By Joe Rosensteel

January 25, 2024 8:00 AM PT

iPhones need to understand that their users are mobile, too

This summer Mercury Weather added trip forecasts and it opened up my mind to a new way to think about how my iPhone could be used to help me track future events while I’m in a state of travel. I could have the same kind of glanceable 8 day forecast I was used to, but those eight days could be strewn across the globe. I wasn’t confined to my iPhone’s current location.

It works in a really dead-simple way. You hit “Add Trip” and you pick your start and end date, and your location. You can stack up as many as you want: Like London, Santorini, Naxos, Athens, and Vienna — hypothetically. As soon as there’s a day without a trip it snaps right back to showing you your home weather. Brilliant for when your trip is winding down and you want to see what you’ll be headed back to. It’s only as granular as a whole day, so on travel days you need to pick which is more important to get a heads up about.

It sure would be great if I could pipe a calendar with a trip itinerary right into the app, and maybe even get the hourly forecast based on my flight time. And it would be even better if that was something that happened at the system level instead of forking over my whole calendar for such a feature.

With apps like Flighty, or even United’s updated app with Live Activities, I could travel across time zones as smoothly as a progress bar. Instead, I’m always adding and subtracting the change in time zone and the total flight time.

Unfortunately, support for this level of travel detail isn’t built into iOS or watchOS. Apple devices always think that wherever they are right now and whatever timezone they’re in right now are constants. All this, even though my iPhone has emails, boarding passes, and calendar entries that indicate I’m on the move.

Any scheduling I do during the trip needs to be offset appropriately before the journey, or for once I return home. I don’t want to see what time a dinner reservation in London is in Pacific Standard Time, because that’s not how I will think about it when I’m there, and vice versa.

Add to that that any time-based modes like Sleep¹, Do Not Disturb, and other Focus Modes will all trigger based on the time zone my devices were in before I switched on Airplane Mode at the start of a flight. Ironically, Airplane Mode doesn’t think the time will ever change.

Not every journey is a dramatic crossing of the international date line, hoping across the pond to Europe, or even a flight from California to the East Coast², but you do gain and lose hours that can have an effect on when you want to sleep or start your day. Hello jet lag!

There’s an app that a friend of my swears by for jet lag, Timeshifter, which I haven’t ventured to try, but it sure seems like the kind of nagging “health” notification that Apple Watch product managers would salivate over.

Flights of fancy

Apple should add a layer of travel savvy to its devices. Sure, there’s complexity here—programmers detest time-zone programming for a reason—but this is exactly the kind of lifestyle feature that users appreciate. It’s not as if Apple doesn’t already have the components lying around: if my flight information is in Calendar, that’s everything needed for time zones and locations for weather. It’s not like I’m asking for an AI virtual travel assistant.

Beyond the basics, there’s even more Apple could do. When I arrive in Paris, instead of flashing a notification that transit directions are available, or telling me there’s a detailed map of CDG³ available, my phone should ask me if I want to switch my navigation preferences to transit or walking while I am in Paris… and then revert to my default when I leave.

My phone should allow me to designate my home-away-from-home. Let’s stick with Paris as an example: I want to have something as easy as tapping “Home” but for my hotel. You can favorite the hotel, but it gets lost in all your other favorites, recent searches, and other detritus, unlike “Home,” which Maps thinks is a helpful navigation suggestion in Paris. (This also works for when I’m visiting my mom and staying at her house.)

In addition to keeping that hotel at the ready, my device should also be able to understand things like the address of the next hotel, so if it’s check out time and there’s a trip to Strasbourg, apps won’t keep suggesting my Paris hotel as a destination for navigation. We’ve moved on. Literally.

You don’t even need to travel far to see how things might benefit you. If you live in a place with mountainous terrain and microclimates, you could even be alerted to a chance of rain or snow a short distance from you just when you’ve got an event on your calendar there. Or imagine being given a heads-up when you’re headed to an office in a nearby region that’s ten degrees warmer, so you can dress appropriately.

From the simple to the more complex, there are plenty of ways Apple could make its devices better at anticipating our movements. This goes for Apple’s own apps, but also allowing third-party apps—like Mercury and Flighty—to tie into the same information. That would be the real ticket to success.

[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]