iOS4 brought some much-needed improvements to the iPhone in terms of app management. Now, apps can be grouped into folders and a multitasking panel lets you switch among active apps (for 3GS users only). The problem is, these features are underwhelming additions to a platform that should have had these capabilities as soon as the App Store was introduced.
Apple should have added folders to iPhone two years ago. What they should be doing at this point is paying attention to the details and making the app management process more fluid.
App Management & Notification Handling
As I began to drag app icons from page to page to organize my folders, I wondered why that process is so difficult. I had to move each app, one by one, across pages to its destination folder. Why can’t Apple simply apply the same select/copy/paste system to icons to make organizing apps a cinch?
Another thing that’s sorely missing from the iPhone is a notification handling system. The iPhone is far too advanced to be missing this feature. Right now, if I get a notification for an item in my Todo list and I close it, I will never see that notification again. iPhone is in desperate need of a notification handling system (like Facebook) so that I can keep track of my many notifications. If I choose to be notified about something, then it’s obviously important enough to me to be kept in a list of recent notifications.
Too Little, Too Late?
It seems to me that Apple did not think ahead when it introduced the App Store. When the iPhone came out, everyone cried for third party apps and Apple told us to use web apps.
Then, the App Store hit the iPhone and you quickly had a mess of icons cluttering pages and pages of your iPhone. Furthermore, to this day you are still forced to keep Apple’s default apps on your iPhone, even if you don’t need them. I never use Stocks, Contacts or Weather yet I can’t delete them. How arrogant of Apple to force us to keep their rarely-updates junk apps.
Conclusion
Folders and multitasking are great, but Apple, please give us the following to make using the iPhone a better experience:
- Let us grab and drag multiple apps at once to organize into folders.
- Let us choose to delete default apps that are useless to us, like Stocks, Weather and Contacts in my case.
- Give us a history of notifications so that we can keep track of our important items.
These are the features I hope to see in the iOS 4.1 iPhone update.
What Say You?
Are folders enough or does iPhone still need some app handling improvements?
iPhone Still Needs Better App Management, Notification Handling is a post from Apple iPhone Review.
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