iOS Profiles

A feature concept/request for iOS or smartphones in general

If you remember the Nokia phones back in the old days, you’ll definitely recall a feature they had called „Profiles“. It was the first item in the main menu and you also could find it when you would press the off button once.
The feature was also included in the feature phones and even in the current models which are now powered by Android. If you don’t know the feature, you can read Nokia’s original definition:

Your phone has various setting groups, or profiles, for which you can customise the phone tones for different events and environments. At first, personalise the profiles to your liking and then you only need to activate a profile to use it.

UsageiPhone

It’s needless to say how much the usage of mobile phones has shifted over the past decade. Smartphones certainly have a lot more features and settings and provide a wide range of different use cases. Though, it’s interesting to note that how many different use cases there are for a single user and a single device throughout the day. Depending on our current environment or situation, our needs and requirements change and with that our usage behavior. That’s why Apple and Google heavily invest in AI-powered suggestion features in order to create a more easy and fluid user experience.
In this context, I really miss the „Profiles“ feature on current smartphones and therefore I went ahead and imagined how it would be like if Apple would add this feature to iOS.

Available Settings for a Profile

Here are a set of different system and feature settings available for customization inside iOS. Every profile you create can have individual setups of each component while your default setup can stay the same.

Notifications

Customization of app notification settings, like the alert style, visibility, preview or and sound settings, or mute entirely.

Sound Settings

Customization of all configurations set for ringtone, text tone, vibrate and all sorts of available sound alerts.

Wallpaper

Maybe you like the idea of having alternating wallpapers depending on your current day situation.

Control Center

Now with the new Control Center in iOS 11 it would be cool to be able to set up multiple different layouts of shortcuts and controls depending on the use case. You may need different shortcuts when you’re sitting at home than when you are sight seeing.

Phone Settings

Maybe there are particular situations in which you regularly utilize options like Call Forwarding, Call Announcement or Automated Text Responds and you want to have different custom setups for that.

Accessibility

There are tons of popular Accessibility features which allow extensive customizations of the UI and system features like AssistiveTouch, Automatic Audio Routing for Calls or simply Color Invert.

Widgets

The access to App Widgets on your Lockscreen which offer feature shortcuts and snippets of different applications can be really useful, but I think it’s safe to say that you may not need every widget all the time. Wouldn’t it be great to have different configurations with different apps and layouts?

Your Lockscreen Widgets at Work

Lockscreen at Work

Your Lockscreen Widgets at Home

Lockscreen at Home in the evening






Setup & Manage Profiles

The “Profiles“ feature can be found in the Settings app and gives an overview on all profiles the user has created and also indicates weather an profile is currently active.

There is also the possibility to use Siri or the Home app to switch to a profile.

Let’s say you want to trigger a scene in your Home app with some predefined configurations for your smart home devices. Why not use that trigger to also switch your iPhone to an appropiate profile.






Configurations

As mentioned above there are different components of iOS which can be customized inside a profile. In the list view the components which have been altered are highlighted and a label gives a short description on the set configurations.

It’s also possible to automatically switch to a profile at a certain time or when the device nears a certain location.

Let’s say you want to switch to your „Work“ profile automatically whenever you reach your workplace, or you have specific routines throughout the day that may require different types of settings and widgets on your phone, then this feature would be very helpful.

3rd Party Support with ProfileKit

Historically, opening up system features to third party developers has always unlocked great potential for new possibilities. In the context of „Profiles“ third party app developers could come up with new features and offer customization settings.

A use case could be e.g. to automatically set a radar in the Car2go app to automatically check for available cars when approaching the end of your working day.

Or imagine you could hookup actions and workflows you created in the Workflow app to a profile. This could offer endless possibilities in automation throughout countless apps and services.

Interactive Customer Journey Mapping