make devs aware of their submission status for each step of the process, with *mandatory* and *specific* notes describing any delay past a pre-set time interval for each step

I often see people using the review system instead of contacting support for help. However, there is no way to respond to these "reviews".

This would:

1. create a "trial ware" business model option.

2. increase lite-to-paid conversions by enabling impulse buys: finish the last free level of a game? buy the whole thing right from the app and play through!

3. simplify lite-to-paid data migrations. e.g., when switching from a lite-to-paid version of a productivity application either (a) I have to re-enter all my todos or (b) the developer has to create server infrastructure to do it for me.

I want to be able to manage calendar events automatically from my apps

I would like access to the real-time camera data as it comes into the system. Right now when you launch the camera, the api only allows you access to the final image (or video). I would like to be able to act on data coming into the camera in real-time, enabling augmented reality apps/games.

Apple should enable background processes.
If the only thing that's stopping them is the battery drain, they should put a toggle in the settings that would allow users to run apps in the background.

The MapKit currently does not support polylines, which are an essential interface element for drawing paths and routes on a map. There are some hacks to simulate polylines, but direct API support would benefit all sorts of apps.

It's currently impossible to programmatically compose an SMS. While you can launch the native SMS application and have a single recipient pre-populated, you cannot hand over the message text itself.

This renders many use cases impossible.

One could argue that programmatically sending SMS exposes a security risk. I strongly disagree. I'm not suggesting to allow to SEND an SMS programmatically, but to prepare a complete SMS and have the user manually hit the "Send" button of the native Messages app.

The calendar 'runs in the background' (the date on the icon changes at 0:00 AM and it can display alerts at given time/date).

Why not allow apps to register themselves to receive a notification at a given time? The app can choose to display a notification or launch itself.

All apps when removed invoke the rating request dialog. This results in a lot of users rating your app poorly as rating upon app removal generates biased results for obvious reasons.

If you must keep this mechanism than please find a way to make it less biased.

How about soliciting reviews from people after they have launched the app 5 or more times?

Right now you can only use promo codes in the US App store. It would be nice if you can give out promotional copies of your apps to people in other countries, especially if you are not US-based developer.

In some instances, I'd like to be able to bypass the review process and distribute apps from outside the store -- e.g., from my own a website.

Ad-hoc builds aren't acceptable because they require knowing UDIDs ahead of time.

In this scenario, Apple can curate apps within the store, providing their sought after user experience for typical users, while more adventurous users can go farther afield.

This would allow users to be able to search for locations. This is largely on the shoulders of Google.

Would love to have greater control over Device Controls such as the ability to control backlight levels, Airplane mode etc from within an app.

Obviously the user will need to "allow" this just once per app (rather like location services) but it would be great for Astronomy apps, Alarm Clock, etc.

Obviously, you'd need to be a registered developer to see the open bugs.

I just can't bring myself to open a bug when I have no idea whether anyone else has opened one with the same issue, or even what kind of standards there are for their bug submissions. I can't be the only person who feels this way.

Developers outside of the US cannot report reviews as bad reviews for stores other than their own country. If I'm a Canadian developer a user could simply load up my app and decide to put "This app makes my iPhone crash every time I load it" even if that were false it would destroy your sales and you have no recourse other than emailing random email addresses at Apple to hopefully get it removed. Allow us to view and purchase our competitors apps, allow us to report bad reviews for all countries.

I would like to develop some iphone apps but can't because I haven't got a mac, and I can't afford one. Allowing people to try Obj C development before buying in would encourage greater uptake.

There are many great and popular extensions to SQLite for full-text search (FTS3), sequencing, and encryption (SQLCipher) that cannot be used with Core Data because it is linked against the vendor-supplied SQLite build. High speed full-text searching and encryption are really important for mobile applications and would greatly benefit the developer community.

In addition, the Core Data API should expose the persistent store class(es) for interacting with SQLite and allowing the construction of other non-atomic persistent stores. Currently, only NSAtomicStore is supported, use of which is not ideal for mobile applications.