In no particular order my wishlist for iOS9.¹

1. Copy phone numbers from the recent calls list in the Phone app. Seriously! I was trying to give my business partner the number of someone who called for him and I had to write it down on a piece of paper and then type that into Messages!

Edit: Since my #1 turned out to just be a temporary bug/glitch I’ll replace it with one John Gordon suggested. Have groups sync in Contacts/Mail in iOS so I can see groups and mail to groups. I use Groups a lot in OSX. It’s frankly boggling that iOS ignores them for the most part. (If you type a group name in Mail you’ll get listed the members of that group but you have to select them individually from what I can see.)

2. Let you delete books from iBooks. I don’t just mean delete them off the device but off the service. I have a bunch of free books I want to delete because they sucked but all I can do is not display the cloud books. But I want to display most of the stuff in the cloud in my list. Amazon lets me do this. Why won’t iBooks?

3. Forward voice mail. Messages allows voice messages. Why can’t I forward a voice mail message via Messages or email it?

4. Find app locations. Spotlight is great on iOS. I actually use it more there than on OSX. For most apps not on the front page I just swipe down and type the name. Whenever I use Android I wish it had that feature. However if I find an app I want to delete or move I can’t do it. You get stuck having to look through all your screens and folders. At least let me delete it from Spotlight. Really though I’d like to move it to at least the top of one of the pages though.

5. Fix the Video app so that if you have a large iTunes library you can actually play video from your iTunes library on your iPad. The AppleTV has no trouble doing this. That the Video app hangs on any moderately large library (i.e. more than 100 videos) is ridiculous. That’s just a few TV seasons. I get the feeling that the people testing the Video app assume all your videos are bought via the cloud from Apple. I have a few TV seasons I’ve done that way. But when I can I get the Blurays and rip them. Not to mention my old DVD library I ripped to iTunes. After more than 20 years I had a lot of DVDs. I’m sure I’m not alone.

6. Put the 6+ keyboard on the iPad. I really want curser keys.

7. Fix all the bugs and limits in 3rd party keyboards so they work half decent. I want SwipeSelection features without having to jailbreak.

8. Make the selected shift key blue. Come on Ive, everyone but you hates the current virtual keyboard shift key.

9. Make WKWebView have the same features as UIWebView such as intelligent url handling and cookie handling. The reason 3rd party browsers don’t use WKWebView is missing features. That means they don’t get the fast javascript speed (which makes a big difference on certain pages). I don’t use browsers like Chrome but I do use apps like Tweetbot or Twitterific that are limited because of this issue.

10. Have a security feature for WKWebView for when apps do redirects to Twitter, Facebook or the like for identity or password. Apple’s been rejecting Apps that send these authorizations to Safari. But if it’s done in a web view the app could potentially record your password. Just have a security option that puts up a note that it’s secure within the app. For that matter I think this should be a basic security feature so people have some security confidence when using a 3rd party web view. They should be able to switch to a secure mode.

11. Allow Safari extensions in WKWebView. I’d really like to be able to access my 1Password extension not just from within Safari but from within 3rd party web views like within Tweetbot.

12. All iTunes Match’s “all songs” display to be turned on or off with a swipe in Control Center pane. When I’m in my car without WiFi access I only want to see the songs on my device. When I’m on WiFi I want to see all my songs. I’m sure I’m not alone in that. 

13. Fix displaying album art from iTunes match in iOS. Right now if I fix the art it’s never updated in iOS.

14. Move Newsstand apps out of the Newsstand folder and let me put them anywhere.

15. More icons per page in folder view as at least an option. This is one feature I quite enjoy when I jailbreak.

16. Make bookshelves in iBooks act more like lists. A book in iBooks should be able to be in multiple lists. I’d like a list for “books I’m reading” and then lists for various genres. Right now it’s the worst kind of skeuomorphism since physical books are only in one place at a time. There’s no reason why eBooks should be limited like that.

17. Let me edit metadata in the Music player, Video player and iBooks.

18. Improve the Remote app. Have it make a connection to your AppleTV and then maintain that between sessions so I don’t have such a delay between opening the app and actually doing anything. As is it’s really only worth accessing to type searches into YouTube.

19. Clear All for notifications. Seriously doesn’t that annoy everyone?

20. Fix syncing. I still frequently edit an iWork document and can’t get it to show up on my iOS devices. If you can’t make it work reliably then have an “update iCloud” button to cause it to look for new files. You don’t even need to make it obvious. Just put a button on the iCloud preferences that downloads the latest versions of everything.