Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is a little less than a month away, which means in just a few weeks we’ll see what Apple has planned for the next versions of iOS and OS X.

iOS has had a busy couple of years—it got a comprehensive visual overhaul in iOS 7, and a nearly as comprehensive under-the-hood overhaul in iOS 8. The only thing we think we know about iOS 9 at this point is that it will focus on stability and performance. It’s not going to be a “no new features” Snow Leopard-style release, but for the first time since 2012 or so the focus is going to be on spit-and-polish and not on radical changes.

We've assembled a small wishlist of features for iOS 9, with a focus on the smaller tweaks we hope Apple can focus on now that it’s not pulling up all the carpets and replacing all the fixtures. Some of these are more likely to be incorporated than others. Some have been on our wishlist for literally years. But all of them would be welcome improvements.

Siri API

This one’s on the list of “things we’ve been asking about for years.” Siri was introduced all the way back in iOS 5 and It's on everything from the high-end iPad Air 2 to the lowly iPhone 4S. It's long past time to allow third parties to make use of it.

Apple's strong developer ecosystem remains one of iOS' biggest assets, and allowing that ecosystem to extend Siri's capabilities would make the digital assistant much more useful than it is today without much extra effort on Apple's part. Sounds like a win-win scenario to me.

Public transit for Maps

This is the kind of feature that you either won't care about at all (people who primarily drive everywhere) or will absolutely need all the time (city dwellers).

The built-in Maps app lost public transit directions back in iOS 6, and since then Apple has been relying on third parties to supply this information. That experience is still inconsistent, though—you're being booted from Apple's app into someone else's with no guarantees about the app's appearance, functionality, or accuracy. It's Google Maps' biggest trump card at this point.

It's an even bigger problem when you consider something like the Apple Watch. Its turn-by-turn navigation is actually pretty good, and once you get used to the pulses telling you to turn left or right It's actually kind of nice not to have to interrupt your music or pull your phone out to make sure you're going the right way. But the Apple Watch can only use Apple's maps, and Apple's maps don't have transit directions.

Apple has been hiring people to work on this problem for a long time now. Maybe iOS 9 will be the update that actually addresses it.

Settings page overhaul

This is the System Preferences window in OS X. It organizes all of the different settings into subheadings. But suppose you’re looking for something and you don’t know where to find it? That’s OK! Because there’s a search box you can use to help.

That’s what the increasingly packed iOS Settings screen needs, at this point. Imagine a search box that’s hidden when you open the app, but appears when you swipe down. It’s an interaction that iOS users will already know from Spotlight and other similarly hidden search bars in apps like Messages, and it will help make sense of the maze that Settings has become.

Dark theme for menus

The Apple Watch app looks a whole lot like iOS’ normal menu screens, but the colors are inverted—it’s light text on a dark background rather than dark text on a white background.

We've kind of wanted a "dark theme" ever since iOS 7 turned everything that blinding shade of white, but the Apple Watch app really drives home how nice it would look (for people who are fans of such things, that is). Apple introduced a dark theme for OS X Yosemite, so clearly Apple knows there’s a demand for this kind of thing.

Maintain speed

New iOS releases aren't always kind to the lowest-end hardware they support. Much of the world has moved on to newer, faster devices and they won't have any complaints, but if you were an iPhone 3G user who installed iOS 4 or an iPhone 4 user who installed iOS 7 or an iPhone 4S user who installed iOS 8, you may have been bitten by the slowdown demon.

If iOS 9 is truly focused on speed and stability, we're hoping it won't come with a performance penalty for older devices. We'd bet that the new operating system will still run on hardware with Apple's A5 SoC—the fifth-gen iPod Touch, third-generation Apple TV, and original iPad Mini are still being sold—and in our wildest dreams the update would restore those devices to at least an iOS 7-ish level of zippiness.