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The debut of iOS 7 is an important milestone for Apple in many ways. Six years into the iPhone and five years into the App Store, the smartphone landscape has changed.

Now, perhaps for the first time, Apple faces real competition in brand mindshare from Samsung and its domination of Android, and users are intrigued by the look of other platforms, including Windows Phone 8 and BlackBerry 10.

Although I'm primarily an iOS user, I'm fortunate enough to get to test and review basically every major device on the marketplace. As a result, I've had a chance to see what other options are available to iOS users.

While the rumored visual overhaul of iOS 7 is getting the most press attention, as a user, it's the feature I'm most longing for in iOS 7. For me, I also want better inter-app communication, a better iCloud and more from Apple services such as Siri.

This is what I hope Apple shows us with iOS 7.

As a longtime iOS user, the one glaring and overwhelming frustration for me with iOS is the lack of real, system-level inter-app communication.

Right now iOS works by "sandboxing" apps into their own environment. What this means is that data stored within one app is not accessible from another app. There are exceptions for some built-in features — for example, your Calendar, Contacts, iTunes Music and Photo Library — but most stuff is kept inside an app.

From a security standpoint, this is great. It means you don't have to worry about a rogue app accessing data from another place and then doing something nasty with it.

From a user perspective, however, it's limiting. Apps have a hard time talking to one another, and that's a problem as we enter a world where you often want to access content in one app from another.

One example: I might want to take a voice recording that I make in the Voice Memos app and send it to Dropbox or Evernote. I can't do that right now. Instead, I have to connect my iPhone to my computer, open up PhoneView and then transfer the files to my Mac.

The excellent app Launch Center Pro has helped popularize the usage of URL schemes and a function called x-callback that allows for a way to easily access specific functions of an app, and for apps to even potentially share those actions with others. It's powerful, and when combined with an app such as Drafts, the kind of stuff you can do is mind-blowing.

Workarounds like this shouldn't be necessary, however. My biggest hope for iOS 7 is a better way to manage inter-app communication. There has to be a balance between being confined to a sandbox and chaos.

While Apple has allowed third-party mail clients, mapping apps and web browsers into the App Store, it won't allow those apps to be the "default" for the system itself.

That means that if you prefer to use Gmail or Mailbox or another email app as your default mail app, you can't. The same is true for web browsers and for, infamously, mapping apps.

Using x-callback schemes, developers can allow users to choose what app they want to use for a specific task. Google even has a whole section showing developers how to route their apps to use Chrome (if it is installed) rather than Safari on iOS.

I don't actually expect Apple to allow users to set their own defaults for certain types of apps, but it sure would be nice. I understand Apple wants to keep Safari the default web browser on iOS, if for security reasons alone. But why can't the mail app be defaulted somewhere else?

Apps such as the aforementioned Launch Center Pro can help power users imitate default actions (such as composing an email in Gmail or looking up an address in Google Maps or opening a URL in iCab Mobile), but these functions would be better served with official OS support.

iTunes Match is one of my favorite services. I know Mashable's Chris Taylor laments iTunes Match — and I certainly agree with many of his criticisms — but on the whole, I find the service to be an example of Apple at its best: Take a task that could be difficult and make it dead-simple.

In this case, that task is to take all the music a person owns (no matter how it was acquired) and make it accessible on any desktop running iTunes or any iOS device.

My only real complaint with iTunes Match is that the only app on iOS that can access those files is the Music app. The problem is, there are plenty of other third-party music apps that have great features. Those apps can access any song manually downloaded to the phone, but not anything stored in the cloud.

It would be a breakthrough if Apple would allow access to the iTunes Match songs within other apps.

Apple has never had a particularly good track record with cloud services. Although .Mac was relatively successful and pain-free, it had a small number of users (relatively speaking) and wasn't overly complex.

MobileMe was a disaster at launch and never fully recovered from that early negative reputation.

So enter iCloud, the new wave of Apple services that was designed to be free (with upgrade options), seamless and reliable.

The free and seamless part is true, but the reliability part is not. As The Verge pointed out in March, plenty of developers have just given up on using iCloud to synch their apps.

As a result, apps that use iCloud for syncing can run into problems if too many changes are made at once, if databases are too big or if there's a connection problem.

As a result, most of the developers I know and respect use Dropbox as the primary sync service, and support iCloud only as a backup. And Dropbox isn't perfect. It's better in some regards, but it's not a default service built into the phone. It requires users to take another step.

Some developers are even forced to write their own syncing services for their apps — something that costs time, money and additional upkeep.

It would be great for Core Data and iCloud to finally work as promised and for Apple to acknowledge that the product hasn't been perfect.

On a personal level, I'd love to see iCloud become a little more manageable. I don't necessarily want an iCloud file-management app on the iPhone, but I would like a way to more accurately see and have some degree of control of exactly what data is stored in iCloud.

More to the point, I really want a way to access iCloud data — and iCloud backups — from a device other than an iPhone or iPad. This is especially important for backups, which now are limited to either doing a full restore or not. There isn't a way to granularly say, "restore these apps but not this one."

Siri was introduced alongside the iPhone 4S back in 2011 with the promise of being a fantastic virtual assistant.

Despite that promise, how many people actively use Siri each and every day? Probably not a whole lot. I know I tend to limit my Siri usage to setting an alarm or setting a reminder.

Part of the problem with Siri — service stability notwithstanding — is the limited set of apps and services with which it interfaces. With iOS 6, we saw more support for other services and hooks into Siri, but it was still a far cry from the services that integrated with the original Siri app from 2010.

I had advanced access to the first app version of Siri — pre-Apple — and it's sad to look at some of the advanced features that have disappeared from the app in its current state. Part of that is because of scale — servicing a few million users is different from a few hundred million — but it does lessen the attractiveness to the service, especially in light of competition from services such as Google Now.

If Siri is going to be more than just a "cool demo" feature, it needs more broad support within iOS as well as third-party apps.

Unlike most Apple commentators, I'm not firmly entrenched in the anti-skeuomorphic camp. Although the green casino felt in Game Center is ugly and the stitched leather in Find My Friends is a little over-the-top, I don't mind some of the other stylistic touches. Sure it's kitschy, but like John Waters, I'm a big fan of kitsch.

It does feel time for iOS to get a more extensive and more profound makeover. That doesn't mean turning everything into a flat-UI-loving wonderland — Windows Phone has done that just fine — but it does mean getting a more modern, and in areas where it makes sense, a more consistent look.

It's the core apps I think could use the most love. Mail, Safari, Notes, even the dialer — could all use a new coat of paint.

Where the update could have more far-reaching implications are how and where Apple updates its iOS Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). While these rules aren't strict (and exceptions can and do happen), they set the tone for how many user-interface and user-experience patterns present themselves in apps. I'm really looking forward to seeing some major updates to HIG.