WWDC 2019 Wishlist

Today I tweeted

Here’s a quick elaboration

Parameters in SiriKit custom intents: The custom intents that were introduced last year do not support recognition-time parameters. All of the parameters of the intent must be baked into the intent. SiriKit calls this “resolving parameters” and the built-in intents all support this, but custom ones do not.

On-device transfer learning in CoreML: Transfer learning allows you to build a new model from an existing one by providing more examples. CoreML added that last year, but you still need to train and build the new model off-device. I’d like a way to build new models this way on-device from device gathered examples (which would preserve privacy).

HKLiveWorkoutBuilder (from watchOS) in iOS: This class is only available for watch workout apps, but a simpler version would be nice for iOS workout apps. It obviously can’t gather heart rate, but it could automatically build the route and perhaps use a less sophisticated algorithm for guessing calories burned.

Web->AppStore->App ad attribution (w/o user tracking): The WebKit team just announced a privacy preserving ad attribution system for websites. I want the same thing to work for an ad for an app that appears on the web, App Store, or in another App. No need to attribute to a user — just the ad source is sufficient.

Fine-grained Shortcut integration (apps provide blocks): The Workflow team integrated the x-callback-urls of a bunch of popular apps into blocks — and Shortcuts still has them, but as far as I know, there’s no API for apps to provide small bits of functionality for Shortcuts to use as a building block. Even with the ones they have, the app comes up, does a bunch of stuff and then returns. A more streamlined experience would be nice.

Multi-select image picker: The current UIImagePickerViewController doesn’t support multi-select of photos. If you want to do this, you can build your own VC, but then you need to ask the user permission to their entire photo library in order to show them the photos. Since iOS 11, you have been able to bring up a picker without permission since it runs out-of-process and doesn’t give your app any access to the photos–just the one the user picked.