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The Smartphone Features We Should Have Had Years Ago

Smartphones are astonishingly capable devices. They have cameras that would have seemed impossible twenty years ago, processors powerful enough to run serious software, satellite connectivity, increasingly sophisticated AI and enough sensors to know roughly what we are doing most of the day. And yet I regularly find myself wondering: why can’t my phone do this?

Not because I am waiting for some spectacular new technology. Quite the opposite. Many of the features I would like to see seem surprisingly simple. I recently came across a post on Curvise about phone features that really should exist by now, and that got me thinking about a much broader question. Smartphones have evolved enormously, but the way we interact with them has remained remarkably conventional. We still open apps. We still move information manually from one app to another. We still hunt through settings menus. And when we want privacy, we often need to disable several different things separately. Surely we can do better.

Why is my smartphone still a collection of apps?

This is probably the biggest one for me. Suppose someone sends me a message asking whether we can meet next Wednesday at 11:00 at a certain café. What do I do? I open my calendar to check whether I am available. Then I open Maps to see where the café is and perhaps check how long it takes to get there. After that I return to the messaging app, confirm the appointment and finally go back to the calendar to create an event.

None of this is difficult, of course. But why am I doing all those individual steps? My phone already has access to the relevant information. It knows what is in my calendar, it knows where the café is, it can calculate travel time and it knows who sent the message. I should simply be able to say: “Yes, that works. Put it in my calendar and send the details back.” The phone should handle the rest.

This is where AI on smartphones could actually become useful. Not by generating funny pictures or summarising emails I could read myself, but by acting as a layer across the operating system. At the moment, smartphone software is still built largely around applications. Every app is its own little island, and we are the ones moving between those islands and performing a sequence of actions.

A smarter operating system could understand the intention behind what you are doing. You could say: “Send the photos I took yesterday to Anna,” or “Find the PDF Peter sent me last month and attach it to this email.” You might also ask: “During my holiday, silence all work notifications except messages from these three people”, or “Whenever I arrive at the office, switch my phone to silent mode and start my work timer.”

Some of this can already be achieved through automation tools, shortcuts or individual AI assistants, but that misses the point. It should not require programming your phone. The operating system itself should understand these kinds of instructions.

Small features can make a big difference

There is another category of missing smartphone features that is far less ambitious. These are the things where you discover an idea and immediately think: of course a phone should be able to do that. Curvise has collected several examples of this type, and I think this is an interesting reminder that innovation does not always have to mean adding another camera, making a screen slightly brighter or putting a faster processor inside a phone.

Sometimes innovation is simply about removing small irritations. Take notifications. Smartphones have become much better at managing them, but notification controls are still often strangely primitive. You can allow an app to send notifications or block them. Sometimes there are categories, and sometimes you can silence them temporarily. But I would like much more contextual control.

For example, I might want to tell my phone not to show me any news notifications while I am working, to mute a certain app until tomorrow morning, or to notify me only when a message in a group contains my name. I would also like to be able to say: “Never show promotional notifications from this app, but keep service notifications.” None of this sounds futuristic to me. It simply sounds useful.

The same applies to sound. Why isn’t there a proper mixer on every smartphone? My laptop lets me control the volume of individual applications, while on phones sound control is often still surprisingly basic. Perhaps I want Spotify playing quietly while a language-learning app is louder. Perhaps I want navigation instructions at one volume and music at another. Or perhaps I want one game permanently muted without disabling sound for everything else.

These are tiny improvements, but they can dramatically change how pleasant a device is to use. And that is something smartphone manufacturers sometimes seem to forget. A phone does not necessarily become better because it gains another headline feature. It becomes better when it gets out of your way.

Give me one big privacy switch

Then there is privacy. Modern smartphones contain microphones, cameras, GPS receivers, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, motion sensors and plenty of other ways to collect information about us. Both Android and iOS now provide reasonably good permission controls, allowing you to decide which applications can use your microphone, camera or location.

But the controls are still fragmented. What I would really like is a huge, obvious privacy switch. One tap and camera access is off, microphone access is off, location access is off, Bluetooth scanning is off and background sensor access is disabled. Perhaps it could even temporarily disable network access for applications. Basically: a leave-me-alone-mode.

Android has experimented with sensor controls that come close to this idea, and individual privacy settings already exist on most phones. But there should be a simple universal control that temporarily shuts everything down. Imagine walking into a confidential meeting. Instead of checking five different settings, you tap one button and privacy mode is enabled. When the meeting is finished, you switch it off again.

Or perhaps you are visiting somewhere and simply do not want apps collecting location information for a few hours. Again: one tap, done. Of course there would need to be exceptions. Emergency calling, for example, should continue to work, and you might also want to allow certain devices or apps. But technically this does not seem particularly difficult.

More importantly, it would make privacy visible. At the moment privacy settings tend to be buried inside menus. That makes them something you configure once and then forget. A privacy switch would turn privacy into something you actively control.

Maybe we don’t need another AI button

What I find interesting about all these examples is that none of them require a radically different smartphone. The hardware is already there, the sensors are already there, the processing power is certainly there and even much of the software already exists in one form or another.

What is missing is integration. Smartphones have become enormously sophisticated devices, but we still interact with them in ways that often feel surprisingly manual. We open an app, tap something, copy information, switch apps, paste it somewhere else, change a setting and then switch it back later.

Perhaps the next big improvement in smartphones should therefore not be another camera lens or another AI button. Perhaps smartphones simply need to become better at understanding what we are actually trying to achieve.

Give me an operating system that can perform tasks across applications, give me much smarter contextual controls and please give me one enormous privacy switch. None of these ideas sound revolutionary, which is exactly why I find it so strange that we still don’t have them.

Here are two links to interesting blogs and ideas about this topic:

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