iOS doesn't even need a lot to get better. Look at the jailbreak community. They're figuring out iOS faster than Apple is (or are willing to).
Look up Zephyr -- this is a thing of pure brilliance. Always reliable, always there. Made using my iPhone 5 monumentally better.
Likewise, look at Auxo for a clever and aesthetically pleasing way to do setting toggle widgets. And they all fall under Apple's design philosophy. It's so natural that if you didn't know better, you'd believe it was from Apple themselves.
Or even simple things like giving us the security option on whether we want to require a password every time we download an app or not. This is not a lot to ask for. Let us choose.
Or a better keyboard with a full range of long-press options. Does Apple really think people don't know about or haven't or can't learn about long pressing? Give us better auto corrections too. The keyboard is long overdue for an update. Look at Swiftkey's autocorrection (not even their prediction; their autocorrection). It's absolutely genius. Allow us to control our personal dictionary. Allow us (you know, the individual people actually doing the typing) to choose what words we want added and--just as important--not added.
Or little things like don't let Safari suddenly go blank because you lose signal. I love that on Android, if you're reading something on the web but lose signal, nothing happens. You're allowed to keep reading. Heck, you're even allowed to press "back" and it'll take you to the previous page if you want to go back and read something there. With Safari, it would just give up and give you that Safari prompt that you don't have service.
Likewise, give us a real email experience. Mail sucks. There's no way to know which inbox your mail came in from, you have to navigate out and back in if you want to see Sent messages, you can't keep more than a few weeks worth of mail (conversely, Gmail lets you keep your ENTIRE mailbox). And like Safari, don't crap out on us because there's no signal. I love that Gmail pre-downloads everything for you. Once, I had no service, but was still able to open an attachment in an email that I had never opened before. It was already downloaded. This is smart for a smartphone. Do I need to mention attachments? I think it's a joke that people want to use the iPhone as a business phone. How am I going to send multiple Excel sheets to multiple clients or multiple photo samples to different people? Do I really have to "share" them?
Speaking of sharing, why not allow us to share to more than just Facebook/Twitter. Gasp, other things exist to share to. What can you share to in Android? Anything you want!
I also hate that when you have no service, you can't send any messages. You'll get that red "!" and that's it. Oh, thanks. Whereas on Android, it'll be queued up and will automatically send it out when you regain service. With iOS, you have to tap the "!" and choose yes to resend. Again, some might call the way Android does it smarter.
None of these are major requests. None of these are impossible for Apple to do. None of these things will necessarily alienate their already established base. None of this means they won't continue to sell millions of iPhones. None of this hurts people who don't want these features.
If you don't want iOS to improve in such ways, so be it, but it's ridiculous to argue that Apple shouldn't because sales are great and/or there are people out there that don't want them. Whoopity-do. And there are people out there that do. See how that cancels each other out?
What does it hurt to add more features to iOS? What does it hurt to make iOS more flexible, more powerful? What does it hurt to make iOS smarter and easier to use? The competition has figured out how to accomplish almost everything faster and easier at this point in time.
But iOS will look flatter. Great.
I sincerely hope iOS 7 is more than that.
