readers write back and tell me their thoughts on different iOS related things. I really enjoy hearing from our readers and it's a really great way to know what they care about. A couple weeks ago, which was ... We record things ahead of time, so it was not a couple weeks ago. I asked what iOS things our readers would like to see in the next iOS update because at this point we kind of know here's what iOS 12 does, here's what my new devices do. I'm disappointed. I wanted these other things.
Sarah Kingsbury: I got an overwhelming response. Everyone has clearly like really has some features they want.
David Averbach: Really passionate.
Sarah Kingsbury: They were really good ideas. I hadn't thought of all of them. A lot of them were pretty obvious, but a lot of them were like, "Yeah, we should have that," and that hadn't occurred to me. I really wanted to share them because I thought they were great. One that I saw got a lot was different options for organizing your photos.
Donna Cleveland: Yes, that's a good one.
Sarah Kingsbury: Like being able to label your photos. Just being able to ... Yeah, just more options for like how your albums are organized. People don't like having all their photos in all photos. They want to kind of like you can delete a song from your music library, but it stays on your playlists. That sort of thing. They want a lot more flexi-
Donna Cleveland: Like more customization, yeah.
Sarah Kingsbury: Right, which makes a lot of sense. I mean like albums sort of work, but it is kind of a pain. It'd be really great to be able to ... What about like folders within albums, you know? There's a lot of things that people want for organizing their photos than I am.
Donna Cleveland: Labeling was something I saw. People wanted to be able to label their photos too.
Sarah Kingsbury: Right. Yeah. It would be nice to be able to name your photos, wouldn't it?
Donna Cleveland: Yeah.
David Averbach: Can I tell you something that I want with photos?
Sarah Kingsbury: Yes.
David Averbach: I want the ability to have photos live in iCloud, but not live in your phone.
Donna Cleveland: This is something I wanted since Apple launched iCloud photo library.
David Averbach: Google has this, so I don't know why Apple can't. Right now if you delete a photo from your phone, it gets deleted across all of your devices.
Donna Cleveland: It's gone.
David Averbach: It's gone forever, but we have very limited storage on our phones. Now, Apple tries to solve this by kind of optimizing for it, which is great, but I would like to be able to have kind of all of my photos from all time living in the cloud and have only access some of them on my phone and manage that.
Donna Cleveland: Yeah, I know. That's one thing that really tips in favor of Google Photos because they allow you to ... You can upload a bunch of your photos to Google's cloud and then just delete them off your device, which is so nice for storage concerns and all that.
Sarah Kingsbury: It's so nice if other people in your life who you may want to share photos with don't have an iPhone.
Donna Cleveland: Yeah.
Sarah Kingsbury: I mean you can actually share like a sort of iCloud shared album link with people who don't have iPhones, but it doesn't really work that well.
Donna Cleveland: It's not that great I don't think. Another photo related one. I thought this was a good idea. I would like to see a search icon in the all photos section from the messages app. When you want to add photos to your messages-
David Averbach: Oh, that's cool.
Donna Cleveland: ... if they added the search section right there in the messages app so you could quickly find what you're looking for instead of as it is now, it's really only easy to add your most recently taken photos.
Sarah Kingsbury: Or if it's in an album. I don't know about you guys, but I only put photos in albums for very specific purposes.
Donna Cleveland: Yeah, me too. I don't use albums probably as much as I could.
David Averbach: Ooh, I have a really good one that I want.
Donna Cleveland: Ooh, let's here it.
David Averbach: The Pixel, the -
Donna Cleveland: Google Pixel.
David Averbach: ... Google Pixel, came out with this feature that people are raving about and it's low light mode on their camera that apparently really, really improves the quality of low light photos.
Donna Cleveland: That would be awesome.
David Averbach: Google is definitely pretty far ahead of Apple in the field of computational photography. Basically how it works is the ... It's not that Google has a better camera than Apple. It's that Google once you take the photo has better AI that takes a low light photo and optimizes it to look good. That's something that I find that Apple's low light photography is pretty bad.
Donna Cleveland: It is. It is.
David Averbach: It's really pixelated and really low quality and then you turn on the flash. I know they've worked on the flash and made it better, but flash photography just never looks good. I really want them to come out with a comparable feature to Google in this regard.
Sarah Kingsbury: One thing that I thought was really a good idea is it seems to be a pretty common problem that people just lose their apps. I mean you have so many and if they're in folders and you have all those home pages. Actually if your home pages are full, then you can have apps on your phone that just won't show up on any of your home screens, but they're on your phone.
David Averbach: Which is really annoying.
Sarah Kingsbury: People are always wanting to know how do I find apps.
Donna Cleveland: Yeah. That's such a common one.
Sarah Kingsbury: You can go to either the today view, which is from the first home screen you swipe right and you can search there or you can just swipe down from the middle of your home screen and a search field will come up. Someone writing in was like, "They should not just show the app icon. They should show you the path to it. They should show you where it is. Like what folder and what home screen?? Basically anything you search it should show you where it is on your phone, not just like let you tap on it and go there, which is ... Yeah, you should.
Sarah Kingsbury: Related to this, one of the ways you can find an app, especially if you're trying to find it and delete it or whatever, is you can go to your iPhone storage in the settings app, I think it's in general, and you will have a list of all of the apps on your phone, but they are sorted by how much storage they are taking up. It'd be great to be able to at least filter in different ways. Like alphabetically or by date added so you can find a specific app because otherwise you have to swipe through all of them. If you have even more than like 20 apps, that's really kind of a burden if you're trying to find an app. Yeah, I thought that was a great idea.
Donna Cleveland: Yeah, I think so too.
David Averbach: I'd also like to see more robust search abilities because what you have to search for for the app is you have to search for the name of the app, but sometimes it's not that intuitive or you can't remember it.
Donna Cleveland: I know, Yeah.
David Averbach: I have a consumer reports app that I like, but the name of the app is CR and I never remember that. When I search consumer reports, it doesn't come up. I actually literally just had this one as I was preparing for the podcast because I wanted to pull up my Google Doc and I was thinking it was Google Sheets or Google Pages, but then I remembered it was Doc. I couldn't find it by searching Google, but Google is the name of the developer in this case. You should be able to search for the name of the developer. You should have related keywords that it can pull up. Similar to when you search on Google, it's not like you have to get it exactly right to find it. You know what I mean?
Donna Cleveland: Yeah, I completely agree. Another reader wrote in that they wanted more powerful features for the iPad Pro. They say, "I believe padOS is what is being bandied about. The hardware is awesome, but wasted on with iPhone OS." I thought this ties in well to a conversation we had about whether you should buy the iPad Pro or not. Really like the iOS is pretty limiting for what's become a really powerful device that could ... Like it could power a lot of what you'd want to do on a desktop device, but it doesn't have those capabilities. It would be interesting if Apple created a separate operating system for the iPad.
Donna Cleveland: I mean right now they have some iPad only features. I don't know, but I agree. That's an area that Apple could strengthen.
David Averbach: I mean this ties into, I'm going to plug my own article, the article that I wrote for the latest issue of the magazine. Is it online now? Can we link to it?
Donna Cleveland: Oh, yes. I think so.
David Averbach: Okay. We'll link to it if you go to iphonelife.com/podcast, but I basically make the same argument that this person is arguing, which is that Apple kind of promotes the iPad as a computer replacement, but iOS is too limiting to make it a computer replacement. What Microsoft does, and I hate to talk about Microsoft as an example of doing good things, but they have one operating system. On your tablet if you have a Microsoft ... It's Surface, right?
Sarah Kingsbury: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David Averbach: If you have Microsoft Surface, you can toggle between the kind of mobile view, which is their version of iOS with apps and things like that, or the full Windows, which in this case would be OSX, which is the Mac operating system.
Sarah Kingsbury: OSX.
David Averbach: OSX. Is it OSX?
Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah.
David Averbach: Oh, I always say OSX. Wow. Okay.
Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah, because they confuse everything. I've ranted about this so many times. You can't mix the different types of numerals. It's not cool, Apple.
David Averbach: Yeah, I agree clearly. But anyway, Apple has very poignantly said, "We are not going to merge our operating systems." I think it's the wrong decision. I think they should.
Sarah Kingsbury: I don't think they're going to stick to it though.
Donna Cleveland: I know.
Sarah Kingsbury: They were very much like, "iPads are very different from computers." That was not the case with the last iPad announcement. They were pretty much like, "Throw out your computer. We've got an iPad for you."
David Averbach: Yeah, which is dumb because they don't have a computer. They have an iPad.
Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah.
David Averbach: I have a product I'm hoping to get. You ready for this?
Donna Cleveland: Sure.
David Averbach: I love my HomePod, but it's very expensive like I've already been complaining about. Amazon has like Echo Dots and I really want like a HomePod version of that.
Donna Cleveland: That'd be so cool.
David Averbach: I've gotten really used to talking to my HomePod and I've made my home a pretty smart home. I want to be able to put like ... I don't want to spend 350 bucks for every room in my house.
Donna Cleveland: As Sarah was saying, it's like that's not practical. Most people can't afford to buy a bunch of HomePods.
David Averbach: Yeah. We talked about this at our CES Podcast where Apple's really far behind Amazon on this front because Amazon has not only have the Amazon Echo Dots, they also have opened up the Amazon platform, the Alexa platform, for other developers. Now you have light switches that have Alexa built in. You have clocks that have Alexa built in. It's really easy to fill your home with Alexa compatible things and build a smart home around Alexa in a way that really is not easy to do right now if you want to do around HomeKit, around Siri and iOS. Apple really needs to get on that because I actually think HomeKit is much nicer than Alexa's system.
David Averbach: Obviously I'm very iPhone and iOS centric, but Apple's really not doing me any favors here.
Donna Cleveland: I've got a different one.
David Averbach: Go ahead.
Donna Cleveland: I thought this is a really good one, dark mode for your iPhone and iPad because Mojave, the latest macOS, has dark mode and I've been really enjoying it. I think it's like a more relaxing and nice. I think that would be nice. Right now you can do like invert colors on your screen, which I hate. I don't know why you're supposed to do that.
Sarah Kingsbury: I mean it's supposed to sort of be like night mode kind of.
Donna Cleveland: Yeah, but I think if they just did a similar thing to what they have on Mojave, that'd be really nice.
Sarah Kingsbury: That would be nice.
David Averbach: I have to say, I haven't used dark mode that much on my computer.
Donna Cleveland: Really?
David Averbach: Somehow I don't like it as much, but the time when I used it was when I was at a conference. I was in there taking notes and it felt like I didn't ... I felt like a little bit ... Had a little more privacy, a little less intrusive and it saved battery to do dark mode. I feel like on an iPhone, I actually would probably be more inclined to use it for those reasons because you're out and about a lot. Say you're like ... I mean I don't think you want to use it in a movie theater even if you have dark mode turned on.
Donna Cleveland: People will still hate you. You'll still be that person.
David Averbach: But I think there's a lot of times when you want to be, A, more discreet, like more privacy, and B, less intrusive of those around you where dark mode on a phone seems like it'd be really useful.
Donna Cleveland: Some of my third party apps have dark mode, like Day One has dark mode and it just ... On your phone, it will detect when it's night time and it'll switch to that.
David Averbach: That's nice.
Donna Cleveland: That'd be really nice to have for Apple's built in apps.
Sarah Kingsbury: I think, you know, because even though everyone ... All the like sleep experts who pontificate at us are like don't have your devices in bed. Like realistically everyone has their device in bed.
Donna Cleveland: I know.
Sarah Kingsbury: But if you share your bed with someone, it can be really inconsiderate to have this like-
Donna Cleveland: Totally.
Sarah Kingsbury: ... screen lighting up the room. If you could have a dark mode on your phone, that would just make probably your whole relationship better.
Donna Cleveland: Yeah.
David Averbach: I have a small one, but I've been asking for it for years. I know we've gotten emails in the past about it, having Do Not Disturb being able to customize that by day. Because on the weekends, I want my Do Not Disturb to turn on and off at different times and during the week. The fact that I have one setting for the entire week seems so silly. It's like these are such powerful devices. Could you really not build that?
Donna Cleveland: I know. Apple added some extra Do Not Disturb settings with iOS 12, but they didn't go that far.
David Averbach: It actually made me angry that they clearly had been thinking about it, but just didn't think about it that much.
Donna Cleveland: They added some things with Control Center. Now you can do some location-based, like turn on Do Not Disturb until I leave this location, stuff like that, but it's like a little limited I would say. What was interesting about reading a lot of these reader requests is that a lot of them are somewhat small things, but they would make a difference for people. Like someone's like, "Make the phone ring louder." You can turn up your ringer higher and lower, but I think what they're saying is that they want the cap to be higher. Other people's saying ...
Sarah Kingsbury: Did you see the one related to the ringer about they want an-
David Averbach: I was going to say that.
Sarah Kingsbury: ... icon that indicates whether your ringer is on or off, which makes so much sense.
Donna Cleveland: Yeah. That's actually the one I was just going to say because I keep my phone on silent a lot, but it's hard to always keep track of. You can see like the little red notch on the side of the phone that shows that you have it on silent, but that's kind of hard to see. It would be nice if you just set it right on your screen.
Sarah Kingsbury: The only time I ever look at that is when my phone starts ringing and I'm like, "Why is it making that noise? I must have accidentally turned it off silence," because yeah, it's such a pain to always be going back and forth that I've just given up and my phone doesn't talk to me anymore. It's just quiet.
David Averbach: Totally.
Donna Cleveland: Right.
David Averbach: I'm just scanning to see if there are other ones here.
Donna Cleveland: There's one, multiple destinations in Maps. Like be able to set up multiple places you want to stop. That seems like such a obvious one.
Sarah Kingsbury: With distance and like time for each one.
Donna Cleveland: Yeah. That was Lorie Oliver. Great idea.
David Averbach: Google has that and it's like I keep Google Maps on my phone for that exact reason. When I need to do multi stops, I'll switch to Google. Another thing, and Google and iPhone struggle with this, I know they have a little bit of functionality around it, but I haven't seen any of them do it well, which is searching for things along a route. If you're on a road trip and you want to like say find a gas station, you don't want the nearest gas station to where you currently are, which maybe way off your route. You want a gas station maybe like two hours away, but is on your route. I know they have some functionality for that, but I had never found it to be very easy to use or work particularly well.
Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah, because I don't necessarily want to be doing that while I'm driving. You know what I mean? I would probably want to figure out where I'm going to stop while I'm stopped. Just because if you're alone in the car, that's a lot of like looking at your phone and sorting through different restaurants or gas stations when you should be actually looking at the road.
David Averbach: Totally. Ooh, I have a cool one.
Donna Cleveland: Let's hear it.
David Averbach: I don't know why these are all bobbing in my head right now. I would love to have the ability to transfer data via wireless, like via G. I mean I guess with CarPlay, the newer CarPlay, you can do it via Bluetooth, but being able to kind of dock your phone and both charge and transfer data would be really cool.
Donna Cleveland: That'd be so cool.
David Averbach: Yeah.
Sarah Kingsbury: That'd be great.
Donna Cleveland: A couple other ones that were cool was better battery life. I think that's one that's like universal.
David Averbach: Everyone wants that.
Donna Cleveland: If Apple can give that to us every time improvements, that'd be great. Deleting all emails at once.
Sarah Kingsbury: That's just like an endless ...
Donna Cleveland: Everyone wants that.
Sarah Kingsbury: Well, and sometimes like for awhile there was a bug where you could sort of at least delete a few hundred at a time and then Apple will update it and fix the bug and then it doesn't work. Then we'll find a new workaround, some other approach to the bug, but I don't know why they don't just give that to us. People want to just delete all their emails.
Donna Cleveland: Yeah. 5G someone wrote in.
David Averbach: Yeah. Well, 5G though, I mean I feel like 5G's coming, but ...
Donna Cleveland: That's not necessarily always related to an iOS release.
David Averbach: Yeah. It's more like Apple tends to be a little bit late in bringing these things out and wait for the carriers to have infrastructure, which I tend to support because it's like who cares if you have 5G on your phone if there's like one tower in your area that has it and you're not usually near it sort of a thing. I understand that. I have a really passionate plea for Apple for email. Better search functionality for email. It's so bad.
Donna Cleveland: I know.
Sarah Kingsbury: It is.
Donna Cleveland: That is such a good point.
David Averbach: Mac mail on my computer-
Donna Cleveland: Such a good point.
David Averbach: ... the search functionality is great. They clearly know how to do it, but like I'll search for something and it will pull up some emails from 2011, but not pull up the email I got yesterday with that exact same like phrase. It drives me crazy.
Sarah Kingsbury: Whenever you order online, you get like order confirmation. Your thing has shipped. Like all these things. I don't necessarily ... I'll just type in the name of the company I ordered from, usually Amazon, and it will just be like ... It won't just pull up like every email related to Amazon. It will just be like, "Here's some random Amazon emails you got three years ago asking you to rate a product." It's like no, I just want to ... Then if you put in like order or shipment, it'll be like, "I don't even know what you're talking about."
David Averbach: Yeah. It's so bad. It's like embarrassing.
Donna Cleveland: It's really frustrating.
Sarah Kingsbury: I've gotten to the point where at least with Amazon because I have an account, I don't always do accounts with every place I order, I usually at this point just go to Amazon and look at under my account for my orders and then like track things.
David Averbach: I have the Gmail app and it works great. These are solved problems that other companies have solved.
Donna Cleveland: Yeah. Apple, get it together. That wraps up. We included a lot of our requests for iOS 13. Thank you so much to our readers. Some of you may have submitted some of these for giving us ideas because a lot of these, they're ones that I want, but it's hard to always remember all of the little grievances over time that you have with your operating system. If you have any of that ... Oh, sorry, Sarah.
Sarah Kingsbury: Well, I just want to say thank you so much for responding to my question. I can't really respond to every email I get from the editor's messages, but you know, I read as many of them as I can. I really love hearing from our readers. It really like helps me know how I can do a really good job coming up with the next tip or whatever for you guys.
Donna Cleveland: Totally.
David Averbach: I would like to double down on this because I know a lot of you maybe listening to this episode, but either didn't see the email or didn't reply, so let's make that our question of the week as well of what did we miss? What iOS 13 features are you excited about? We will talk about that at our next episode. Send us an email at podcast@iphonelife.com and let us know.
Donna Cleveland: All right. That is all we have time for today. If you stick around for the extended version of the podcast, if you're an insider, we'll get into some of our complaints and learning this week. But for the rest of you, we'll say goodbye and we will see you next episode. Bye.
Sarah Kingsbury: Thanks for listening.
David Averbach: Thanks, everyone.
