The Swift Student Challenge Interviews and watchOS and tvOS Wishes
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Hello and welcome to App Stories. Today's episode is brought to you by Play by Marcos Tanaka. I'm John Voorhees and with me is Federico Fatici. Hey Federico. Hello John, how are you? Good, good. I'm excited because we have a really cool episode today. We are speaking to Susan Prescott and two of the Apple Swift Student Challenge distinguished winners today.

for our first segment. And then we're going to move on to OSs. So, you know, why don't we, why don't we dive in and say hello to Susan and the students.

Let's do it. Hey, everybody. We have a very special segment of App Stories today. Today, we have some distinguished guests with us to talk about the Swift Student Challenge. We have Apple's Vice President of Developer Relations, Education, and Enterprise, Susan Prescott, along with two of the distinguished student winners, Amy Key and Omar Firdaus. Welcome to the show, everybody. Thanks so much for having us all.

Susan, maybe we could start with you because for listeners who maybe aren't familiar with the Swift Student Challenge, could you explain a little bit about what it is and kind of how it fits into the context of the Apple Developer Program?

Yeah, I think, you know, coding is a great way to be empowered and a great way to express yourself, to change the world for the better in the smaller, in the large. But at the end of the day, Swift Student Challenge really is a way for students around the world to pick a topic near and dear to their heart that we don't constrain what the topics are.

and be able to participate regardless of background or experience levels to showcase their own passion project and in doing so, demonstrate some creative encoding skills. So we're really excited about the scale we have

winners from 38 countries this year, 350 winners in total. So it's really taking on a global nature, which makes sense because coding is a universal language of sorts, obviously. We're really proud of all of the students who submitted. We're really impressed. And especially with folks like Amy and Omar here today, who will also have the opportunity to join us on campus for our

special event on day one of our Worldwide Developer Conference this year. So very excited about the Swiss Student Challenge. It's continued to gain momentum and we are so inspired. And I mean that

so sincerely. And you'll see what I mean as you hear from Omar and Amy. Yeah, it's always very inspiring. And in fact, I kind of want to start talking to Amy. I wanted to know, Amy, you're a 17-year-old student, distinguished Swift Student Challenge winner. I kind of wanted to know from you, what inspired you to start coding in the first place?

Yeah, so I would definitely say something that helped inspire me start coding in the first place was actually in ninth grade, I was diagnosed with a rare chronic illness. And because of it, I had to stay at home for around like three months from school. And while I was doing homebound school, obviously, I had a lot of free time to sort of just experiment, learn what I wanted to learn outside of the more rigid school curriculum. And because of that,

I was like, well, why not just start learning how to code? And so I started off super basic, just learning the APCSA curriculum. But from there, I started experimenting with small projects. And obviously, it's continued until now.

That's incredible. And why did you choose Swift and sort of Apple hardware? Was it just because you wanted to build apps for your phone? How did you approach the Apple ecosystem from that point of view?

Yeah, so I think I definitely have to say that Swift is a really intuitive and simple programming language to code in, which I can really appreciate. I mean, they have so many really great and built frameworks. For example, like CoreML helps you really easily integrate AI into your apps. And also just SwiftUI has such a really aesthetic and pretty UI UX design. So that was something else I also really looked for when I was coding with Swift.

Yeah, it's really interesting. Could you tell us a little bit about your app, Amy, and what it does?

Yeah, so my app is called Chiron and essentially it's meant to be this sort of all-encompassing app to support individuals with Parkinson's disease. And it helps, it can help with like diagnosis and help track symptoms and mood of users. It can also help users manage their medication, send notifications to their phone for when to take their meds. And also there's just like a couple of games that can help with motor control.

Very cool. Very cool. And, you know, now that you've kind of finished the Swift student challenge, where are you going to take it from here? What are your plans for coding in the future?

So in the future, I plan, well, since I'm a senior in high school this year, I plan on going to college and I'll be attending Stanford University, which I'm really excited about. And I think, yeah, and I think there, I mean, it's basically right next to Silicon Valley. There's so, so many opportunities to continue coding and continue like furthering my passion for technology.

Yeah. And let me ask you, Amy, since AI is one of the topics that we cover frequently on the podcast, and we never had a chance to talk to the new generation of coders about how they see AI in terms of development. What do you think, what kind of help can AI be, not just maybe for you as a developer, or maybe both, both for you as a developer, but also for the users?

Where do you see AI fitting in the developer tooling for you, but also in terms of the user experience for the customers of your app and your future apps?

Yeah, so I think AI is like an incredibly powerful tool and it's still, so much of it is still intact. And I think there is going to be a future where we see a transition to like a greater transition to AI, I guess I should say. And I think as a developer, AI is certainly very helpful. I mean, even if you think off the top of your head, there are a lot of models that can help you when it comes to coding, which I think are good resources to understand like

how to create code and also just in terms of helping users, AI can automate a lot of processes and just make it less hands-on, I guess. Yeah. Well, I just wanted to say that your app idea that you submitted is very inspiring. Thank you. Yeah, it's a very, very inspiring story.

Omar, we also wanted to talk to you. Obviously, congratulations for the Swift Student Challenge. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself? How you started coding? What's been your path so far? Hi, my name's Omar. So I started coding around 9 or 10 years old when I first started Python tutorials on YouTube. And that was my first, like, dipping my toes in the water. And it was an amazing experience because it was the first time I actually built something. And...

Being so young, there's not a lot of opportunities you have access to and there's a really large skills gap. So coding really helped me solve that. And over time, after I got proficient in Python, I learned about this new app called Swift Playgrounds and I downloaded it on my iPad. And that was even a better moment than Python because unlike Python and

and Swift Playgrounds, I could actually see those visual demonstrations and it made it so much easier to understand what I was making. So that was the first time I could build my products. And then over time, I kept going into different fields like robotics I'm currently involved in first and organizations like that where we build robust competing competitions. And now I've been getting more into Swift development through QubitQuest.

That's really cool. Are you doing any of the coding as part of your first program? Yeah, I'm the coding leader of that team. It's been an awesome experience to learn about new models and new technologies that we can use to build mechatronics and robots.

That's really neat. I've been to a couple of those competitions before, and they're always a lot of fun to watch the competitions. Let me ask you a little bit about your app. What does it do? What led you to create it for the challenge? Yeah, so I built Cubic Quest, which is a quantum computer simulation app. And the reason that I was inspired to build it is

in about like 2018, 2019, I was trying to learn more about quantum computing because there was so much buzz about it. There's, I'm not sure if you all have had much experience with it, but with quantum supremacy, you're able to achieve a whole new level of environmental and pharmaceutical benefits that couldn't be possible due to the way quantum computing works. And when trying to learn about quantum computing, I found

that there was a very large skills gap and this was before technologies like Chazu-T. I just couldn't get a hold of it because, well, first off you have the left side of it, which is basic videos to understand how quantum computing works and that worked to some level. And then you have high level programs like Qiskit that are meant for PhDs and masters in those fields. Now I want to build an intermediary between

the two fields and that's where I came upon Cubic Quest. And the best way I found to learn what quantum computing is and how it works and interact with it is through an interactive simulation where you can place different types of gates on a circuit manipulating different types of bits.

That's incredible. I find it so fascinating that as a 10-year-old you developed an interest in quantum computing. I thought I heard it all from student challenge winners. And every year I'm surprised.

What's next for you? What do you think is next for you? - Next, I plan to continue. I'm a freshman in high school right now. So for the next three years, I'm definitely gonna get more involved in robotics

and possibly trying to get my team to the worlds. And besides that, because of being motivated by Swift Student Challenge, I think I'm going to start pursuing app development, specifically with Swift, a lot more. And there's a lot of other projects, especially now with AI, that are achievable that I plan on working on in the future.

Very nice. Very nice. Now, before we go, Susan, I had one final question for you. I mentioned I thought I had seen it all just a couple of minutes ago, but you have seen it all. And every year, you have a new group of students, a new group of winners. And I wanted to ask you,

Do you, do you still also get surprised every year by what these kids are able to accomplish? Absolutely. It's unbelievable. We keep, you know, you think, okay, you know, we've done this for a little while now, you know, we know these, there's a lot of ingenuity, a lot of passion, a lot of skill, you know, a lot of,

Very authentic purpose in what these students are doing. But honestly, yes, you know, we have engineers from Apple who help judge the contest and they too are blown away, you know, looking at some of the things. And, you know, there's all kinds of, as I mentioned, backgrounds and experiences. Some people are very new to coding when they submit and there's still real ingenuity in what they've done.

You know, others have had more experience and are using it in really powerful ways. As you've heard from, you know, Amy and Omar. So it's really one of my favorite things I get to do is to participate in the framing and then the, you know, the excitement of, you know, meeting many of the winners and celebrating these students. So if you need some good news in the world today.

There you have it. Yeah, it's always inspiring for us to listen to the students because ultimately a lot of these students over the years have been people who have come, you know, created apps that we write about now on Mac Stories every week. So congratulations again to Amy and Omar. It's been really a pleasure talking to you. And thank you so much, Susan, for your time too and for joining us today and giving us a chance to speak to a couple of the distinguished winners. It's been a pleasure. We greatly appreciate your time both. Thank you.

All right, Federico, that was a lot of fun. I enjoy doing that every single year because there's, as you said... You could take a returning App Stories guest, Susan Prescott. Yes, yes, friend of the show, Susan Prescott. Friend of the show, Susan Prescott, yes.

Well, and as you said during the interviews, I mean, we're constantly surprised about the interesting and innovative things that these students do. And it was a lot of really fun talking to Amy and Omar. They both made some really interesting apps. And I'm looking forward to going to WWDC and meeting some of the other students too. Yeah, yeah.

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But we also have some operating systems to wishcast for. We do. We cannot stop. We cannot stop. We shouldn't stop. This week we're doing maybe arguably the two smaller ones, which is why we're, you know, we're grouping them together, but they're not as big as iOS and iPadOS. It's watchOS and tvOS.

And I have a kind of particular angle here, which is that I haven't worn my Apple Watch for two months at this point. Because as I revealed, I've been testing a Pixel 9 Pro Fold that Google sent me as a review unit and I'm still working on a story.

But I purchased of my own a Pixel watch, which I have been wearing for the past couple of months. And I have not even noticed in all the recording that we've done.

And you never noticed. You've stretched, you've raised your arm during recordings. I have not noticed. You don't pay attention to my arms and my wrist like you used to. I'm going to have to really keep an eye on your wrists from here on out. You don't look at me anymore. I'm sorry. It's been how many years? After eight years, you don't even look at me anymore. This is going to a very weird place, Federico. I guess I'm boring to you now or something.

Okay, but in any case, I have been using a Pixel Watch 3 for about a couple of months now. And that is why the two wishes, sort of like two big wishes that I have for watchOS are mostly...

inspired by my usage of the Pixel Watch. - Oh, well that's interesting, that's interesting. For me, the watch, I really like my Apple Watch, but I also don't use it extensively. I use it for working out, tracking my exercise, tracking my sleep, and getting notifications. That's really about it, I think.

And so I don't, I very rarely go into like the honeycomb and open up a particular app. Sometimes I'll tap on my, one of my complications, you know, like the mercury weather one to get a little more detail on the weather or I'll tap on the scratch pad one and dictate a quick note or the to do list one and do a quick task.

But those are the only apps that I really go into, the ones that are on my watch face already. And I did not buy, for the first time in the life of the Apple Watch, I did not buy a new Apple Watch last fall. And I was just talking the other day in our group chat with Mike and Steven. I mentioned that I may not get one this fall either. It really depends on the hardware for me at this point because...

I'm still on the Apple Watch Ultra, the first version, and its battery life, although it's down to 88% now, it's still good enough that I don't really see a reason to get a new Apple Watch just yet because the only thing that I'm really missing is the pinchy-pinch gesture to deal with notifications and that kind of thing. I think that's about the only big thing, and I'm not convinced that I would use that that much anyway. But...

- With that context Federico, I guess I will, should I let you go first since you've got the unique perspective here? - Yeah, so the big thing that I want from a future Apple Watch, if I ever come back to the Apple Watch, is an assistant that actually works. A Siri assistant that actually works.

I cannot even begin to tell you just how much better of an experience I've had with Google Assistant. It's still not Gemini on the Pixel Watch. It's still Google Assistant. And Google is progressively phasing out Google Assistant in favor of Gemini. I know that my car with

Android Automotive, as well as Android Auto, which is what you get when you actually connect a smartphone. The Google Assistant will also be phased out there, but right now my car still has the Google Assistant instead of Gemini. And the Pixel Watch also has Google Assistant instead of Gemini. So technically speaking, it's the old one, but it's still so much better than Siri for a couple of reasons.

It's so much faster. Just when you press down on the side button, Google Assistant comes up and it's just, I had never had those issues where like sometimes I ask Siri on my iPhone or the Apple Watch to set a timer and I don't know, about 30% of the time it takes forever and that said something went wrong.

Like that's typical Siri experience, even with setting a timer. That kind of stuff never happens with the Google Assistant. So it's faster and it's more reliable. But the other big thing for me is multiple languages. I can talk to Google Assistant and Gemini for that matter when it'll come in the future. I can talk both in English and in Italian. And I don't need to set a single language.

as I have to do with Siri, which is crazy that we're still doing that with Siri. But I can just talk. You know, sometimes I talk in English, especially when I'm dictating tasks for work. And I put all of that down in English. But sometimes, especially when I'm around people, I talk in Italian. And, you know, I just want to be able to use both of the languages that I speak.

and the Google Assistant on the watch, on the Pixel watch, lets me do that. - I was gonna say, do you know if it's recognizing both languages independently or whether it's translating from one of the languages to the other? - No, I think it's recognizing both at the same time, and that's what the Google Assistant has been doing for a long time.

and now what Gemini is also doing. And I really hope that in the future Siri will also get these capabilities. Like, don't let me go into a menu to set my language, just understand my language. And in fact, that is one of the great things that large language models are great at. - Sure. - Even right now, if you talk to ChaiGPT or Gemini and you use

the kind of weird mix of Italian and English that I use in my regular life. Like when I talk to my girlfriend in Italian, I use some English verbs that have been Italianized, so to speak. And large language models don't care if you mix and match words from multiple languages. And that to me is the future. And of course, right now, Siri doesn't have a large language model.

a large language model behind it. So I hope that at some point in watchOS, we also get that kind of reliable, fast, and multi-language assistant experience. Yeah, no, that's a great suggestion. I think for me, most of my wishes are going to revolve around various aspects of things that could be greatly enhanced with AI. And one that I've mentioned before that I really want to start out with

comes with a frustration of something that I think that Apple should be able to do quite easily for any kind of exercise routine that involves going out into the world and doing like a loop or an out and back. Whether you're going on a bike ride, a walk, a run, whatever it is, if you are going out into the world and coming back, and if your watch dies while you're out exercising, sure,

Sure, you're not going to have the access to the sensors to read your heart rate and your calorie burn and all of that. But you should be able to, at a minimum, from past workout routines for a lot of things, at least have the watch suggest to you, completion of your route is

and then let you put in the time that you finished it so that you can at least get an idea of how fast did I run, how fast did I bike. You can get some of the very basics, the kind of things that you would have done before you had a smartwatch where you might have bought a stopwatch type of watch, a Casio, and you'd go out for a run and you'd time your run and you get back, you're like, oh, okay, I ran this many miles in this many minutes.

And here's the pace that I ran. You should be able to do that, I think, because, I mean, the reality of a lot of people when they they work out, they have their especially if they're at home, they have their routes that they do over and over again. And so if those things are in the watch in your the fitness app, it should be able to say, oh, here, John was like three quarters the way through this workout.

this route that he's gone like 50 times before. We're going to assume the rest of the route was this particular one and then just ask him when did he finish so that we can at least get some of the basic stats that are missing, which is like the end time of the run and the pace that you were going. So that's what I'd like to see. Yeah, yeah. My other wish, which I think is something that we'll never get, is custom watch faces. Yeah, I don't think we'll get that either.

And let me tell you just how nice it is on Android and on the Pixel Watch to just go to the Google Play Store and install all the watch faces you want. It would be a great way for Apple to make more money. And sure, they like to make money on services and on the App Store. You can just go to the Play Store. And sure, there are some ugly watch faces. But guess what? People

People also install ugly wallpapers on their phones and it's fine. Google came up with this. And it's competition. It's commerce, right? The ugly ones float to the bottom. You'll get the good ones because they'll be popular and they'll be the highest rated. Yeah. You know, maybe, I don't know, if you have a thing for ugly stuff, I mean, get the ugly watch faces. Who cares? It's your watch.

You should be supposed to install whatever you want. Google came up with a framework that is also shared with Samsung, I believe, where certain watch faces support certain types of complications. And there are the slots that you can customize. And it just feels like customizing a built-in watch face, only that it's provided by an extension from a third-party app. And look, you can even, there's an app that you can download on your computer to design your own watch face.

And it just gives you a file that, again, I believe it's a file type that is shared between... It's all based on Wear OS, which will be the operating system for the Pixel Watch. And you can use that watch face on a Samsung watch or on a Pixel Watch or any other watch that is based on Wear OS. Now, only Apple is making Apple Watches with WatchOS, so it would be even easier. They wouldn't have to support any other company making WatchOS devices. And it's just...

It's totally fine. It's like when you install a widget on your lock screen. You just go in and sure, you got a mix of Apple-made widgets and complications. Or you could have third-party watch faces that you can get from the App Store. A lot of Apple fans seem to think that this is impossible. Let me tell you, it's just an obvious thing that you can go to the Google Play Store, search for watch faces.

and download any watch face you want. Sure, there are problems with copyright infringement,

But that's not the user's problem. That is the app store maker's problem. So don't think of that as an excuse for watch faces to never exist on watchOS. It's doable. Other companies are doing it. It's fun and it's fine. Yeah, it's a template and there are these set sizes for the complications. There's only so many permutations you could do there. A lot of Apple people think that

that this is way too hard and it really is. - Yeah, I don't think it's hard. I just think it's unlikely. - Yeah, unfortunately so, yeah. - All right.

The next thing that I want to talk about are the things that I find difficult when I leave the house without my, without my phone. Okay. I know a lot of people don't leave their, their house without their phone, uh, wearing an Apple watch, but I do when I go running because I have the 16 pro max and carrying that big phone with you when you're out on a jog is no fun. I still see people with like, you know, the big arm band things with the phone in it. And, uh,

I used to do that. I'm really happy that I don't have to do that now. I have my watch and I can go out and have nothing but my watch and a pair of shoes, you know? So I head out. The problem is, is that first of all, it's too hard to connect headphones. Sometimes they just refuse to pair, even though I'm using Apple technology, usually my Beats Fit Pro.

And part of that, I believe, is because, yes, I have too many gadgets in my house. But I go out my front door, which is right next to my office. And when I leave to go running, my phone is probably sitting on my desk in my office. And sometimes the watch just does not want to let go of the phone. What I've started doing, Federico, because I live on three stories.

is when it's time to go running, I leave my phone, I make sure the screen is off, I leave it on my desk, I take my Beats headphones, I go upstairs to the third floor where I changed, you know, put on my shorts and t-shirt to go running, and then I put in the headphones up there because I'm on the third floor and I'm out of Bluetooth range.

and can get it to pair more likely if I'm in my bedroom than if I'm down near anything else that has Bluetooth like my Mac or my iPhone. So that's one. One is the headphone thing. The other one is file transfers.

I don't know what it is. I mean, I assume this is a battery saving thing, but it is so slow to transfer something to your phone. And what I'm thinking about here are podcasts. A lot of times I like to listen to a podcast when I leave the house and it does not do a good job of anticipating which podcasts I want to listen to. I don't listen to a ton of different podcasts. I'm not like, you know, a 50 podcast person. I've got like a handful that I listen to very regularly and there's

a very clear pattern about the ones that I always want to listen to every week. It should be able to anticipate what those are and whether or not I've saved those in the Apple Podcasts app, you know, save them for later. It should anticipate that and it should move things like connected or the verge cast or whatever to my watch before I go running.

pretty pretty standard number uh window of time when i go for a run in the mornings too so you know it should know that oh you know it's 9 a.m john might be going for a run in an hour and anticipate that and start that download and and having it faster even if you have to kind of force try to force it manually would be would be a good thing too um yeah it's just the you know

it's just really hard to get stuff onto your watch. And so a lot of times what I'll end up doing is I'll go out and I'll just listen to music those days when it just doesn't work. And then, and then, you know, I think another thing that might help would be if it automatically buffered a little bit of that file, uh, even before you hit play, uh, because I, that's another thing I've noticed is just getting it started. Sometimes it takes a little while. It's, it's just little things that I noticed, like I'll get, I'll leave the house, uh,

i'll actually get it working i'll be listening to a podcast and when i get to the corner

it has a hard time playing because what it's doing is it's switching from Wi-Fi that was in my house to cellular. And when it switches from Wi-Fi to cellular, there's almost always an audible hiccup in the audio playback because I think that it is switching over to buffering via cellular and has a little bit of a hard time because I don't have a great cellular signal in my neighborhood. And it would be nice if there was a little bit better buffer there.

what else any comments so far Federico no no this may no this all makes a lot of sense I think yeah I wish I didn't have to update my watch on a charger which I know is something Mike Hurley mentioned recently on on connected which it you know the I will go for a very long time after an OS update before I do my

my watchOS update because I'm using it at night to sleep track. And what I have to do is I put it on a charger on my desk and then I have to do the pin while it's on the charger without knocking off the charger and get in there, get into settings and then start the download. And then they take literally forever. So that's my other wishes for faster, easier updates. Yeah, that's the updates that...

They were always horrible. I don't know what's worse, like the updates on the watch or the... No, it's got to be the invisible updates on the AirPods. Like when there's a new AirPods firmware and there's no way to properly say, just let me install the update. That is always very bad. Yeah.

Should we talk about tvOS? We should. I got just a couple of basic things. The first one, I know that everybody's wishing for this one. This is the watch face equivalent of a tvOS wish. Let me see my Netflix queue in the TV app.

Uh, remember when he went live and then they said that it was a mistake. Yeah. For like six hours on like a Thursday morning randomly or something like that. And that was nice. And that was nice. And let me tell you just, uh, uh, it's what gets me is also like part of my second wish. The Siri remote as a TV button that is always right there. And so I end up pressing that TV button that opens the Apple TV app a lot.

And whenever I do that, I realize, oh, my Netflix queue is not in here. So I got to go back to the home screen or open multitasking and open Netflix and see my Netflix queue. Just, I don't know what it takes. Work out a deal. And I know that like, oh, this is going to be unpopular. I know that a lot of people are like, oh, but privacy. Apple doesn't want to share data with Netflix. Let me tell you one piece of truth. Nobody cares. Literally...

except for Apple nerds on Mastodon, nobody cares. If you ask my mom or my sister-in-law, like, hey, do you care that Apple is now sharing your Netflix history with Netflix? She'd be like, what? I just want to watch, you know, Emily in Paris in the TV app. Nobody cares. Like, I get it. Good sentiment.

Just it's one of those things where the practicality of the feature, I think, exceeds any potential benefits of data sharing, which doesn't really hold truth anymore when we are literally surrounded by like, I find it so funny that the same people who are arguing for, oh, Apple shouldn't team up with Netflix because of data sharing. Then they go on Google and they search for, you know, oh, I want to order takeout or they use ChargePT. Guess what? Those services, they share your data. Correct.

Yeah. Guess what? You've been tracked. So let me just open my Netflix queue in the TV app. Let me see my Netflix queue in the TV app. And while you're at it, let me customize the TV button to open whatever I want. Just why is it that the TV button opens the TV app? What if I want the TV button to open Prime Video or to open Netflix? Because you're not putting the Netflix queue in the TV app. Just let me remap it to whatever I want.

Well, that's a very Federico request because that's all about customization. I agree. We should have more customization. All right. Here's one that goes to the heart of Apple not realizing that more than one person lives in the same household sometimes. And that is that no matter what I do, when Jennifer stops watching TV, I ask her to kind of back out to the home screen.

But she always leaves it in the middle of Amazon Prime or in the middle of the catalog for Netflix. And so I'll turn on the TV and I'll be in the middle of this app. And I'm not sure what app it is necessarily because of where it's left off. And yeah, all I have to do is hit the TV button and I'm back to the TV app. But I wish that... Why isn't it a default that when you shut off your Apple TV, when it goes to sleep, shouldn't you at least have the option to have it come back? Yeah, or maybe an option like go back to home screen after...

shut down or after, I don't know. After sleep, because it goes to sleep, right? After sleep or like after 12 hours of inactivity or something like that. Right. So, I mean, that's a little one, but that's one of the ones that I would like. Let's see. I'd like the ability to be able to delete apps in bulk. One of the things that I have all these, I, you know, there is at some point in my Apple TV ownership life,

where I said it was okay to automatically install things like games that had an Apple TV component. And I have a ton of really old games that I don't even know if they work and I've never played on my Apple TV. And it's too much trouble to delete them. So all I've done is I've moved the apps that I do use

up to the top two or three rows and everything beneath it is mostly junk. And I know that you can move things into folders. Also way too much work. Maybe let me do that on my phone like you can do with CarPlay because right now there's no way to bulk delete or bulk organize things in a way that I find convenient or useful. And I would also, I guess, as a final thing,

ask that maybe we get some kind of way to automatically organize the home screen. At least, you know, set it up to learn, for instance, maybe which are the apps that you use the most and allow it to kind of prioritize those and float them to the top. I think it might be a good idea to employ tabs in the home screen too.

because why not separate entertainment apps from games? I know that there are a lot of apps that are kind of in a middle place between TV and something else like shopping or something like that, but it's pretty clear what's a game and what's not a game. And so you could at least have a tab that said, here are your games and here's everything else and have your streaming services and other things like that in that second tab.

That alone, I think, would clean up my home screen a lot because I wouldn't go to the games tab very much since I don't really play games on the Apple TV ever, really. Never. Yeah. Yeah.

No, these are good wishes, especially deleting multiple apps. I have literally the same problem. Like apps that I installed years ago, and every once in a while I'm like, oh yeah, I should delete those. And then I remember, oh, I got to do it one at a time. Nah, I'll just leave them there. And so that's why they're still there. Then of course, every now and then you'll get a new streaming service. It'll add it to the bottom of the pile. And then you have to swipe it up and up

and up and up until it's finally somewhere where you'll see it when you turn your TV back on. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, well. So these are our watchOS and tvOS wishes. We still have macOS and visionOS to go. And we're going to do... I think we're going to do shortcuts in Apple Intelligence. Apple Intelligence. Yes, we're also going to do that. So we're kind of halfway through. Kind of. I'm surprised we were so cranky about the watchOS and tvOS, Federico, because I think...

generally speaking, the two of us don't care that much. - Well, because they're boring. Yeah, we don't care that much and they could do other things and they're not. And like those two OSs have been stuck, especially tvOS has been like stuck forever. Like do something, you know?

I don't know, poke it with a stick and do something. I don't know. - When I see people talking about tvOS and these little intricate details about it, I sometimes have to just go turn on my TV 'cause I just don't notice those things. I just go on TV to watch TV. I don't really think about the OS nearly as much as I do with other things, but anyway.

Anyway, that's it for today's episode of App Stories. Join us in the post show where we've got an AI topic that I, a philosophical topic I want to talk to you about, Federico, about AI and culture and art and that sort of thing. But thanks again to our sponsor for this week's episode. That's Play by Marcos Tanaka. Thanks, Marcos. And you can find the two of us over at MacStories.net.

and on social media where Federico is at, Vittici. That's V-I-T-I-C-C-I. And I'm at John Voorhees, J-O-H-N-V-O-O-R-H-W-S. Talk to you next week, Federico. Ciao, John.