What’s next for iOS app extensions?
looks at how Apple nee ds toopen up the wo rld ofexten sion s to improve iOS apps
When Apple buys a company, it’s hard not to turn into an amateur seer. In theory, you can’t read too much into its future by looking at the businesses it acquires, but sometimes the tea leaves indicate something more clearly than others, especially if the acquisitions are in areas that seem to be a slam dunk for Apple to be getting into. When it bought Siri, for example, the animal entrails pretty clearly spelled out ‘built-in AI assistant’.
Apple’s latest purchase is a similar story. Workflow is an app that many iOS power-users have come to love very dearly. It’s a bit like Automator, in that you build up workflows of tasks for it perform in a particular order, pushing a piece of data between them, but it works across many of the most popular apps on iOS. One of the most common issues people have with using iOS as a full-on macOS replacement is the way apps are ‘sandboxed’ – all their own little fiefdoms, isolated from each other for security reasons. The apps generally can’t talk to each other, but the Workflow app enables them to provide their capabilities outside of the sandbox.
Apple buying Workflow surprised a lot of people, but I think it makes perfect sense when you look at its recent moves to power up iOS. It’s all about extensions. Instead of breaking the sandbox system so that apps can become more capable, Apple is providing ways for apps to make cameo appearances within each other, and lend their capabilities as needed.
You can now record instruments from other music apps within GarageBand. You can access payment apps in iMessage, or book a ride-sharing service in Maps. Apple is making it so that you’re not relying on Cupertino to make your apps more powerful – it’s putting in a system so apps can do that on its behalf. All it takes to improve the apps you already have is a new app with a great idea.
These apps within apps are quite flashy, but there’s also a more subtle level on which extensions can operate. Apps can simply offer a task they can perform, such as translating text, which is available in other apps through the Action sheet (which you find in the Share menu). And when I say it’s subtle, really I just mean ‘irritatingly hidden’. Workflow helped to make these extensions more accessible and flexible for regular work, so it’s a great sign that this is Apple’s direction – but there’s still much more to do.
If extensions are the future, they need to be freed from the Share menu, and made so that apps can reveal them more naturally. Maybe a text-based tool such as translating words could be available in the text-selection pop-up menu. Maybe 3D Touch could act more like a right-click, and offer some of these options based on the type of file or content you pressed.
Apple keeps iOS simple to make it as easy to use as possible, but once we reach a certain level of experience with it and want to do more demanding things, the inflexibility of its simplicity can actually limit us, making it harder to use than macOS. Extensions help to improve its functionality, but we need Apple to stop hiding them in the cellar.
Apple keeps iOS simple to make it as easy to use as possible