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4 annoying problems iOS 9 doesn’t fix

Published Jun 8th, 2015 5:40PM EDT
iOS 9 Biggest Missing Features

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Apple revealed several great new features with iOS 9, but as ever there’s something for users to gripe about. In particular, there were many glaring issues with iOS that still won’t be fixed with the release of iOS 9. We’ve listed all the big ones below.

RELATED: The 5 best iOS 9 features

Extensions are still hard to discover: Extensions were one of the cooler features Apple added with iOS 8. Essentially, Extensions let your apps share data and information with each other and thus make them much more useful. In reality, however, Extensions aren’t easy to discover.

Earlier this year, MacStories‘ Federico Viticci came up with a proposal to make it easier for users to discover Extensions and use them on iOS 9.

“By allowing developers to trigger specific extensions programmatically (after a user’s consent) and attach extensions directly to other parts of iOS beyond the share sheet, iOS 9 could fix the discoverability problem of extensions and make the technology more consistent, useful, and approachable at the same time,” he proposed.

Unfortunately, this issue doesn’t seem to have been addressed in iOS 9.

Apps still collect large caches of data you can’t easily get rid of: This was an issue that ZDNet flagged recently in the context of letting users have the power to free up more space for iOS upgrades without forcing them to delete their content. Thankfully, Apple is making sure iOS 9 will be a slim 1.3GB, but it would still be nice to have a way to delete massive content caches from apps such as Facebook without having to delete and reinstall those apps.

Notifications still need better organization options: One issue that some users have complained about is the fact that iOS notifications are delivered separately for different apps instead of chronologically overall. So if you want to see the most recently sent Instagram notification, for instance, you have to scroll through all your Gmail notifications first. Some users have requested that Apple offer the option to sort all notifications chronologically but that didn’t happen with iOS 9 that we know of.

Support for third-party keyboards could still be improved: This was another issue that Viticci wrote about, which is the inconsistency in supporting third-party iOS keyboards. In particular, he noted that these keyboards lacked access to key iOS features that would make them more useful for users.

“Custom keyboards can’t access Siri dictation, they can’t show the popup menu to switch to another keyboard with tap & hold, and they can’t implement the system auto-correct dictionary,” he explained. “With a proper set of permissions and performance considerations, I’m hoping all this will be enabled in iOS 9.”

Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the case right now.

Brad Reed
Brad Reed Staff Writer

Brad Reed has written about technology for over eight years at BGR.com and Network World. Prior to that, he wrote freelance stories for political publications such as AlterNet and the American Prospect. He has a Master's Degree in Business and Economics Journalism from Boston University.