Daring Fireball: iOS Low-Hanging Fruit

Daring Fireball: iOS Low-Hanging Fruit: “iOS is by no means feature-complete. But it’s getting harder to identify the low-hanging fruit — the things you just know Apple has to be working on, not just the stuff you hope they are.”

Good post by John Gruber that explores the rumor that Apple will break from Google’s map data in iOS 6. He then goes on to say:

What else remains hanging low on the iOS new-features tree, though? I can think of a few:

Clever inter-application communication. Seems crazy that iOS, the direct descendant of NeXT, doesn’t have anything like Services, which were one of NeXT’s most touted features (and rightfully so). It’s also worth noting that Android has a pretty good Services-esque system in place, called “Intents”, and Windows 8 has an even richer concept called “Contracts”.

Third-party Notification Center widgets. Like the Stocks and Weather ones from Apple — information at a glance, without launching an app.

Third-party Siri APIs. Let other apps provide features you can interact with through Siri.

But that’s about it. And even the Siri API idea seems more like a “nice to have” feature idea than a low-hanging “Apple really has to do this sooner or later” idea. Again, I’m not saying Apple’s iOS to-do list is empty; I’m just saying the list of obvious they-gotta-do-it stuff is getting short.

I can think of one more developer API, though, that (unless I’ve missed it) remains glaringly missing: integration into the iOS search screen, aka Spotlight for iOS. Third-party apps should be able to plug into that search screen, offering up their data when users conduct searches. iPhones would be that much more useful if the search screen could be extended to cover third-party apps.

I’m sure Apple is concerned about malfeasance and abuse, but that’s what the app review program is for. The third-party apps that supported search would display in the Spotlight Search settings screen as well, so apps that matched terms too generously or otherwise misbehaved could be switched off from the privilege of responding to searches.

I’d love to see this in iOS 6.