Unnoticed Gems: The Overlooked Features of iOS 17

Over the years, I have dedicated countless words to discussing the new features of Apple's operating systems. From significant enhancements to subtle additions, I have covered them all in an effort to enhance the user experience on Mac, iPhone, iPad, and other Apple devices. Yet, this past weekend, I was reminded that most users remain unaware of these features, even when they have been available for years.

If you're reading this article, you are likely one of the most knowledgeable individuals when it comes to Apple products. However, your friends, family, co-workers, and acquaintances might never discover these flashy new operating system features unless you personally introduce them. It poses a significant challenge for Apple: how can they keep their devices relatively simple while also making complex new features more discoverable?

A Chance Encounter

During my family's recent visit to my daughter's college graduation, my wife and I decided to grab lunch at a bustling bakery restaurant. As we settled at our table and waited for our order, I placed my iPhone 14 Pro on the table. My wife playfully teased me about using nature pictures on my lock screen instead of images of our children. This led to a conversation about the lock screen's capabilities, including the ability to shuffle through nature photos in my library using machine learning. It became evident that my wife had never attempted to customize her lock screen, even though this feature was introduced in iOS 16 last fall. Furthermore, she had not even explored lock screen widgets, another prominent addition in iOS 16.

Unlocking the Potential

Editing the lock screen requires a series of somewhat unintuitive steps, such as locking the phone and then performing a long press on the lock screen. Without actively seeking information about Apple's new features, how are users expected to stumble upon them? Apple's upcoming iOS 17 introduces a feature called TipKit, aimed at helping app developers provide users with guidance on lesser-known features. While this is a commendable idea, Apple itself faces challenges in encouraging users to embrace these new features.

But the challenges do not end there.

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Facing Limitations

Upon realizing that my wife could create a lock screen that displayed a shuffle of photos featuring our kids, identified through machine learning, her enthusiasm grew. However, my excitement was short-lived as I discovered that Apple's shiny new feature relied on a combination of shaky technologies that failed to deliver the desired experience.

To enable Photo Shuffle for people on the lock screen, you must select their faces from your Photos Library. Unfortunately, my wife had never delved into the People album within the Photos app on her iPhone, where faces can be merged and labeled. Why would she? The People album is tucked away, and face and name assignments do not sync across shared photo libraries. Consequently, my efforts to classify faces on my Mac did not extend to her device.

To make matters worse, Photo Shuffle's method of presenting faces seemed entirely flawed. It offered my wife a limited number of faces, most of which were random and uncommon. Despite having hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures of me and our kids on her phone, none of us appeared in the options provided. Moreover, if the desired faces are absent from the very limited selection, there is no recourse. Users are left with no choice.

I took her to the Photos app, where we spent a few minutes quickly browsing through her photo library, identifying family members, marking them as favorites, and cleaning up duplicates. Regrettably, the process responsible for generating the list of faces in Photo Shuffle appeared to lack priority. When I returned to it at the end of our lunch, none of the family members had made an appearance in her Photo Shuffle options. Thus, our clever idea was rendered futile.

App Overload

During this lunchtime revelation, I also discovered that despite Apple's efforts to innovate iOS features over the years, my wife continued to adhere to her habits from when she first started using the iPhone. In other words, Apple made improvements to enhance the user experience, but these changes failed to register with her.

Let me be more specific—it's about apps. My wife's home screen was filled with numerous pages of apps. Attending a wedding? Download an app to contribute photos to the couple, and it remains on her device indefinitely. Need to pay for parking in a new city? Download an app, and it becomes a permanent fixture. All these apps were added to the end of her last home screen page, never to be rearranged.

(In fact, she even complained about the inconvenience of dragging desired apps from the last page to the first. I showed her the new feature that allows you to hold the wiggling app with one finger while swiftly swiping with another to change pages, which astonished her because she was still following the old method of dragging the app icon to the left side of the screen and waiting for the page to scroll. Another new feature that went unnoticed!)

As it turns out, my wife primarily uses one or two pages of apps and resorts to searching for the rest. She had a few folders from a past attempt at organizing her phone, but eventually gave up and turned to search functionality. I ended up deleting several pages from her home screen and showed her how to utilize the App Library.

The truth is, her behavior—maintaining a page or two of essential apps and relying on search for the rest—is likely how most people use their iPhones. Apple recognized this, which led to the introduction of the App Library and the removal of the requirement to place every downloaded app on the home screen. However, if my wife serves as an example, these new features have gone unnoticed.

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I don't have all the answers. I acknowledge the difficulty Apple faces in making new iPhone features discoverable and changing ingrained user behaviors. The forthcoming TipKit APIs indicate that Apple continues to grapple with this challenge.