Apple have borrowed one or two ideas from the jailbreaking community in the past – the app icon rearranging functionality comes to mind, I’m sure there are others. I think many of the new features we’ll see in iPhone OS 4.0 will be based on functionality added by the community.
Don’t have time to fully explore these ideas in a blog post this morning, but here’s a breakdown of my ideas/wishlist. In order of probability.
- Background processes
- Not much of a hit to battery or CPU performance with simple apps like twitter or IM clients. Apple could tweak the OS to handle background processes even better.
- All new smartphones have this ability. iPhone needs it to stay competitive.
- Themes
- New source of revenue
- Could be what the paint splotches on the invite are alluding to
- Only reason not to do it would be inconsistent UI. But, with themes officially supported Apple could apply their stringent review process.
- Lockscreen
- The lockscreen functionality is really cool.
- Current jailbroken functionality doesn’t seem fully baked. I think Apple could make major improvements.
- A dashboard widget type interface would seem to make sense.
// end stream of consciousness.