With June fast approaching that means one thing for Apple developers around the world — WWDC. WWDC is the annual developers conference where Apple announce the latest versions of their operating systems (they have 4 on the go at the moment in OSX, iOS, tvOS and watchOS) and occasionally new hardware.

As many people like to do; at Add Jam we love to guess what’s coming so here’s a wishlist for WWDC 2016.

A better HomeKit

At Add Jam we’re keen on the internet of things. Both Chris and I have Nest Learning Thermostats and Hue light bulbs and we’re both keen to explore other IoT products for the home.

I feel IoT in the home is a bit of a wild west. Everyone is fighting to create their own ecosystem or partially play nice with others. Take my Hue set up, I use at least three different services to control the lights as I like them. While it’s undoubtedly cool to turn the lights on and off with Siri through HomeKit I need to use a third party app to allow me to do it. The experience is clunky and not something my parents could easily set up.

Not so ridiculous now Scotty

I would love to see HomeKit become a stand alone app and be the one place for my home automation. As a user it would give nice controls to configure my home and set up rules. As a developer having a go to place (like Health and HealthKit) for the home would be incredibly useful and easy to integrate with. It could really open up home automation for the masses.

watchOS, you’ve got to do better

I’ve had an Apple Watch since launch. I still wear it almost daily but… I don’t love it. There are days I leave the house without it, I don’t turn back to get it while I can’t imagine leaving the house without my mobile.

The Apple Watch is a pain to charge every night but I can live with that, what really grinds my gears is how extremely slow the watch is. Most useful interactions with the watch need information there, already present or within easy reach. Complications do this really well but so few apps use custom complications. Glances are slow and difficult to navigate/remember the order (it would make more sense to be able to switch between glances with the Digital Crown).

Apps are almost entirely useless, it takes ages to find and open them and when you do it takes even longer for them to load up anything useful.

The watch comes with a button I never use. I’m a pretty sociable guy and keep in touch with a lot of people but I never use the social button on the watch. Whenever I want to get in touch with someone it’s easier to just get my phone and and text than it is to tap through menus and scroll through emoji to send a message. The only time I send a message from my watch is when I can get away with a one word reply (Yes, No or OK) reply and that never needs me to touch the button. So I’d love to see this button repurposed for Apple Pay, as a home button or a physical ‘positive action button’.

The second iteration of the OS improved the watch a great deal so here’s hoping watchOS3 can improve things even more.

OSX (or is that MacOS)

I just installed El Capitan last week, a full 7 months after launch. I think as an OS update it was a bit of a let down following Yosemite. Yosemite had great new features like handoff and the new design language. El Capitan added a mouse shake to identify the cursor and some annoying (at least for developers) under the hood security improvements.

With the new OSX it would be brilliant to see a revamped App Store. A lot of big apps like Sketch have ditched the App Store for distribution which is a shame as it offers developers an easy route to market and eases payment/licensing and for users it makes it easy to carry apps across devices. Currently it’s so slow, search is awful, discoverability is a problem and it would be nice to be able to offer demos or trials.

Improving the App Store would be a massive improvement for both Mac users and developers.

You can do better than this Apple

Siri has came a long way since her introduction in 2011 but she still hasn’t found her way to the Mac. It’s crazy that our mobile devices have a smart assistant but our powerful desktop ones don’t. Yosemite did a lot to bring the two operating systems together but it feels jarring that I can’t also ask my MacBook to turn the lights on or to set a reminder.

iOS10

iOS is all grown up. In 2016 (all things going as expected) the iOS version number will be in double digits so what new can Apple bring to iOS to keep it fresh.

System app updated separate from the OS update would be lovely. Wouldn’t it be great to have the best browser Apple can make at that time on your phone? It’s actually a problem OSX suffers from too. Currently we get system app (Safari, Mail and Apple Music etc etc) updates bundled with the main OS updates. Why? I’d love to see Safari etc decoupled from the OS slightly and to get continuous improvements through the year.

While we’re on the subject of the system apps can we get ride of some of them? Everyone with an iPhone has a ‘crap’ folder filled with unwanted system apps — stocks anyone — so I can’t be alone in wanting a way to at the very least hide them.

iCloud storage needs some love. Costs should come down and storage should go up. We’re consuming more and more, taking bigger photos and higher resolution video so help us out here Apple and make iCloud more useful.

I don’t really have a big wish list for iOS. As a user I really like my iPhone. The OS is easy to use, robust, fast (at least on my iPhone 6) and only have a few minor gripes with it at the moment.

As a developer; we’ve been using React Native and tools like CodePush which has really reduced most of the major problems developing on iOS (app review times, Xcode etc). It would be nice to see Apple improve the situation in general for developers so:

A stable Xcode (one can dream)

Improve the App Store submission and release process; could there be an official competitor to CodePush?

Improvements to TestFlight, make it easier to distribute beta apps and track performance — we use Crashlytics for this

Would it be insane to see Apple offer a test cloud service like Amazon and Xamarin?

Dependency management. There’s carthage and Cocoapods, each with their own pros and cons. Can Apple do something genuinely good here?

Apple Music

It seems popular to knock Apple Music at the moment and rightly so. The UI is a mess, the sync between devices is awful and it lacks the social aspect of Spotify.

The ‘New’ tab is ok if not spectacular for finding new music but it’s also where you find curator and activity playlists and the ‘Connect’ tab is horrendous — I’ll just follow artists on Facebook or Twitter thanks. It really need a rework and the rumour mill is suggesting that’s going to happen.

While I’m on an Apple Music rant; why do I still have an iTunes App on iOS when I also have Apple Music? I’m not going to buy music when I’m paying for the streaming service so get rid of it. This mash up is even more confusing on OSX. I guess the reason for this is Apple still use the iTunes store to sell TV and movies…

Apple TV service

Netflix is great, I would go as far as to say it’s a service I enjoy paying for. Compared to the the licence fee in the UK, I feel I get much more value for money from Netflix than from the BBC. But I can’t help but feel the catalogue is shrinking.

It’s all down to licensing but you would imagine Apple have the clout and the financial resource to unify streaming and produce a great service for TV and film. Apple could do it globally as well which would be huge now Netflix is clamping down on folks using a proxy to access content from other regions.

A service like that (tied to a decent Apple Music) would sell devices so you have to think Apple are pursuing it.

The Apple TV hardware itself is great. It’s the best set top box I’ve used and the Siri remote is a really good input device. Discovery could be much better on the App Store (a problem across all platforms) and it would be nice to see a 4K version.

What do you think Apple will announce at WWDC? Or is a better question what do you wish they would announce?