19 exciting concepts for iOS 19 and Apple’s 2025 lineup (Part 2)
Easier StandBy widget arrangements? Multilingual Siri support? Schooltime Mode for iPhone? My 19 concepts for iOS 19 and beyond.
Last week, I shared the first nine concepts I hope Apple includes in iOS 19 and other 2025 releases; you can read that here. Below are the final ten designs.
10. Facilitate importing external lab data into Apple Health
Apple Health provides iOS and iPadOS users with an easy way to aggregate electronic medical records (EMR) from services such as Epic’s MyChart in the United States. Being able to quickly access lab results, vaccination records, and more in one easy-to-use app is a huge timesaver in the doctor’s office.
Unfortunately, this currently only works with hospital systems and doctors that use patient-facing EMR platforms. For users whose health care providers do not use patient-facing EMR platforms, received medical care outside of their home country, or have medical data that predates the advent of contemporary EMR platforms, there is currently no way to import this crucial data into Apple Health.1
Apple Health already allows users in the United States to scan medicine labels to add medication reminders; using a similar workflow, users should be able to scan or manually enter information from medical lab results. This could even incorporate Apple Intelligence, which could be used to help parse the data and then import it in a uniform matter.
11. Bring Journal to all platforms
For the last five years or so, daily journaling has been having a moment. This surge in popularity resulted in Apple debuting the Journal app alongside iOS 17.2 in December 2023. Anecdotally, the app appeared to be broadly praised for its sleek design and simplicity of use, but one aspect confused many users: it was iPhone only.
This means that iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro users were all left in the cold, with no official announcement of when–or even if–Journal would eventually support other devices.2 This decision leaves Mac users who prefer writing with keyboards, iPad users who want to journal with their Apple Pencil, and Vision Pro users who paid over $3,500 for their device out in the cold. Cross-platform support should be the future for the Journal app.
12. Apple Music Classical upgrades
The first post I wrote for this blog was an in-depth analysis of Apple Music Classical. That post contained a number of suggestions for the future of Apple Music Classical, sadly none of which materialized in the release of iOS 18 and iPadOS 18. In short, I urged feature parity with the Apple Music app, cross-platform support, and a more diverse definition of what constituted “classical” music.
But perhaps the most frustrating omission from Apple Music Classical is its lack of Shuffle button. This is not just the case in albums–which might have an essential listening order–but also in playlists. Shuffle functionality on CD players has existed since at least 1982 - over forty years later, is that really too much to ask for?3
My full analysis of Apple Music Classical can be found below.
13. HomePod remote mute functionality
Apple HomePod and HomePod mini devices are smart speakers that provide phone-free access to Siri and Apple Music, can take phone or FaceTime Audio calls, and can optionally be paired to an Apple TV. HomePods also can set up alarms and timers, including recurring alarms.
One limitation exists: users may control speaker playback only when they are connected to the same wifi network. However, this creates an issue related to recurring alarms. Imagine you set up a recurring alarm to help you wake up every morning, but you go on vacation and forget to turn off the alarm. As you are not able to remotely control speaker playback, how do you turn off the alarm?
There are a few convoluted workarounds to this issue, but a clearer solution should exist.4 I propose adding a button in the HomePod settings page in the Home app could be set up to “Stop All Current Sound.”5 This would allow users to remotely cease any unintended speaker playback from their HomePod devices without having to implement fleshed-out remote speaker control functionality.
14. Fix Apple Calendar’s inconsistency between macOS and iOS/iPadOS
Over 11 years ago, Apple released iOS 7 and macOS Mavericks, and along with this came a useful addition to the Calendar app: Travel Times.6 When an event with an address is added in Calendar users can enable Travel Time, which will use that address to indicate how long it will take from the previous event location. It is very handy!
But for over a decade, this functionality has worked differently depending which device you are using:
On macOS, Calendar uses the chronologically-closest event to assume your starting location to give you estimates for travel times taking public transportation, driving, cycling, or walking. There is no way to edit the starting location. This can be frustrating if you use multiple calendars; for example, I am able to view and edit events on my wife’s calendar and my parents’ calendar, so Calendar on macOS often mistakenly assumes that I am physically with them.7
On iOS and iPadOS, Calendar allows users to modify their starting location, which is incredibly useful. Strangely however, Calendar for iOS and iPadOS only provides travel time estimates for driving and public transportation if it deems that it would take too long to walk or cycle to the destination. I was unable to find out why this is or what the cutoff time is.8
Interestingly, if you select a custom starting location on iOS or iPadOS, it will update on macOS. Likewise, if you select a comically long walking or cycling travel time on macOS, it will update on iOS or iPadOS!
Feature parity between all versions of Calendar app is a must. This oversight has been a needless frustration for over a decade, and it is past time to fix it.
15. Easier way to edit StandBy widgets
StandBy is a useful feature that debuted with iOS 17 that displays widgets, the time, or other clock face-like screens when iPhone is locked, charging, and positioned in a landscape orientation.9 I have found it to be an attractive way to both charge my iPhone and display useful bits of information while also keeping it at the ready at my desk.
However, actually editing the widgets for StandBy can be somewhat difficult. The moment that the iPhone stops charging or is positioned in a portrait orientation StandBy immediately closes. Depending on one’s setup, modifying widgets for StandBy might be easier said than done.
Giving users the option to edit StandBy widget arrangements in the StandBy page of the Settings app would make the experience far simpler.
16. Return a rich metadata editor to Apple Books
Initially, iTunes was the one-size-fits-all home for music, movies, TV shows, books, and podcasts on macOS.10 As time went on, complaints labeling iTunes as “bloated” contributed to Apple splitting these functions into other apps and doing away with iTunes altogether: music to Music, podcasts to Podcasts, movies and TV shows to TV, and books to Books.11
All of these macOS apps–except for Podcasts–allowed users to edit metadata information about the pieces of content in their respective libraries. Metadata can contain information such as song title, director, release date, summary, or author. There are a lot of reasons why one might want to edit metadata, but the primary motivation is to better customize how items are categorized.
For example, I could either categorize all songs by The Beatles to be in the “Rock” genre, or I could go song-by-song and use more specific sub-genres such as “Psychedelic Rock,” “Skiffle,” and “Folk Rock” to name a few.
Inexplicably, a few years ago the Apple Books app on macOS removed the feature to edit most types of metadata. Currently the only metadata users can edit are the title and author, and cover art is only editable on .EPUB files. Information such as publisher, release date, plot summary, genre, and other key pieces of metadata are uneditable through the app.
This suggestion is not technically a new feature, but I want to see the return of the full-fledged metadata editor like in the Music and TV apps on macOS. Give users the option to organize their content libraries as they see fit, and stay consistent with other content-managing apps.
17. Enable uses to speak to Siri in multiple languages
Last week I was wearing my AirPods and Siri announced the following:
Message from : “Hey, what’s up?”
No, that isn’t a typo; I did not forget to type the name of the sender. That is verbatim what Siri told me.
The reason that Siri did not include the name of the message’s sender is because their name is written in Korean, and my Siri is set to U.S. English. Siri also has trouble reading other notifications that contain non-English characters, and cannot process requests other languages.12
Since iOS 17.4, Siri can read notifications from Messages in other languages of your choosing, but core problems remain. In my case, Siri would be able to read Korean within the Messages notification but unable to read the Korean name of the sender.
About 60% of the world speaks more than one language. As GPT-4o has shown, multilingual voice recognition is possible. Let’s bring this to Siri.
18. Add Storage information to Apple TV
The position of Apple TV is in limbo. On one hand, it is decidedly not a “pro” device - its intended audience is the general population. On the other, there is an increasing focus on games, apps, and 4K-quality TV shows and movies, all of which take up significant storage space. Unlike every other Apple device with internal storage, the Apple TV currently lacks any way to see what percentage of the device’s store is being taken up by which entities.
As of tvOS 18, the Storage page in the Settings app only lists installed apps and how much space they are taking up.13 When users are alerted to the fact that their Apple TV storage is almost full, they lack context to help them decide what items need to be purged.14 Providing visual context could not just help in troubleshooting and reduce stress, but also provide a more consistent experience across Apple devices.
19. Schooltime Mode for iPhone
Starting with watchOS 7, students with Apple Watches could enable Schooltime Mode when in class. This disables almost all user functionality on the device and enables Do Not Disturb mode; on the screen, only the user’s name, time, and date are displayed.15 (Emergency notifications, however, are able to break through.) Guardians or parents can also set other Schooltime settings, such as being notified if a student exits Schooltime Mode during certain hours.
When a user attempts to exit Schooltime Mode, the length of time of the user has been in Schooltime Mode is displayed. So, for example, if at the end of a class a student’s Apple Watch says that Schooltime Mode has been active for only 5 minutes, the teacher will know that the student used their Apple Watch during class.
The next step seems clear: bringing Schooltime Mode to iPhone. This functionality would operate on iPhone in a similar manner as on the Apple Watch, namely disabling nearly all extraneous features, enabling Do Not Disturb mode, and displaying the elapsed time upon exit.
I do not purport to have the answer about what schools should do with regard to students’ smartphones, but Schooltime Mode for iPhone would give more options to school districts, parents, and students to navigate this complex issue.
This is exactly my situation. My physical medical files are a hodgepodge of records from before EMRs, lab results from when I was living in South Korea, and recent information from my primary physician whose practice did not offer patient-facing EMR access.
Some observers point to the iCloud syncing of Journal entries as evidence of Apple’s plans to expand Journal to other platforms. While this could be true, the setting might also exist for the purpose of secure backups.
I am very curious how the Apple Music Classical team arrived at the decision to not include a shuffle button. This is a niche question that will likely never be asked in an interview with anyone from Apple, but I am dying to know! It seems like such a basic feature.
As readers may guess, this has happened to me before. The solution I came up with is to create a new alarm, and then to set the alarm volume to 0%. Another potential solution is to remotely reboot the HomePod, but that is less than ideal if the HomePod doubles as a HomeKit hub.
One might wonder why Apple does not allow remote speaker control. I could not find any documentation explaining this limitation, but my guess is that they do not want to deal with the latency issues that would occur. (Furthermore, the use case for remotely controlling a speaker are fairly limited.)
Originally iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touch devices all ran a single operating system called iOS. In 2019, Apple split iPadOS from iOS.
I live in New York City and my family lives in Connecticut. This means that sometimes the Calendar app on macOS will tell me that it will take me hours to get to locations that are well within walking distance. It definitely does not take hours to get to my barber in the building next door!
Some travel times will simply be unavailable to geographic conditions. For example, travel times between Guam and the mainland United States are not available because the only ways to travel between these two destinations are by airplane or boat, both of which are not currently supported in any mainstream calendar or map app. (Ferries, however, are.)
Anecdotally, StandBy is very difficult to describe to people who do not closely follow tech news, but once they learn about it they love it.
As well as iPod games, device management, Apple’s short-lived social network Ping, and photos, calendars, and contacts syncing.
Sort of. iTunes still exists on iOS and iPadOS for purchasing music, as well as on Windows PCs. Several other services with iTunes branding, such as iTunes Connect, also still exist.
Most of the time, Siri just ignores non-English characters. But sometimes Siri will replace them with arbitrary English letters! For example, “R sent you a message” when the name, even romanized, has nothing to do with the letter R.
Eagle-eyed readers might notice that I added an entire section dedicated to the downloaded screensavers. Although the screensavers on Apple TV are absolutely gorgeous, their depth and quality can take up a lot of storage space. It would also be great to give users granular control over this!
Third-party app TV Info can be useful, but one should not have to download an app for such basic information.
In writing this, I discovered a glitch. When Schooltime Mode is enabled on Apple Watch, it also turns Do Not Disturb on. If a user has it set so that setting a Focus Mode on one Apple device changes the Focus Mode on other Apple devices, enabling Schooltime Mode will also turn on Do Not Disturb on these other devices.
However, if a user turns off Do Not Disturb on one of the other Apple devices, it will also turn off Do Not Disturb on the Apple Watch - while also leaving Schooltime Mode running. In this instance when Schooltime Mode runs without Do Not Disturb enabled, any notification that comes through will end it without displaying the message telling how long Schooltime Mode was enabled for.
In testing this a number of times, I found that Schooltime Mode sometimes ends immediately when Do Not Disturb is turned off, but sometimes does not. I was unable to test if this glitch affects guardians or parents who have the system set up to receive a notification when Schooltime Mode is disabled.