OPINION: We’re just a couple of months away from Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC for short) and the likely launch of a load of new software, including iOS 19.

The keynote that kicks off WWDC is up there with the iPhone launch as the biggest Apple event of the year.

It typically focuses on software – although hardware is never completely off the table – and it’s the traditional launchpad for Apple’s next batch of software updates that’ll power the best iPhones, iPads and so on.

While the general public will have to wait until around the time of the iPhone 17 (and probably iPhone 17 Air) launch to get stuck into whatever iOS 19 brings, Apple usually releases the new update immediately for registered developers and follows that up with a public beta in the summer.

There are already numerous iOS 19 rumors floating about, but these are some of the features I would most love to see in the next iPhone upgrade, with a few iPadOS 19 requests thrown in too.

A complete redesign

The loudest online chatter regarding iOS 19 is that it’ll come with a big redesign, potentially the biggest switch-up in the software’s look since iOS 7 ditched the skeuomorphic look that had defined the early versions.

Many suggestions have pointed towards Apple adopting a look not too dissimilar to Vision OS, which has a lot of circular design elements. App icons could go from square to circles, and other system elements would follow.

Unifying a look across software seems an obvious move, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if these leaks and rumors are mostly on the money.

All I can say is that iOS needs a visual refresh. As more features have been added in recent years, the OS has become cluttered and confusing.

The busy notification panel and Control Centre need a redo, and the way some system elements come in through the Dynamic Island and some don’t needs to be rectified. I’d also like Apple to rethink that panel of widgets that sits to the left of the homescreen as this is mostly wasted space.

Split screen apps

While I feel that if Apple had any intention to include a feature like this in iOS, it would have been added when the Plus phones became a thing, it remains one of my biggest requests every year.

The Max and Plus-sized iPhones are big – big enough to allow more than one app to be visible and accessible on the screen at once. True mobile multitasking has been present on the best Android phones for years now, yet Apple has never decided to bring such a feature to the iPhone.

On a supported Android phone you can, for instance, have the Spotify app take up the top portion of the screen and Google Docs on the bottom, or YouTube and Chrome, or Slack and Gmail. Some Android UI’s even let you resize app windows, and shrink apps down into little bubbles that can be moved around.

Apple already has a similar function in iPadOS, but with phone screens getting bigger, it makes sense to bring it to the iPhone too – even if it’s restricted to the larger models.

True icon customisation

After many years of staunch opposition, Apple brought in the ability to add some customisation to app icons in iOS with last year’s release. Along with setting icons to display in dark mode, you can tweak the general colour and make them larger.

In iOS 19, I’d like Apple to go a step further and give us full icon customisation, letting anyone completely change an icon – without the need for a finicky hack in the Shortcuts app.

This is another Android staple, and now that Apple has dipped its toe into the customisation waters it needs to wade in even further.

Food logging in the Health app

This is one of the features that has been touted in iOS 19 leaks and it’s something I would love to see added. 

As a user of a food logging app, both for calorie counting and for allergy detection, having it built right into the Health app would make complete sense and cut down on the numerous other apps I use every day.

Apps like MyFitnessPal and Nutra Check Calorie Counter are incredibly popular services, so Apple would need to ensure it rolls out a fully-featured alternative, but having it tie up with other system features – the shopping list in Reminders, for instance – could be a reason to switch.

A much deeper editing experience in Photos

Apple recently acquired Pixelmator, a very capable set of iOS and MacOS photo editing apps. While iOS 19 might come a bit too soon for an implementation, it seems like a no-brainer that we’ll see many of these apps features eventually baked into the Photos app on iPhone. 

This would be similar to how Apple acquired the weather app Dark Sky and added some (although certainly not all) of its features into the iOS Weather app.

Both Pixelmator Pro and its sister app Photomator have deep AI editing features that feel like a perfect fit for the Photos app, and they both have far more editing options that what Apple currently offers.

A system-wide paste board

I’ve recently started using a Mac app called Paste, and I am not sure how I ever lived without this simple utility. This app holds everything you copy – links, paragraphs, images, etc – and saves it in a board, making it always accessible. No longer do I accidentally clear what I’ve previously copied when I need something else, as it’s all saved for me.

Something like this would be fantastic as a system-wide iOS feature, possibly even tying into iCloud so my copied text and images are accessible everywhere.

What are your iOS 19 feature requests? Let me know over on the Trusted Reviews forum.