I have had this conversation with several people. I feel like I used to be able to type with a fairly low error rate on a smaller screen with old iPhones. Now I feel that it is constant exercise in frustration as I will hit a letter and the keyboard will decide to pick the letter next to it. It is evolving backwards.
There are two very simple causes to point to why touch keyboards turned to shit:
1. Crowdsourced word weighting: your keyboard's stochastic predictions are no longer mostly based on your typing, but rather on what 'everyone' is typing as their next word. This makes the word replacements it does often suboptimal to downright nonsensical.
2. Aggressive lookbehind correction: these days you have to be seriously on your guard for your keyboard to not sneak-edit something you typed 5 words back, because autocorrect suddenly decided that the probability is high you meant to say something else there (which it clearly isn't, as your eyes and brain exist)
The problem your encountering is downstream from point 1. Basically your keyboard thinks due to the way most people construct a particular sentence, you're gonna want to type "bold" next, despite "hold" clearly clearly making more sense. So it'll force "b" on you 4 times in a row until it realizes you really want to type "h".
Going back to the old style of doing keyboards (mostly user-learned dictionaries and probability weighting, and little lookbehind autocorrrect) could be done, but within Google and Apple there are probably people who got promoted by switching to the current shitty system. They'll block off any attempt at someone messing with their pride.
(There is a third 'problem' where your visual keys do not correspond to the touchmap at all. Swiftkey has a feature where it can show you what your touchmap and heatmap look like versus the actual layout and it its often staggeringly different, with many keys vastly tilted. When you try to desperately type "h" after 4 misses, you're doing that with your index finger in "hunt and peck" mode, which does correspond to the visual layout but not with your usual typing on the touchmap layout. There is no way for your keyboard to know you're in "hunt and peck" accuracy mode.)
> The problem your encountering is downstream from point 1. Basically your keyboard thinks due to the way most people construct a particular sentence, you're gonna want to type "bold" next, despite "hold" clearly clearly making more sense. So it'll force "b" on you 4 times in a row until it realizes you really want to type "h".
In the video, the user is typing 'Thumbs up', and when they get to the first 'u' the keyboard shows a 'u' being pressed but a 'j' is inserted instead. Are you suggesting that, due to the way most people construct sentences, the OS thinks that 'thjmbs' is the most likely word? And then the next time the OS thinks that 'thhmbs' is the most likely word?
Both of the issues you've mentioned are common, and irritating, but if you watch the video you can see that that's not what's happening here. Before any autocorrection or adjustment is being done, the keyboard is registering a 'U' and the OS is inputting a J or H or I or some other nearby letter.
The video also debunks the touchmap discontinuity issues as well, because you can clearly see which key the keyboard is registering; it's not assuming that you meant to press J or it would highlight the J; it's registering a U, highlighting U, and inputting J.
It sounds to me as though you didn't watch the video and just assumed what issue was being discussed; please do watch it, because this is another, relatively new, issue that lots of people have seen and which is far worse and more frustrating than the other legitimate issues you mentioned.
The above commenter is talking about why touchscreen keyboards have become worse over time in general
Apple additionally may have just bugged up their implementation as well, but the above mentioned issues exist even on Android, and didn't a decade ago.
I still contend that the single best touchscreen keyboard and autocorrect implementation was the onscreen keyboard on the Microsoft Zune HD. A tiny tiny screen, and you could still type without looking and nearly always end up with the right text. It was magical, and creepy in retrospect.
But nobody bought it so we had less good keyboards for a decade. Then companies insisted that they could throw "Algorithms" at the problem (which is what we had been doing for a decade but whatever) and make it magically better and now everyone gets worthless autocorrect because of the everpresent "Nobody is actually average so tuning your system to the average makes it bad for everybody" problem that has infected literally all "Data driven" product decisions.
We literally had better text prediction using boring methods. We literally had working voice control on flip phones from the 90s. All on device too.
> In the video, the user is typing 'Thumbs up', and when they get to the first 'u' the keyboard shows a 'u' being pressed but a 'j' is inserted instead. Are you suggesting that, due to the way most people construct sentences, the OS thinks that 'thjmbs' is the most likely word? And then the next time the OS thinks that 'thhmbs' is the most likely word?
In addition to the other problems (the keyboard being too prone catching extremely subtle slides below UI response time), there certainly is the problem of when you crowd source enough data you crowd source all of their collective mistakes, too. In a lot of that raw data mistakes are going to be as common or more common than corrections and/or originally correct spellings.
We do have a great filter for this called a "dictionary", but as the above commenter laments companies have given up on "just autocorrect to dictionary words" for much more complex "learning" models and filtering them back to just dictionary words is antithetical to the (sunken cost) expense that went into training these models, and/or the KPIs and promotion incentives that keep prioritizing "AI" and giant crowd sourced data vats over simpler mechanics and local user specifics.
> it's registering a U, highlighting U, and inputting J
The voiceover is deceptive (unintentionally?)...
They touch the [u] which shows the popover U but you can see them slide their thumb down off the [u] key onto the [j] key.
I guessed that was the issue, repeated it on my phone (SE) and only then looked at video and it's obvious when you see him do it in slo-mo. Edit: I have most prediction turned off (I mostly find slyde typing to be fastest, and I hate automiscorrect on uncommon words).
iPhones are very very sensitive to tap-slides which causes many UI gremlins (a variety of terrible side effects that you can't avoid if you're designing a UI).
Over time, most people seem to intuitively learn not to slide when tapping.
I'm unsure how many designers/developers even notice the effects of slide since they have learnt to avoid sliding? When I watched beginners on iPhones you see them get frustrated by things not tapping and other subtle effects (HTML event interactions, scrollable areas, buttons, inputs).
Same thing can happen on Android. One menu button repeatably failed if I used my left hand - took me a while to work out the issue (and a bit of work to increase the tappable area so a bit of slide was accepted and worked better for neophyte users).
> Aggressive lookbehind correction: these days you have to be seriously on your guard for your keyboard to not sneak-edit something you typed 5 words back
If I ever meet the person that invented lookbehind correction, I’m not sure I’ll be able to restrain myself. This person has robbed me of my peace of mind as I now have to be on guard every time I type anything on a mobile keyboard
See this is why I turn off absolutely all autocorrection on iOS. I still make mistakes but now they are my mistakes. And I can type whatever I want without interference
I keep switching it back on after having it off for a while. I want some autocorrect. I often like the type ahead suggestions. I just really hate the "update behind" mechanic.
It's real frustrating that Apple has decided to put just about everything under only a single Settings switch and won't break it out into individual things.
It's also frustrating that for about half an iOS version Apple seemed to have caught on that the update behind was catching people off guard and implemented an extra, more obvious change animation. The whole word flashed in a bright blue or yellow when it changed and had a visible undo button. That was useful. But then the button didn't survive the next point release and the animation kept getting subtler again until it disappeared.
3. I stopped caring and learned to love the algorithm in 95% of normal typing. The result is that my typing speed is up but my accuracy has plummeted, yet my typing output is generally correct because of autocorrect.
Unfortunately this falls apart when I try to type anything that isn’t common English words: names, code, rare words, etc.
I also think that the keyboard could learn the different “rhythms” of typing - my normal typing which is fast and practically blind, and the careful hunt and peck which is much slower and intended for those out-of-distribution inputs. I bet the profile of the touch contacts (e.g. contact area and shape of the touches) for those two modes looks different too.
My strategy for a time was disabling autocorrect and perfect my accuracy, but this was stumped because indeed, it's harder to type these days than when the screens were smaller and less precise, it seems to pick adyacent keys on a whim.
So I realized I had exchanged correcting the same word four times in a row to correcting the same letter four times in a row.
Sometimes I think about how much harm has been done to the world just so a few people can get a vacation home on Lake Tahoe. Every increase in YouTube ads leading to millions of hours wasted - but hey that L7 got a sweet new lake house!
Because that would correspond 1 to 1 with the actual visible letter boxes, and the whole system of catching events outside the "real button sizes" was developed to be more forgiving than "you have to click precisely in the box".
My understanding is it's not just about including or not including some extra fixed clickable padding around each square (in which case it indeed wouldn't harm to show the whole area), but about dynamically adapting the area, based on frequent off-target clicks, probabilities, etc.
This! I switched to SwiftKey some 8 years ago and no matter how many phones I change, logging into my SwiftKey account ensures my typing experience doesn't change almost at all.
It's extra fun because the account it needs is a Microsoft Account because Microsoft acquihired SwiftKey for the lovely Windows Soft Keyboard in Windows Phone 7/8/10 and still accessible in Windows 11 even as form factors that make good use of it continue to disappear and people also don't learn that you can still switch it to "phone mode" for one hand swipe-typing because they don't have a device where they regularly need to type on a soft keyboard.
The big reason after years of SwiftKey use I finally uninstalled it is because it became too much of an ad vector for "you should use Mobile Edge and have you tried our new Bing Mobile app yet". I also haven't used it in a couple of years, but I'd be surprised if it doesn't have some Copilot button or buttons somewhere now.
I feel like when they introduced the neurological engine, they got away from the previous algorithm and it's just gone to shit since then. Apple being Apple, they John Force their way to victory by keeping their foot on the gas even when the wheels are spinning and the engine is smoking.
At this point we should make "your" serve dual duty as an official alt spelling of you're and be done with it... let context determine which "your" it is
I still feel the pinnacle was ~2011 Windows Phone. It was some kind of swipe-to-type, but maybe not Swype specifically? At any rate, it seemed to use "how humans actually talk" as a guideline, because it was do a great job of predicting what words I would actually mean to use in a row.
Modern keyboards are like, I know you just said "I want" but instead of predicting "to" I predict "rip". I mean the letters are close. And "I want rip" makes way more sense than "I want to." You're welcome!
The absolute zenith of mobile keyboards was the Blackberry, which included F & J nubs. I could type without looking at my phone at full speed and not get a character wrong.
The fact that Apple will as often as not autocorrect grammar from actually-correct to wrong -- and systematically screw up spelling -- in not just transcribed Siri but also in typing is just inexcusable at this point. It will even Randomly capitalize Certain words!
I swear the android autocorrect got so much worse at some point. Somewhere between 5 and 15 years ago. I used to be able to type vaguely coherent sentences and all of the typos would magically become the words I meant, even if they didn't look right. Now I frequently type completely correct sentences and the correctly spelled words get changed into other words that make no sense in context.
And i used to be able to backspace the wrong word and fix it and it would learn thats what I meant. Now if I try that, it'll frequently keep trying to edit to the word I didn't mean unless I press the little checkmark in the autocorrect panel. Just annoying UX.
I remember when I could blindly type because autocorrect was so good. I've been enjoying FUTO keyboard a bit, but I dont yet know if it's the same experience.
Bit of an aside, but I just checked them out and TIL that Immich (which I use as my primary photos solution) is also a FUTO product (the website says "powered by FUTO").
SwiftKey has this one where you can erase the wrong word and try to correct it, and it instead adds two words: the one you erased and the second attempt after it.
Which is the better option now. But the one he's talking about is the OG windows phone swipe keyboard which would predict next word almost like from a LLM these days. For that reason, you can swipe like a maniac but it'd still type the correct thing.
Apple keyboard is shit.
Swype (the one Microsoft bought) is better but still shit.
Gboard is ok.
But none of them are close to that windows phone keyboard. I still miss it.
Google's keyboard is okay for English. It's a complete tire fire for two other languages I use (both popular and with a very large training data set).
Suggests words that make no sense, preferring rare words to much more widely used and obvious matching picks. Has the vocabulary of a poorly educated five year old idiot savant — fails to complete many words you use fifty times a day, but sometimes surprises you by suggesting something you'd hear a couple times per decade. Doesn't know other forms of the same word, forcing you to correct it manually over and over again, often failing to remember the word until you type it in four or five times.
Yes, I've downloaded all the dictionaries, tried it on many phones, and my friends are of the same opinion: it really is just bad.
I write in English and Spanish on it, and it seems the shittiness gets multiplied when you use a bilingual instead on monolingual layout. I've tried switching languages manually, but that sucks even more when writing Spanish with English technical terms sprinkled.
This is a patent case where IA made a function worse instead of better, yet companies clinged to it for some reason.
Never used the Windows Phone keyboard but after Swype fixed its worst error ("me" was very often rendered as "nee", as in the term for a maiden name) it was fantastic. The last time I was able to use it was ca. 2016 when my Nexus 6P suffered the dreaded battery-goes-to-worthless-one-night-and-never-recovers problem. The editing keyboard allowing precise cursor placement, the Swype-X/C/V shortcuts, Swyping above the keyboard to indicate capitalization - WHY WHY WHY were they dropped?
The swiping keyboard from Apple simply refuses to do "and" for me. I get "abs" (I'm not a gym rat; I don't talk about that) or "Abbas" (the only one I know is the Palestinian president, and I don't talk about him either) almost every time. I hate the autocorrect-something-five-words-back problem, but not being able to recognize one of the most common words in the language is unacceptable crap.
The keyboard I know is best, is the slide out hardware keyboard from the olden days. I pine for the days of old when me greasy fingers could write a book on a phone in a rainstorm.
Okay but are there any other Android keyboards to swipe better? And for even nicer, to _actually handle_ multilingual input? I'm fed up of garbage concepts where you can only have ALL languages at once (who the heck wants that), or suggesting random words (I don't even know from where) and definitely unable to learn anything - not even my own name...
My phone constantly autocorrects "the" to "Tue" (short for tuesday), even when that makes no sense in the sentence. I presume I'm accidentally typing "tue" but why it always corrects it that was is baffling
Microsoft acquihired SwiftKey to help make that pinnacle Windows Phone keyboard. It's too bad SwiftKey itself became mostly a vector for ads for Microsoft.
Android got really annoying recently, I think in the past few months, almost 30 percent of the time some random menu will pop up. They added a new top layer menu and I keep fat fingering it.
I have the same experience, and my hands are pretty small. Some paranoid bell rang in my head about it being an intentional annoyance to start getting us to use voice-to-text more,
Even switching to the Hacker's Keyboard and tweaking some settings still has me smacking the "tab" key or whatever when hitting space.
Just out of curiosity, who here is a one-handed texter, like me? I just assumed my constant need for error correction was because I only use one hand (and thus, one thumb) to type, but this thread has me wondering.
It wouldn’t be so bad if suggested corrections would take into account sibling-letter-on-keyboard typos, and if the spellchecker would recognize when words don’t make sense in context. We had better spellcheckers 25 years ago in word processors.
Dunno man, I’m on a 17 and there are a ton of context menus that were clearly not tested properly on a screen this size (6.1” or something) - the “delete” option is nowhere to be seen for example, you have to scroll down to find it.
Guess they’ll want us to carry iPads in our pockets for these UIs to actually work :)
Regarding typing on the iPad - Apple has removed the landscape split keyboard on the iPad, making it even more awkward to use, but not on the iPad Mini.
iPhone SE user here - it feels that even if Apple is not making small screen experience intentionally worse at least they optimize iOS for large screen sizes as a result with most updates UX on SE becoming worse. Using keyboard on this phone is a frustration but guess it's generally hard to make it work well on a small screen (and given that Apple wants to sell large phones unlikely they invest into small screen optimizations).
Except that it always used to work well on the SE / 13 mini form factor. That was part of the original iPhone-vs-BlackBerry magic, wasn’t it? It’s phenomenally hard to make typing work on a soft keyboard, especially at that size, and yet they did. And now un-did.
By contrast, the typing experience on a 2.5” Unihertz Atom screen is shockingly acceptable…
Ha!! That may be the first time I've been cited in a search result! I'm flattered :)
Though of course Google's Gemini-whatever does manage to subtly miss the mark even there: I said (and think) that the typing experience is acceptable, I said nothing about the screen. If I remember correctly, the last one I handled, the screen was resistive rather than capacitive, and it felt weird and squishy. Still not bad for the price, and it's a minor miracle how much Android software can still draw a coherent layout with that kind of resolution, but...
They have a Jelly Max https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-max and this looks too good to be true. I am sure one catch would be that it's not sold in my geography but still. Does it have at least few years of OS update support and more than few years of security updates?
My impression was that their update cadence is ~never and that the Jelly Max is rather closer to iPhone-SE-sized. The last one I handled was for ephemeral use on a trip abroad. It was durable, functional, and it worked wonders as far as breaking the phone-checking dopamine cycle.
I'd never come anywhere close to trusting it with anything important, but then again maybe that's not such a bad relationship to have to a smartphone...
I moved from 13 mini this year to 16 Pro, the keyboard is just as bad either way, not a noticeable difference. Maybe slightly worse on the 16 because the ergonomics are so bad.
My first iPhone was a 4S and i was astonished how correctly i'm typing. At least in English.
I even managed to bully the spell checker into reasonably accepting both English and Romanian, back when they didn't have multiple languages at the same time on the keyboard.
I'm not sure when it started to go downhill, but I was using an XS and it was at at least one more version after whatever XS shipped with.
Switched from pixels to iphone in the last year or two and the keyboard is the biggest pain point by far. I tend to use swipe, so this particular issue isn't something I've come across. What I do run into is weird censorship issues where I'm trying to type "kill myself" or something similar and the phone will do anything to not provide that as an option. Then, when I try to manually change it, editing is a nightmare. Inevitably trying to change the ending of a word results in the entire word being deleted. It inserts spaces where I don't want them.
Is this some sort of psyop to get me to use siri to send texts?
Similar switching story. I'm very happy with an iPhone overall, but god damn they keyboard took some adjusting. The default keyboard on Pixels (GBoard?) is excellent. The autocorrect is also unimaginably better on the Pixel. It's embarrassing how bad the iPhone's autocorrect is. Not just missing obvious cases, but actively sabotaging correct cases.
>autocorrect is also unimaginably better on the Pixel
Pixel user here. That depends on the language you're typing. Autocorrect and spellcheck, not just on Android but other Google products, will change correct danish to incorrect danish. It's infuriating. The issue I encounter most often happens because Google apparently assumes english grammar is universal, and insists on splitting compound words, which is never done in danish.
Danish is already being heavily eroded by foreign influence, and this isn't helping.
I personally haven't found any keyboard that works better than gboard. And exactly because it's the only keyboard that just lets me type in two languages without having to "switch", and it does that well. Right now my spacebar just says "NL - EN" and it lets me combine Dutch and English just fine.
From my experience it is much worse than it used to be 5 years ago. I have been writing English, French, and to a lesser extent German on an iPhone since ~2008. Initially, the dumb autocorrect would just correct to the closer word in the dictionary corresponding to the current keyboard, but over time it would pick up more and more words I used regularly. At some point around 2018 or so, it was nearly flawless. I think it changed the dictionary depending on the language or the sentence, because I had different suggestions for the same mistyped word in the same document. Also, I assume that by then my personal dictionary was quite extensive.
And then they bragged about a new machine-learning improved keyboard and it went downhill. First, all keyboards became monolingual, which was a 10-years regression. And even in that language, it was very flakey. They added multi-language keyboards somewhat recently and it got slightly better, except that for some reason it changes the keyboard back to the English-only one regularly for no reason I can see.
It is maddening. For a couple of years it was fantastic.
And that’s not the worst. On the Apple Watch not only is the multilingual keyboard completely broken, but worse than that: if you change the language of the keyboard by long pressing the space button it shows the new language, but the autocorrect proceeds to just ignore it completely and autocorrects everything as if I were typing in the system language rather than the one I selected.
And contrary to the iPhone you can’t even disable autocorrect! This + the super-aggressive autocorrect of watchOS (the screen is small after all so you are likely to make a mistake and we better fix it automatically!) makes it an absolute NIGHTMARE to type on an Apple Watch in multiple languages. Your only option is to use speech to type because that one for some reason works when you change the language whereas the keyboard doesn’t care.
Edit: the language switch bug on watchOS seems to have finally been fixed on watchOS 26.1. The bug was already long present on watchOS 11, so not something that watchOS 26 introduced.
Completely agreed. Apple seriously regressed the multi-lingual experience. They probably have a model per language. If you have to mix languages in a sentence, well, good luck!
I just want to talk to the folks who made the language switching logic so complicated instead of just a constant rotation like desktop IMEs. It seems like they expect the user to remember the previous language or prioritize languages in a clear order, but did it not occur to them that I might switch languages chaotically (A->C->D->B), keep it there, then hours later when I forgot what $previousLanguage was and press switch, I might as well be spinning a roulette?
> And exactly because it's the only keyboard that just lets me type in two languages without having to "switch", and it does that well. Right now my spacebar just says "NL - EN" and it lets me combine Dutch and English just fine.
I can't stand keyboards that do this - especially those that don't let you turn it off. If you write in another language that doesn't use the Latin alphabet, you end up with nonsense suggestions - common English words like "the" or "and" will get replaced with obscure words in another language that just happen to sound vaguely phonetically similar. I almost never switch languages mid-sentence when typing, and yet the keyboard can't seem to grasp that.
This. I use romanian, english and turkish at the same time. Sometimes goes sideways because we mix a lot of words in english and romaninan in the same sentence, but it's ok. No other keyboard comes close.
Multilingual typing is a godsend. I did have to tweak settings though, like disabling the "suggestion strip" (because sometimes I'd be typing fast and accidently click the GIF button, then an image, which in many apps sends it immediately without a draft which was extremely annoying).
I've switched to GBoard on the iphone. I don't like the fact that I need to use a third-party software for something that's so crucial. But GBoard is so much better than the default iphone keybaord.
It's abandoned and buggy. I'm surprised google hasn't just removed it from the store. I suspect as soon as it actually requires an update because of a change in the OS it will disappear.
Yes, I loved it, but it crashed in too many apps and I had to switch to the Apple one :(
Yes! I miss it very much. When I was on Android, I used to have it set to 100ms. I used to very quickly send well-punctuated text. On iPhones, it seems like the digitizer has 100ms of hysteresis built in.
now i just Lettuce my iPhone sden whatever it wants with no punctuation its not real good
Unfortunately, MacOS doesn't have settings (which I am told it had) for animation scales, like Androids have. The interface is sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow.
Yeah I tried it and it doesn't stand up to it on Android in my experience. I figured I'd rather not give Google any data if the experience isn't going to be the same.
The key is to work around the text input. If you want to say "kill myself", you input "kill my" then complete the "self" portion by pressing delete (remove space), then s-e-l-f. I feel like most of my typing time is spent making these corrections, as it's very quick to swipe but corrections are almost always necessary and they are an order of magnitude slower. Yesterday for example I tried to swipe "succession" but it really wanted to output "secession", so I change my strategy to "success" (it really liked this word), then delete (remove space), i-o-n.
I think every time I swipe I need to do at least one correction like this, where I type one similarly spelled word with as minimum an edit distance as I can think of in the moment, then do a manual correction.
I've never noticed the "censorship issue", but once it gets a word wrong once, it's game over. Editing is awful. If I'm trying to replace the word entirely, I inevitably do the "wrong thing" and fall victim to the editing again, or tap something wrong, or.. I don't know, but I either have an undiagnosed brain injury, or the "correct" thing to do to get the phone to just take the damn word you typed changes every day.
Really? If you swipe "kill" and then try "yourself" or "myself" does it ever get it right or provide it as one of the options? Doing it right now myself and I can't get it to do either. I have manually entered those words and hit the "myself" in the suggestion box to try and convince it that that's an acceptable correction to no avail.
> I inevitably do the "wrong thing" and fall victim to the editing again, or tap something wrong, or.. I don't know
Every. Time. I like to think that I'm not an idiot and can generally pattern recognize, but it just feels so inconsistent that I'm always doing the wrong thing.
Further, iPhones are so bad if you exist anywhere outside the mainstream and language orthodoxy.
Their voice recognition stubbornly refuses to acknowledge Linux, instead transcribing Linux.
Typing "tboy" or "transfem", common terms in the trans community, gets changed to "toby" or "transfer". I can understand "toby", but the latter is especially bad, as the "r" and "m" keys are nowhere near each other. I'll type these words several times a day, every day, and it'll never get recorded. But one typo of the form "unbeleivalbe" gets permanently etched into the autocorrection.
Any intentionally unorthodox english gets invisibly censored and editorialized. You can say "here come dat boi" nowadays (which is good if you're a fan of 2016 memes) but not "wrasslin". Phrases like "what you doin today" has its tone and informality stripped when it's changed to "what are you doing today".
I would at some point throw my phone out the window if it worked like this. Instead I choose to have zero help correcting anything I type on my phone. I proofread, and fix any errors before I hit "send". I'm also on a folding android phone with a large screen and a 3rd-party keyboard app with adjustable size keys, so it's very easy to type.
But you can not disable predictive button resizing.
Predictive text replacements are very bad, but they mitigate the worse issue of the fact that the keyboard is incessantly shifting with every single keypress.
I switched from Android to iOS like five or six years ago and still think about this almost every day, how much I miss the Android keyboard because the iOS keyboard is so, so, so terrible. Years later I still find it a frustrating, type-inducing mess.
Same for me. My Pixel magically fixed scrambled words (and was very fast doing it). iOS is terrible, even without described bug.
I am now much faster typing with the speech-to-text feature. Maybe that is what they are pushing. Maybe Apple wants to remove the keyboard and it is slowly increasing the friction so people use it less and less? Similarly how Chrome degrades browser performance until it gets restarted to force an update.
> Then, when I try to manually change it, editing is a nightmare.
It feels like the editing and cursor process has gotten exponentially worse over the last few iOS versions. I do not understand what anyone is doing on the Apple side with this, but every change they make, makes it significantly worse.
Haha sometimes I want to type f*ck and it gets auto corrected to duck. But once I was trying to type “pura” (pure in Spanish, I do have Spanish enabled for auto correct) and it auto corrected it to “puta” (look it up). Shrug.
The workaround is to add fuck as a shortcut for fuck. They intended the translation for doing things like translating omw to "On my way" but it works as a hack to let you use profanity without autocorrect killing it.
Fun you should mention this - I do have a few shortcuts but I find I don’t use them anymore because it tends to not recognize/expand them. It’s faster to just type the whole thing than to type the shortcut, realize it didn’t expand, curse at the thing, backspace over it, and have to retype it all anyway.
In spite of the manufacturing drama it introduced, 3D Touch was an insanely great feature for editing alone. Push a little harder on the keyboard and have a cursor to easily place where you need it.
I was real grumpy when they took it away. Editing had only become even worse since. I’d love to know what they’re trying to achieve.
"3D touch" was always marketing wankery. Every capacitive touchscreen and touchpad can sense pressure.
No android phone needed a trademarked name to have that feature. If modern iPhones no longer allow you to easily move the cursor around for editing, that's a software engineering decision. Android's implementation was not as nifty, you could only move "linearly" along the text input, rather than freely in two directions, but the intent is you just place the cursor roughly at the place you want and drag the space key for exact placement, though IMO it's too sensitive. Constraining axis in that context is a good thing.
Meanwhile, my Mac's "3D touch" keyboard functionality only results in it insisting to show a dictionary definition for most of the words I click and making it so "drag this file onto an app to input it" doesn't work half the time because dragging a file from Finder just doesn't work sometimes!
"Mac touchpads are so much better than everything else" people tell me as I yet again cannot do the one interaction that is the killer app for multi-window graphical workstations and that we figured out in the 80s on computers that couldn't even do color.
I'm not just grumpy, I'm baffled. Suddenly, when there is an URL or number input, when the hold-on-spacebar UX doesn't work because there is no spacebar, how could you even move the cursor left or right? Tapping in-between tiny letters is borderline impossible, and it isn't always in the right place to do the hold-and-slowly-move thing either, because the magnifying glass doesn't show up, so you can't see where you end up... It seems to me like for the last 5-6 years, the people who do decisions at Apple doesn't actually use the products themselves, or actually understand functional UX. Jobs would be ashamed.
This was changed, and it is pretty easy to think the feature got removed.
When it was pressure-sensitive, you could push harder anywhere on the keyboard. But now that it’s tap-and-hold, it only works on the space bar. Most other pressure-sensitive actions just got replaced with tap-and-hold with no changes. But doing that on any other key brings up letter-specific accents, so they moved it down to spacebar.
It also used to be faster. Now you have to wait, but before it was pressure sensitive. You could trigger it instantly with more pressure. Edits were so fast and convenient, but now it’s a slight pause each time
I don't think it's "censorship" so much as it's defaulting to less-problematic phrases to avoid the opposite happening (you meaning to say "fill myself" or something). That could be jarring and lead to embarrassing situations.
Maybe 99 times out of 100 someone means to type "fuck" instead of "duck", but it's a completely legitimate UX decision to optimize preventing that 1% case, even if it's annoying the other 99% of the time.
I didn’t pick up on the censorship issue. I just spent a few minutes trying to swipe type “kill myself” and found myself completely unable. I wonder if this is intentional. If so it feels like an embarrassing waste of time.
and auto-correct has lost me data. I've typed in something important to remember and later when I go look at it ("call spaghetti before 5pm!"), I can't figure what I typed in.
In the end, I learned to disable auto-capitalization, auto-correction and smart punctuation.
and editing is a nightmare. Getting the cursor in the middle of a word is just about impossible, like highlighting just the characters you want to cut or copy.
theres a setting to turn off whole word delete. So if it does the wrong word when you press delete it will only delete the letter by letter not the whole word. It helps but iphone keyboard is still horrendous.
I recently learned of the early 20th century cult called the Royal Fraternity of Master Metaphysicians. Their best known stunt was attempting to raise a baby to become immortal by never exposing her to the concepts of death or disease—our ability to contemplate death being the thing that dooms us to die, in their worldview.
Big Tech's attempts to shape us by conforming our capability to express ourselves to "algospeak" seems similarly misguided... though not out of character for Big Tech. (AI can be seen as a form of hermetic magick: an attempt to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth by first constructing a machine-god.)
Does Pixel somehow have a good keyboard? I use GBoard and find it atrocious: for English it's ok, but it doesn't know basic declensions in Czech nor Polish and autocorrects them to something nonsensical. This happens every time I try to type something, so I avoid writing on the phone.
It's the age of LLMs! Language has been solved! LLMs are great at both Czech and Polish. This problem is orders of magnitude easier. Why doesn't my keyboard even know these words exist?? Is there an Android keyboard that actually... knows basic forms of basic words?
Do you have an example? I type in Polish in GBoard regularly and haven't noticed too many anomalies (although I do have the right language pack installed, and the keyboard is set to it, and I "add to dictionary" occasionally).
what do you mean by this specifically? iOS (and I'm guessing Android) both have dictionaries. I can select a word I've entered and look it up in nearly any text area.
> Does Pixel somehow have a good keyboard? I use GBoard and find it atrocious
I use Google Pinyin Input. Since it was discontinued in favor of (the much worse) GBoard, I have to keep a backup of the apk and sideload it onto new phones.
Google does not appear to think of input methods as something that should be convenient for the user to use. Not sure why.
You're on Android. If the keyboard is censoring you and you don't want that, install a different keyboard from any store/repository you like
I've also got a Pixel from work and the keyboard doesn't even support swiping. It's a nightmare. I don't really want to install another one due to paranoia related to the work I do, but on my personal android phone, replacing the OS keyboard with Swiftkey (for which I have a data folder with over a decade of training in it) and denying it internet access is the first thing I do after rooting. I'm amazed that so few people seem to even realise that software is replaceable (also the launcher, which is an even-more-commonly-heard complaint after changing/upgrading phones)
Edit: wait I misread which way around you switched. Nvm and good luck
35m ago edit: Apple uses many predictive systems for typing. My sentiment in pointing out just slide to type might be misguided as it does not exist in a vacuum. I'd love to see these tests redone with slide to type disabled. I'm leaving the original comment below for reference.
Slide to type. This "issue" is at most 6 years old for iOS users.
Turn off slide to type if you do not use it. Slide to type does key resizing logic. This is the direct cause of this issue. Please upvote this comment for visibility.
Please reply if you think I'm wrong. I see this get posted frequently enough I'm actually losing it.
I'm on an iPhone 12 Mini and always thought this issue was because it's kind of old. But I've seen this issue for at least 3 major iOS generations now, and I'm currently on 26.X
I'll give this a try. My typing is better when I use slide to type but I'm still super uncomfortable with it (I feel anxious trying to think of the letters "fast enough" even though I know it doesn't matter).
FWIW I've felt my phone typing accuracy has gotten worse every single year for, whatever, almost 20 years now. That's not the case on the computer.
I almost exclusively use slide to type and what I do is not think about the letters, but about the motions I would have done if I was typing with my hands on a regular keyboard, sort of letting muscle memory take over and create the correct “shape” of the word without thinking too hard about it.
I remember when Swiftkey first launched on Android, the swipe-to-text was extremely good and the built-in "learning by itself" dictionary worked well too. Of course, it seems like Microsoft at one point bought it, so I don't even have to try it again to understand the current state of it.
I thought I had a neurological disorder. (My iphone has auto-everything off. I'm not enabling slide type for fun, but I do not exclude the probability ios auto-enabled it when I changed brightness or something, as they are used to do.)
About two years ago, my phone typing suddenly gets extremely bad. Like, from occasional error to about one typo every second sentence. No matter how carefully I type. Hardware didn't change, so it must be me, right?
Let me play with that setting, I hope you are right.
It might be different with slide-to-type enabled, but the iPhone always invisibly resizes keys hitboxes using predictions about what key you want to use next. This can't be disabled, and has been part of the iPhone since the very first. It's a really abysmal experience for something that's so crucial to a smartphone, Apple seems to be completely disconnected with how people use these.
Apple even used to advertise this on their own site. That video definitely exists somewhere on YouTube.
> the iPhone always invisibly resizes keys hitboxes using predictions about what key you want to use next. This can't be disabled, and has been part of the iPhone since the very first.
Yes. True.
> It's a really abysmal experience for something that's so crucial to a smartphone
Full disagreement here. I expect and enjoy the predictive hitboxes, and this issue I am experiencing is not about those. It is when I type for example the letter "T" and I am certain I touched correctly and I am certain I _actually saw_ the letter "T" appear as pressed from the UI, yet when I look at the word I just typed something else which was obviously not the "T" appeared.
This already happened when they got rid of the 5-star rating in favor of the like button. "Rate 5 stars and subscribe" became "Like and subscribe". People will adapt.
I’ve been complaining about the iOS Keyboard for years, and the people I’ve been complaining to would act like I’m insane.
I suspect this last iteration broke it just enough for it to impact more people and make some of the problems I’ve been experiencing mainstream.
But yeah things like deleting when I meant to space, putting an “I” instead of “K” and a bunch of other little things like “thinks” instead of “things”, unintended periods; complete failure of spelling just generating gibberish “x” instead of “c” leading to un-autocorrectable failures; and if you want to reference the name of something that doesn’t fit the grammatical structure of the sentence but isn’t a mainstream item, forget about it.
Also “od” instead of “of”.
Seeing this video is super validating. Emotionally, it does a lot to make me feel vindicated.
Someone was telling me you can install 3P keyboards, does anyone have any recommendations?
What gets me is if it autocorrects the wrong wrong the first time, I can deal with that. It's when I backspace, re-type it the exact same and it autocorrects again - that's a huge UX problem. Then there's the lack of autocorrect where it makes sense, like you're "od" example. I know they probably do need to do a little tap point correction, but whatever they did with this last version is way off. Maybe they're trying to determine viewing angle since that could affect the perceived place you're tapping?
not just the keyboard either, but the text editor box (or address bar /search) in general. i cant count the number of times i try and put the cursor before a word, i see it is before the word, i let go, and the cursor moves to the end of the word. if i wanted it at the end of the word i would have put it there before letting go.
also, the damn period next to n in the address bar. no i didnt mean to type every word in a sentence with a period delimiting between words.
It has the exact same bug as mentioned above. I solely use the spacebar for cursor movement, and the cursor returns to the end of the line/word at random times. I couldn’t find a pattern when it happens. It’s especially annoying when it happens with something long like a long path in a URL bar.
> i see it is before the word, i let go, and the cursor moves to the end of the word. if i wanted it at the end of the word i would have put it there before letting go.
Having never implemented something like this, I wonder if the algorithm could take into account how long the cursor lingered on each position before being let go. If it spent significantly longer in a position before the word, and your finger happens to move a little bit when you let go, that slight movement shouldn't affect the cursor position.
Apple is usually pretty good about this stuff but they've really been slipping on the keyboard.
I think the Apple software UI team has cultural problem in adhering to "one source of truth", and that's where most of the problems come from. I've seen this many many times throughout the years, from toggles, to actions, account creation (I have dupes from tapping a button too fast), etc: the UI doesn't match the internal state.
Another example is most any toggle that's linked to Apple cloud stuffs, like settings in your iCloud account or parental controls. You see it toggle immediately, but that's unrelated to the actual state. You can't know the actual state until you exit the page and go back. Meta gets this right with their apps: you toggle, the toggle turns disabled, then the toggle is re-enabled when the state is confirmed remote side.
Part of apple’s language design is to not show failure whenever possible.
It’s everywhere once you’re told. at most a loading icon remains loading or a setting resets itself when you don’t look, but those “there was an error -accept” popups that are a constant in windows are rarely seen this side of the fence.
It tends to become stupid when the network is involved, where lack of coverage, interrupted downloads and the like are common. They have to show it just works I guess.
and you know what, that actually might be reasonable if the iPhone was smart enough to retry a few times - either with exponential backoff or when network connectivity is restored.
instead, it just pretends everything is working great lol.
I pranked a friend in college by tricking him into installing a “utility” on his Amiga 1200 that swapped adjacent keys into the key stream as he typed, but only above a certain speed. He called and woke me the next morning in a panic about losing the ability to type. He would type slowly and it would work fine. Then at normal speed and he’d get constant errors. He’d quickly pull his hands up to see what keys they were over. Did he have a brain tumor? How could he be a journalist if he couldn’t type! Did he need to change majors?
Is software just going to get worse from now on? Was the level of quality and feature improvement we've come to expect an artifact of high levels of investment based on expectations of growth that are no longer seen a valid?
We've built stacks so high we're afraid to jump off.
Nobody is really competing because nobody can build a complete product. So there's less pressure to fix the little irritations. Users are mostly satisfied, and problems get worse slowly enough that for the average user they don't notice right away how bad it's getting. So they stay because it's too hard or completely impossible to leave.
I think the bigger issue is the update model. In the past, if a new version sucked, people wouldn't upgrade. Now with subscriptions / continuous delivery, there's less ability to vote with one's wallet/feet
If you're dependent on updating your OS for security fixes and basic compatibility, you are also forced to update the things you may not want to. It's all bundled together.
But it's not just the OS, but apps too, to say nothing of web SaaS products.
How many times have you launched something only to find the UI had been redone, some feature was now gone or changed, something that worked was now broken, etc.
But it's fine, you see, because we have telemetry and observability and robust CI/CD.
Users and their work are nothing more than ephemeral numbers on a metrics dashboard
This does not always work for specific programs which do not do that, and even then, there are updates that you might want other than security updates without updating other parts of the same program. Separate programs can usually be updated individually, but if they are all in one program then it can make it more difficult (sometimes configuration can be done but not always; sometimes they change things that make this not work either).
100% this. And cars are following down this road as well. For example, my Tesla 3 radio will go bonkers every so often and will refuse to change the channel, no matter what I do. Tapping a new channel icon changes the "currently playing" view, but the audio from the original channel continues to play. This happens until you restart the entire UI (by turning off the car or rebooting the display).
But, hey, they managed to add a Tron cross-over tie-in feature, and maybe some new fart noises!
Undoubtedly when they fix that radio bug, something else will fail. Like the SRS (supplemental restraint system, aka airbag) error message that was introduced at some point in the past six months, then silently got fixed with a more recent firmware update.
Incentives Rule Everything Around Me. What incentive does Apple have not to be shit? People aren't going to switch to anything else, they'll just suck it up and shove it in their enormous sack of learned helplessness.
Yup, it's time to let go. The forces that eat away at quality software are running an indoctrination campaign with budgets in the billions of dollars to ensure that people don't remember what quality software is. You can do right in your own work and with your own people but most peoples' experiences are going to suck for the foreseeable future.
There have been bugs and regressions since forever. It’s easy to look back with rose colored glasses, but I don’t think software has actually gotten worse.
Just look back at the Snow Leopard release of OS X. It was specifically marketed at having no new features and just being a fix and optimization release because Leopard was such a mess. And people were happy about this.
> Just look back at the Snow Leopard release of OS X. It was specifically marketed at having no new features and just being a fix and optimization release because Leopard was such a mess.
This is wrong. Leopard wasn’t “such a mess”. No one was saying Leopard was more buggy than Tiger.
Further Snow Leopard wasn’t a bug fixing release. It had a lot of new features. The difference is the features were not user facing but geared towards the underlying tech.
From Wikipedia:
> The goals of Snow Leopard were improved performance, greater efficiency and the reduction of its overall memory footprint, unlike previous versions of Mac OS X which focused more on new features.
> Much of the software in Mac OS X was extensively rewritten for this release in order to take full advantage of modern Macintosh hardware and software technologies (64-bit, Cocoa, etc.). New programming frameworks, such as OpenCL, were created, allowing software developers to use graphics cards in their applications.
I suspect that people not really paying for certain things has had an impact. Remember when there were a lot of high quality, paid keyboards for Android?
I doubt those were particularly profitable, but there was a lot of innovation back then.
Why pay for a keyboard app when the default keyboard is already good enough?
Moreover, why risk installing a 3rd-party keyboard app when the App Store is filled with adware and malware? All those handy flashlight and camera apps are a Trojan's Horse, why should one assume that the various keyboard apps in the App Store aren't keyloggers trying to steal my login info?
In 2025 I can do mostly error-free blind typing on the Pixel 7 keyboard, with all autocorrect and predictive spelling intentionally turned off. Why would I need innovation?
>why should one assume that the various keyboard apps in the App Store aren't keyloggers trying to steal my login info?
Honestly, you shouldn't.
Theoretically, Apple + Google take a % of all payments that go through their store, with the expressed reason being to "monitor and police the safety of the apps on the app store". You really should be able to trust apps on the official app stores, but I don't trust Apple or Google, so the whole system is moot I guess
>Moreover, why risk installing a 3rd-party keyboard app when the App Store is filled with adware and malware? All those handy flashlight and camera apps are a Trojan's Horse, why should one assume that the various keyboard apps in the App Store aren't keyloggers trying to steal my login info?
And unless the app gets acquired by the big companies, it will eventually turn into malware.
> Why pay for a keyboard app when the default keyboard is already good enough?
That's probably what people would have said before Swype was invented too. But lots of people use that in their default keyboards thanks to the people that _did_ pay for keyboards back then.
Who knows what innovations we are missing out on today just because we've consolidated things down to 2-3 suppliers?
Improving quality (or degrading, for that matter) of existing features doesn’t figure into career promotions anymore. Only new features count. Or changing the visual design.
> Is software just going to get worse from now on?
I mean, yes? I think, as a pretty universal rule, you can expect commercial software to (on average) get worse every time it is changed. Companies spend little or no time fixing bugs and spend most of their time cramming (wanted or unwanted) features. Of course software is just going to get worse and worse over time.
The #1 problem I have typing on my iPhone is that I hit letter keys (mostly 'n') instead of the space bar and the phone just doesn't anticipate this as a possible typo and doesn't offer the right corrections. (I have AutoCorrect off.) It doesn't seem able to learn that this is a common typo, either.
Hah! I have exactly the opposite problem, I hit the space bar, instead of N, and the iPhone doesn't understand this a possible typo, so all the suggestions and auto-corrects are wrong.
It’s problems like this that make me wonder what high level leaders do anymore. Do they not use technology? Infinite tolerance for bugs? How is it someone with authority does not make it a mandate to file down some of these regular annoyances in everyday software.
It is risk aversion in low level managers, and profit margins in high level managers, and since they're the market leader in the US and smartphones are pretty mature there's little risk of anyone jumping ship (go to android, start over, lose all your apps, get differently frustrating issues).
They don't have a Steve Jobs anymore to sit down with the product, get frustrated beyond belief with it, and start sticking boots up asses on general principle.
Nobody is going to step up to do that because all the other executives would hate them for it and knife them in the back, and it would be seen as a waste of effort. And nobody could ever tie fixing those bugs to making a financial number go up, and would argue instead that it was pure cost for no benefit.
Everyone has gotten so used to software being extremely shitty and hostile that they just think this is how it is. People work around the jank sometimes hundreds of times a day and don't look at the big picture.
I know at work I get work around windows taskbar jank at least a few dozens times a day. Granted, I can't do anything about it.
That’s the thing, if you are in charge of Teams, YouTube, Spotify, the Windows taskbar, whatever - you have the power! Surely you must be encountering the same annoyances that enrage the rest of us. Why not tell the team to fix the things that bother you? Set the agenda and improve your own life!
Instead, seemingly trivial bugs exist in huge software products for years. It somehow feels like the people in charge actively avoid dog fooding their own products.
Because they are too busy coming up with new “features” that nobody needs or wants so they can talk about delivering value in a yearly review.
Fixing broken UX is not a priority at Apple any more. They stopped enforcing HIGs for 3rd party apps a long time ago, and their own apps violate many principles that used to matter. Music app on iOS is a great example of slop UI.
Honestly, it's stuff like the horrible typing experience, which makes me wonder, if I am somehow missing something fundamental when people are praising Apple for the UX. How on Earth can they possibly fuck up a basic phone feature like typing? I've been using iOS for a few years now and it's such a mess, absolutely not growing on me. Hardware doesn't matter, if you're locked in software hell.
The key that is punched into the input field is based on where your finger lifted up. So if you have slide-to-type on, the pop-up paddle that showed up on key-down won't change to where your finger slid to for key-up. That's why when typing fast with slide-to-type on you can get confusing UI hints like this.
It kind of seems like the grace period for the paddle hiding with slide-to-type needs adjustment. I just leave slide-to-type off.
I had an iPhone day 1 in 2007, and my typing on that day was better than it is today.
Once they added the suggestion bar above the keyboard things got noticeably worse. Every time they try to fix it they make it even worse than before.
With the current version, it’s not just the issue in the video I see as an issue. The two big problems I have are 1) repeated words, where I will type a word once, but auto-completion will inject another one. 2) The autocorrect will seemingly look at the whole paragraph I’m typing and change random words I typed several lines up and deemed correct. I will catch it doing this in real time, and sometimes it will flip a word back and forth repeatedly. I find I don’t just need to proofread while I’m typing, but also need to go through and re-read everything. It wasn’t always like this.
Maybe it’s my rose colored glasses, but I often think the iPhone peaked with the 4S.
I literally cannot type "its" without iPhone putting an apostrophe into it every goddamned time, even when it's obvious from the beginning of the sentence that the next word must be a verb not a possessive pronoun.
If I ever lose my marbles I know I'm going to accuse iOS of being in on it.
I have always used SwiftKey and Android. This year I switched to Apple because Android was being bloated by Samsung etc. I'm shocked by how horrible Apple keypad is. I also feel like the touch sensitivity of iphone is worse than Samsung phones.
I installed SwiftKey on iPhone too but even it seems sluggish.
Long a swift key fan but ever since it got sold to MS, it has gone downhill. I have it on my iphone and I think the development on that has stopped. My favorite keyboard is just unusable.
I went to apple keyboard and had to disable autocorrect because it would uncorrect it to the wrong word until five words down and decides which word makes more sense.
I went the other way this year, from an iPhone to a Z Flip 7. It's generally been a pretty good experience - the bloat on Samsung devices seems significantly less bad than it used to be 7 or 8 years ago.
I've stuck with Samsung's keyboard and it has mostly been fine, though it's less aggressive about adding punctuation for contractions etc.
+1 on GBoard - every time an app has that weird bug where it selects the native ios keyboard instead of GBoard it doesn't take long for me to notice, it's crazy how bad the Apple iOS keyboard is by comparison.
I actually keep a bluetooth keyboard when I'm at my desk but am forced to use my phone. I really, really dislike touchscreens and touchscreen typing, and it's baffling to me that so many people seem to like it. The bluetooth keyboard is actually a little Logitech K380, and it's quite convenient as I also have it paired with my work laptop and my steam deck. I just push the button to seamlessly swap between pairings.
I guess I'm in an extreme minority here but... it's not broken if autocorrect is off.
I raw dog my typing everywhere. Zero autocorrect. The last time I did use typing assistance was on BB10 with the 'flick to complete' because it was out of my way enough that I could ignore it was there or use it to save a small amount of time. Otherwise I too have the fond memory of Windows Phone's keyboard (I ran it on the HTC HD2), I couldn't tell you why it was good other than it felt good to use, again without autocorrect.
However, I'm CERTAIN there's an ergonomics thing at play, the 'brain calibration' time for me to type accurately on a big screen takes longer. I ran the original iPhone SE's as long as I could and always carried a second android device that was huge by comparison. Today I have the 15 Pro and a OnePlus 11. If I spend a lot of time using the iPhone it takes a little time maybe 20 minutes or so to stop making easy errors on the OnePlus 11. However, going back to the smaller iPhone after being on the OnePlus for awhile, there's not really an adjustment, I can hit all the letters accurately.
I have large hands, I still want the smaller device. There is extra work to need to move your hand and eyes across a larger device. More space to misclick on.
Swipe to type is enabled on android/ios for me. I use it sometimes, if you are hesitant at all on iOS or have a tendency to drag fingers at all don't enable it or it will mess up your typing. It's of course enabled by default like autocorrect. Some people have issues with it.
Dictation is underrated on iOS at least. It just works better and faster than the shitty autocorrect for typing. Obviously not applicable to a lot of situations but when I don't feel like typing it works really well.
EDIT: And I really have to have it off, I switch between devices too much and even with them learning my style of writing, I write differently for different contexts and each OS does its own thing differently. I don't want to spend the extra mental bandwidth correcting the autocorrect or having to think of how that specific autocorrect will behave.
Also in the minority. I use pretty atypical language and grammar for effect frequently, which is a nightmare to edit on iOS. I'm probably a little slower typing now for run of the mill message, but like you said dictation is actually great for that.
I'm overall happy with the decision and would recommend others try it.
Apple’s support for 3rd party keyboards is notoriously difficult to work with. It’s not surprising to me that we don’t see many high quality alternatives.
Working with 3rd party keyboards is still the same nightmare it was when the feature was introduced many years ago. For one, iOS will randomly switch you to a different keyboard. Or the keyboard will just crash.
What does it matter that development has stopped? I haven't updated my software keyboard in a decade because I'm simply happy with the way it works. Why not use Nintype if you like it?
Mostly I'm worried about bit rot, i.e. breaking changes in subsequent iOS updates. But your point is valid, I'll try Nintype again. It's extremely quirky and opinionated in an entertaining way.
At least on Android, Nintype has a few annoying bugs now and has gotten terribly slow. But it's an incredible idea and I wish it would get revived by someone - I still use it despite the bugs, but I need to switch over to Gboard sometimes.
The third party keyboards are OK, but it depends on if you trust sending 100% of your typing content to a third party. The two big options are owned by Microsoft and Google. It’s bad enough I have to trust Apple. And Gboard still isn’t as good as the Android keyboard.
I literally just had a dream about this. Where I needed to urgently send a message, but I kept messing up the text. Weird. At least now, I know I'm not just fat fingering it.
I have a frequently reoccurring dream (nightmare scenario) that I'm somewhere unpleasant where I don't want to be, and need to leave right away, so I try to order an Uber on my iPhone, but the app is just so fucking hard to use and figure out, with all the important commands hidden so that the user interface is clean and sleek and beautiful and minimalistic without any visible scrollbars or labeled buttons or visual affordances, so much that I can't even use it, and I'm trapped in some horrible place in a nightmare I can't get away from, desperately fumbling with my iPhone.
I think it's a manifestation with my pain and disgust with Alan Dye's vain cosmetic approach to user interface design.
Now maybe my nightmares will shift to being trapped in the Facebook user interface, now that Alan Dye is at Meta. They totally deserve him, and I hope he destroys Facebook once and for all.
I have tried to set a "lucid dream recognition breakpoint" on my iPhone's user interface being impossible to use, but I keep hitting it in real life that I can't wake up from, and I keep getting terrorized by it in dreams without recognizing it.
Sigh.
The only way out of this insipid inception is for Apple to get their shit together and actually fix their UI, but that's never going to happen.
Same here. I even blamed it on switching between Italian and Spanish all the time and thought my brain was short-circuiting. But when you see the right key light up and a different letter shows up, something’s clearly off. Also: with battery saver on it’s basically unusable - the lag makes typing way worse. The video was oddly comforting. Turns out I’m not losing it.
I know because I hqte iPhone keyboard so much, and the calculator app. I wish there’s an alternative timeline where we still have Palm keyboard with big screen
Unfortunately it turns the iPhone into a lever that is always trying to launch itself from your hand. The iPhone part is much heavier than the keyboard part. And the ergonomics of the camera control become impossible (unless you have enormous salad fingers or something).
The first iterations of the apple keyboard were perfect. They literally did everything perfectly without any notes.
Then it seems like they’re started teaching to the bottoms of the class and added a bunch of terrible decisions: Substituting touch to select instead of touch to move cursor was a genuinely awful decision that now makes typing a constant chore, and it seems like their autocorrect is overcompensating so hard that it prevents me from writing perfectly good words simply because they’re not common ones.
Side note: anyone else have moments where you can’t press delete once predictive text has shown up?
I just installed it and it seems really promising. Glad you shared it here.
I’ve spent more time than I care to admit searching for a good keyboard app in the App Store, and I’ve tried a lot of them. This one never surfaced for me in any of my usual searches, which is a shame (likely more on Apple’s search than on you).
I really like the T9-style approach, and I appreciate the clean App Privacy section and straightforward privacy policy.
Is there a trustworthy third-party "Retro" keyboard app - none of the shenanigans that made the default keyboard bad, and also no typing exfiltration to third-party servers?
I imagine the problem could be severe enough to some that they would pay the price of the Apple Developer program just so they may install such a Retro keyboard app from Github - if one exists?
iPhone keyboard is probably one of the several biggest factors I consider when once again I think "hmm, maybe this time I should upgrade to iPhone?". And then I'm confronted with this, ummm... thing, and immediately remember why I ditched iPhones years ago :) . How do you deal with it daily? I'm at a loss really. PS: I've owned 3GS and 4S and a few iPads, so I'm not just baseless here.
Exactly the same here. I've considered switching from Android multiple times and the two things that always stop me are notifications and the keyboard.
No long-press punctuation, no switch.
I also can't trust Apple to let 3rd party keyboards work smoothly everywhere, so that's not really an option I'm willing to take the risk on.
I switched from iOS to Android and it's actually kind of insane how much higher quality a lot of parts of the OS are. I wasn't expecting this, I was expecting customization and the associated jank. But no, it's been pleasantly surprising.
There's still some jank. Sometimes searching for something in setting takes upwards of 5 seconds. I can only assume it's downloading a bitcoin miner or something.
Yeah, something happened a few months ago where by iOS I'm now "hitting" the wrong key a lot, words like we'll and we're are constantly being automatically "corrected" to well and were and, most frustrating, it will auto"correct" the last word in a sentence from what is on the screen when you hit send. It went from almost always helpful to often frustrating.
I haven't been getting notifications from any messaging apps for a few months. I've checked all the relevant settings (do not disturb etc.). I also get random keyboard issues such as this one. This is my first iPhone. I have no idea why I paid premium prices for a premium phone if they can't even get notifications and typing right
That's a really strange issue you have here. Never heard of anything like this. Could it be possible that some aggressive filtering exists on your network that would disallow your iphone to connect to Apple's push servers ?
It's definitely a setting issue, the problem is Apple has multiple settings which all interfere with notifications. My mom gets this problem a lot and it takes entirely to long to track down which setting is overriding what.
The most infuriating “feature” of autocorrect is that it includes all your contact names in your dictionary, with no way to opt out of this aside from disabling autocorrect entirely. This can lead to some awkward texts when your innocent typo (or even correctly spelled technical term) turns into a mention of someone’s name who should not be in your phone…
I wonder if this is related to the fact that every Apple app shows up as “recently accessing” contacts in App Privacy Report. And I don’t mean only photos (face recognition), but: Safari, Camera, Shortcuts, Mail, Health… why? I’ve never even configured a Mailbox. Why are these apps all accessing my Contacts?
This drives me nuts because I put things like "(Alexander)" after someone's name to indicate who I met them through, who they're friends of, where I met them, etc.
Then whenever I dictate "Alexander" it shows up as "(Alexander)" in parentheses. Drives me mad.
I'm astonished people on this site use autocorrect at all. IMO it's a mind-bogglingy insane antifeature, even more insane than that weird "replace arithmetic expressions with their result" thing Apple once did.
It's worse because it keeps the text you intentionally entered? To be sure: I'm not talking about next word suggestions, only about it changing words after you already wrote them.
When I first saw your name, a few decades ago, it was because I was interested in HCI and human factors engineering.
Today, my impression is that the field of HCI has mostly disappeared. Most people who might have been interested in HCI are now studying and practicing UX instead.
In UX, the designer/engineer in practice is usually directed by the goals of the party who decides how the thing will work, rather than the goals of the party using the thing.
There are some intellectual elements to UX practice (e.g., aesthetics, fashions, A/B testing, and dark patterns). But I wonder whether the transition from HCI to UX means that the field is not only perversely anti-user, but also losing the intellectual and/or institutional capacity to be user-oriented on occasions that they want to be?
The 3rd letter is the key here.
If you are going to look up a possible word that a user is typing, iOS waits until the third letter typed to do the lookup. Too many possibilities before then. So at the third letter typed, in the video it displayed the U, but his finger was low on the button. It displayed, then did the lookup, and while it was doing that lookup the u was still displayed, but the input moved to J without the display being updated. Maybe the lookup being spawned on the background thread caused enough delay on the main thread to not update the highlighted key before the touchUp event fired?
I am surprised that there isn't a comprehensive test suite of (at least) virtual button presses replaying actual typed sentences for a product used by so many people that apple would run on a daily basis against each device.
This has been driving me up a wall. I was seriously considering if I had just gotten 'old' or something. I've had every iPhone since the first one, and suddenly I feel like I'm typing with mittens on.
I can't help but feel like some product manager is behind all this...
Why would it go from what felt like a predictable error to what feels like someone moving the keys around? I am guessing someone presented aggregate research that showed higher accuracy overall, but ignored the case that the errors feel like the voices are getting louder :D.
Hopefully they come up with a setting to change this, but knowing apple it probably won't happen. Is it time for custom keyboards to come back?
The issue is that when you press down, the key you pressed down on first is not the registered character, it's where you release your finger at. When you type fast and you slide your fingers around, it misregisters.
One-handed finger swiping to type doesn’t work as reliably as it used to either. I am not sure why.
My recent experiment has been very disappointing. Mostly post upgrading to iOS 26? I’ve had to painfully change my behaviour to two-handed typing by default.
My suspicion— they’ve changed the ML system that inferred words based on swipes, and the new one isn’t as good in real world use.
As a bilingual/trilingual user (I have English, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, French and Chinese keyboards enabled, and use the first three on a daily basis), I have had surprisingly few issues with either swiping or pecking at the keyboard, perhaps because I automatically switch to pecking the instant I spot swiping going down the “wrong” decision tree.
But I also think having this many keyboards enabled makes iOS basically throw up its tiny virtual hands in frustration and nullifies most fancy predictions.
(This was mostly swiped in on an iPhone 15 Pro running iOS 26 with very minor hiccups)
All commenters here missing the big picture/long game…. Apple just doing their part to poison the well for future LLM training data across the internet. With enough typos littered about the Internet, that’ll really grind foundation LLM trainers’ gears.
Also wth happened to the alarms page. Feels like they made the clickable area of the toggle 1/4 the size just to annoy me. Usually takes a couple tries to hit them when sleepy in morning
I’m using a 12 mini and I’m running into so many typos since the new iOS. Maybe the combination of buggy software with their smallest screen is making it even worse.
Wish it was only the keyboard enshittified. Literally everything became worse with the update, I had to google how to turn off the silly transparency (Accessibility Settings -> Display -> Reduce Transparency) so that the battery that used to happily last for the entire day on iOS 18 does not die in a matter of some 4 hours. And don't even get me started on now-always-lagging home screen swipes and the Safari overhaul madness! Wanna close the active tab? That will be three taps, thank you very much. Oh, you want them taps to register _every time_, too? This basic phone UX used to be Apple's major USP over Android, now fewer and fewer reasons to stick to this ecosystem.
Is there anything in iOS 26 that makes it worth updating for an older iPhone? I am holding out for now, based on the bad reviews regarding battery impact.
Thank you! I was thinking of moving over at 26.1, but it sounds like maybe I'll have to stay away for even longer. Honestly there isn't a lot that I'm excited about, other than perhaps call screening. But I can do that by just sending callers to voicemail and seeing watching the transcript come in on iOS 18.
Why is the first row oversized and sliding back and forth with keys sliding off screen. Hitting letters on this moving row is like a carnival game. Is that intentional or a bug on my Pro Max phone?
Hi! Thanks for trying it. The "slow sway" is part of the plan! It's so the oversized first row of a qwerty keyboard can show all possible letters on the top row. If it feels too much like a game, slow it down using the main app from your home screen.
The iPhones autocorrect is one of my biggest frustrations coming from Android a few years ago. The biggest frustration for me is the tendency to correct the _second to last word_. I have never gotten used to this. I know i can stop it by "clicking" on the word instead of hitting space - but that feels slow and bad.
I can't comprehend how that's even an issue. Like it's the sort of thing you might read in an old bug report online and go "wow, that must have been an awkward few days for everyone" but to hear that it is "normal"? Wild. Utterly unacceptable.
I detest Apple's, and Google's, and Amazon's, and nearly every tech company's feedback system.
Apple's is by far the worst. All feedback is private. There is no way to show or advertise support for feature. Like I want to go upvote the feedback from this video, but all I can do is file my own feedback, which is more work, and therefore more people will choose not to give any.
Both Apple and Google and Microsoft have "users help users". These are infuriating as there is no official answer or help. There's just some fan with an often completely wrong or irrelevant answer. There is zero indication that any of these companies look here to see what's broken.
You've reminded me of the hellscape of Microsoft's "help" forums filled with people asking specific questions and getting their question closed with a barely-relevant response followed by many others commenting, essentially, "me too! why won't anyone help us?"
After a recent update, my keyboard started typing "and" as "and's". This happens 100% consistently, but only when swiping. I don't understand how such a bug happens. Yes, 's' is next to 'd', but "and's" is not even a word.
while I definitely agree the autocorrect has gotten worse, what I find more of a problem is all the various other pop-ups that occur. For example, they recently added the ability to 'undo' an autocorrect, but this pop up grabs focus, and you can't click on text near this pop up, because the pop up will claim the click.
I've also had trouble getting rid of pop up menus (copy, etc). If I want to click on text, but it has decided to pop up a menu, it can be a real pain to get rid of it. (I had no problem on previous versions of IOS).
There's a fundamental law of features: Every feature you add may may make it better for people who use it, but it makes it worse for everyone else.
If you keep adding features, anything will eventually become unusable.
Although I do not use it myself, I had seen that some other people do, and that apparently you cannot disable autocorrect while still having prediction enabled (at least, that is what they told me); I think it might be useful to enable prediction without autocorrect.
Maybe whoever told me that was wrong, or that was an older version that could not switch them separately, or I was confused and it is different for Android vs iPhone, etc.
Seriously. Drives me up the wall. Once I've written a word and seen it, I've confirmed that's the word I want. If it wasn't, I would have changed it then. I don't ever want it to "correct" a previous word based on a new one. Ever. Yet still, more than a decade later, there's no way to turn this off.
And it takes so long to keep backspacing to delete it, or move the cursor to make a surgical edit. The WORST.
My son has an Apple Watch SE 3 and it doesn't feature the keyboard and you literally cannot type a lower case 'n'. The only hack was putting in a space and then it will sometimes do an n (or multiple characters). It's bonkers bad.
I wish Apple would let you load different “dictionaries” for technical specialties so it wouldn’t try to autocorrect everything. For example, “IT”, “Automobile”, “Medical”, etc.
I use voice typing for almost the same thing every day.
I run to/from daycare to drop off my son and I title the run "Daycare drop-off". It constantly types "Take care drop-off" which drives me nuts. Those words don't even make sense together. A simple Markov chain should do better.
Wanna is in a number of notable and respected English dictionaries including the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, and Collins. I don't know what else defines if a word is or is not in the language.
Its an informal word, and it does not belong in a device used for professional communications.
"Wanna is used in written English to represent the words `want to' when they are pronounced informally.
I wanna be married to you. Do you wanna be married to me? "
Ah, good then, great to see you've changed your mind and now we both agree it is most definitely a word commonly used in English for over a hundred years.
Its incredible the dictionary pronounced it to you instead of showing it to you in a written form. When I go to the link I definitely see it written!
I do agree with you that it is an unprofessional word and probably not the most charitable and professional dictation result. But in the end there's two different directions dictation software can go: what was more accurate to what the person actually said (or what it thinks the person actually said), or the more correct way of saying what was said. If someone was legitimately saying "wanna", should the dictation software always auto-correct it to "want to"? If you were to type "wanna", should the keyboard auto-correct to "want to"?
Swiftkey on Android does this also and it's a very nice feature. I sometimes see a key lighting up that I didn't mean to press. I was just barely on that key, and it figured out that I didn't mean to press it
Not sure how it works. Maybe it looks at touch surface area movements during the couple milliseconds that I'm pressing down for? Or dynamically adjusts hitboxes as this video says iOS does? Whatever the method, it works very well after like fifteen years of training (I copy the data folder between devices and never update it or let it access the internet, so I'm sure it's just me training it and not anything else, nor incompatible versions ever throwing data away)
Note that this is different from the context-based autocorrect since that only triggers on spacebar or suggestion selection
I assumed it was just me getting worse at typing but combined with aggressively wrong autocorrect and mysterious blue lines under everything I type they seem to have ruined yet another perfectly good UX.
OMG yes. Pretty sure that bug has been around for something like a decade. Insane they haven't prioritized it, or I wonder if they hide behind the fact there doesn't seem to be any way to reliably reproduce it?
Someone just has to look really hard at the code and find the bug. Surely the relevant code can't be that long?
I just hope them to provide an option to get rid of all those predictive models and just use a static, consistent layout. At least I can blame myself if my typo is from my own mistake.
The best touch keyboard on a phone for me was always on the Blackberry Z10 phone.
The phone UI is also one of the best I used. Unfortunately, Blackberry went to shit.
I type in Dvorak and frequently the iOS keyboard's swipe typing bugs out and acts as if the layout is in QWERTY. I kind of don't believe it will ever be fixed...
I've wondered for a while whether it's a dark pattern where they're trying to optimize for more text to speech in this post-literate world.
The iOS keyboard "just not working" is something I gripe about pretty much every day as a symptom of the world getting quantifiably worse than even five if not ten years ago, alongside a whole laundry list of enshittification transgressions.
I remember back in the late 90s that, if you ignored the matter of hardware driver quality (and that is a big "if", no question) that open source software tended to be higher quality in general than a lot of commercial software. Not because of any moral characteristic per se, but just the "many eyes make bugs shallow" sort of thing. Since it was mostly only programmers using open source anyhow, if someone hit an annoyance, statistically speaking, there was a good chance that someone who could fix the problem had hit the same annoyance.
Then maybe in the 2010s commercial software at least caught up.
But it seems to be swinging back around to, if I want my software to effing work I want to be seeking out open source again. Statistically speaking, fewer of the users who may encounter problems can fix any problems they find, as the systems have gotten much larger, but it is still possible, and on the compensating side, no one on the emacs team is figuring out how to stuff AI where it doesn't belong [1] or how to monetize it via ads or any of the other exciting ways to arbitrage long-term software quality against short-term money.
It's an opinion, it is clearly highly path-dependent, and I won't deny this is just my impression... but it is something I've been noticing again lately. Especially as Windows seems to be heading down the catastrophe curve and this time I'm not sure they can stop it.
[1]: I'm not anti-AI at this point... but there are places where it belongs, and there are places it just doesn't, and stuffing it where it does not belong is not a win.
Using raycast for dictation has been pretty great for me (longer sentences ofc). I wish apple would just acquire and integrate, with local models one day this will be crazy fast.
This isn't just double space = '.' either since you can just turn that off in options.
iOS also changes the keyboard layout depending on usage. So when you're in a browser like safari or Chrome and you tap the address bar which these days is 99% used as a search bar with no particular need for a prominent '.' you get a prominent '.' for no good reason.
A huge '.' right next to the space that's not even correctly recognizing the touch area in a context where you actually likely type '.' less often than any other form of writing. You cannot change this behavior.
Fwiw i made a mistake of switching to iOS from Android due to a lot of peer pressure. "iOS is better, you should switch" the wife said. Well I've switched. Now i have a terrible keyboard, i don't have any call screening and non existing text spam filtering. I'm yet to see any improvements.
I remember when this first became an issue, then they tweaked something and I noticed it a lot less. Something changed again recently (last couple years) where this is happening a lot again.
I appreciate how Apple pioneered the touchscreen mobile device, largely due to the implementation of the keyboard, but it needs to be more stable than this.
SwiftKey was actually good. I could pound out a solid 30WPM without even trying, no typos. But then they added a "Ask Bing" context menu item to all my selections after an update and after leaving it on principle I've been suffering ever since.
try thumb-key [0] if you're willing to go for something unorthodox :-) the swipe-style keyboard cut my typos by ~90% (though i was particularly bad at using phone keyboards, lol).
that's the most annoying to me, when they put a large "enter" key, or "@" or "." just next to the space, and you want to type with both hands, and you keep hitting that with the right thumb
Another problem I'm having is.. with the latest iOS public betas, when you swipe down to bring up Siri search, it takes 2-4 seconds for the keyboard to show up. Every time. Went to an Apple store and they said, "re-install from scratch". Which isn't really easy these days, given work MFA accounts etc.
It’s a beta, Apple Store isn’t going to help. File a bug, as Apple is famous for their timely bug feedback and fixes (that would be a strongly sarcastic statement, for those that have not dealt with Radar).
I'm aware of the beta trap.. and I'm waiting for the final release to come out to see what happens, but given that we're on the 2nd RC, I'm willing to bet all my money that the bug persists.
That learned helplessness at the 2-minute mark... Install a different program if you don't like this one. There are options beyond "submitting a bug report and hoping for the best". The video makes it sound like Apple is some kind of holy spirit to which you can only pray. If there's no good options, and you can't code, you can even get together and fund someone to fix an open source keyboard if it's bothersome enough. There's always more options, especially in software
maybe what has happened is that the team needed some experts to measure improvements and tapped ppl with a career in optimizing for "User Engagement" so the more we fight the keyboard the more they cheer and grow the team
This is a feature to get you to stop typing and to just speak. I have a couple friends that are almost exclusively speech to text. One friend is ESL and just finds the brain work easier and the other just figured it worked better.
Seeing this video has convinced me it’s a feature. I can’t see iOS development practices that shit and to read comments here about similar Android issues.
that to me looks like a error in whatever logic is behind the positional error code. You'd think they would have transformer models based on different layouts but maybe some weighting issues going on.. ie I would have thought its a model that is altering based on likelihood weights and maybe something up with that..
Well, possibly unrelated to all of this, but in my experience, multilingual spell-checking has gotten noticeably worse on both iOS and Windows, to the point where I had to disable auto-correct wherever that's possible (and that's, unfortunately, pretty far from everywhere!).
This particular problem manifests as: you're conversing in one language (say, French) and then use a single English word, at which point the spell-check and auto-correct permanently switches to that language, mis-correcting pretty much everything from that point onward.
(Classic) Outlook on Windows is pretty much entirely broken for me these days (even if I repeatedly mark the entire message as being in the majority language), as is Safari on MacOS: even in a completely-Dutch conversation, it always insists on auto-completing 'lang' ('long' but can also be 'tall') to 'language' and it's absolutely infuriating, and with no apparent way to disable the madness... (and, interestingly, no mechanism to detect that I dismissed the auto-complete for the 100th consecutive time, and that it's possibly not a desirable substitution)
My goodness. I honestly believed I was experiencing a decline in finger dexterity due to age, given the sudden increase in typing mistakes on my iPhone (I have been an iPhone user since the OG iPhone).
Tim Apple really needs to let go the clowns who managed to regress the keyboard input functionality.
There's a slightly different (I think) bug which I've been hitting since the update with URLs. The URL keyboard allows long-pressing on the . to open various TLDs, speeding how long it takes to write a URL.
In prior versions, you could long press to open the choices, then letting go would insert the default (eg .com)
With iOS 26, the touch target seems to be slightly different for triggering the options vs selecting them. I now frequently long-press, see the TLD choices with the default selected, and then releasing incorrectly inserts a single . instead of the TLD. This is infuriating when typing fast.
Dude - crazy. When I saw this post I was like - finally someone said it. But it isn't just "iPhone". Why is spell check so bad EVERYWHERE..... still?. Like, how is it I am still even able to share texts, emails, etc that have mistakes at all? I feel like "spell check" is so old school. Intent, and matching intent, without typos is way over due. A bit meta: but, I am going to have to re-read this post - why? I still send texts that say "What re you doing?" - hwy?
I’m so glad other people are having this problem too. The keyboard is just so bad now.
The autocorrect does help sometimes. But it fucks things up that were previously fine just as much as it helps so overall it’s probably worse than it used to be. Now
You need to constantly monitor every key pressed to make sure it hasn’t screed it up later.
I'm gonna be that guy and say that this has never occured on Android. And if it did, I can install any keyboard I want and the issue would likely be gone (I use FUTO keyboard). Apple is ridiculously controlling and anti-hacking I still have no idea why hackers use it
My english keyboard is broken but the two international keyboards that I have installed are borderline unusable. The keyboard situation has been atrocious for the past couple of versions of iOS but OS26 send it over the cliff.
THIS. I'm constantly sending typos in texts now even when typing slower on purpose. The software is clearly making choices for me that are wrong and I can't do anything about it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The most annoying to me is how close they put "enter" or "@" to space on the right side, so when you type with both hands you keep hitting those when you want to type a space
I've seen soooo many rendering errors in Safari. And bugged-out keyboard + inputs (input touch location offset from its visible location on the page after the keyboard opens—a real problem if you're trying to paste). Never ever seen it 1/10 this buggy after any prior release, and I've been on iOS since... 5, I think? And did some development work on the platform as early as version 3 or 4.
That's in addition to so many dropped frames in the animations that I disabled as many as I could because it was driving me crazy, and to a bunch of word-based buttons becoming confusing icons. I think this has topped 7 for my least-favorite iOS release, and the gap widens by the day. It's terrible.
[EDIT] What it most reminds me of (I was on early Android and have done even more development work on Android over the years than I have for iOS) is Android. The jank, the pile of little confusing UI choices that all add up into an overall off-putting experience. The uncertainty what kind of bad thing might happen when you touch anything. Feels like an above-average 3rd party Android skin, like from Samsung or someone (so, pretty bad). The stuttering animations. No other iOS release has ever felt like Android to me.
Normally I tend to wait before each major release, but I got lured by unknown caller screening. Then I noticed there's no unknown caller screening for me (just a useless setting to move unknown callers to a different list). They also removed blocking numbers directly from the recents list and the new phone layout is a complete mess.
For me it's been going downhill since the update that changed the settings app to show apps (even system ones) on a different page. Iwas seriosuly inpressed with the settings app when I first switched to Apple from Android, and now it's terrible.
Meanwhile you still can't freely set the search wngkne for Safari, contacts always forgets my custom labels, camera doesn't allow free control over the flashlight,...
I was recently gifted an Apple Watch and it forced an update on me, so I jumped straight to the x.1 patch, and I'd still call this beta-quality, even setting aside my strong disagreements with the design and UX direction.
I've seen other releases much complained-about online then found them to not bother me much, or even at all, when I upgraded, but this one's an exception. It really is very bad.
On Android, I used to be able to easily send text messages and now my contact from the dialer. Swipe to call, swipe the other way to text, long press to get the selector that shows the contact info button. Extremely useful: I only need one button for both calls and texts on my homescreen. I have a new number for my dentist after they moved, long tap them from recent calls and add the new number.
Now? All gone.
- You can make a call from the text app, but only after you open the conversation, and it's a tiny button in the corner next to the menu. You haven't texted them? Sorry.
- You can send a text from the dialer: switch to recent calls view, tap a recent call (the name, not the icon) and you can text that person. You haven't called them recently? Sorry.
- Edit a contact from the dialer? Tap a recent call (the icon, not the name) to see their info, then click edit contact. Haven't called them recently? Sorry.
- Want to call someone from your starred/favorite contacts? Tap the favorites section to expand it, you get 5 contacts on screen at a time with tiny hard-to-read names
- Want to call a frequent contact that doesn't appear in the recent list because of a bunch of incoming calls? Tap the search button, if you're lucky you'll get a nice big target to tap, but more likely they won't show up (this is suggested contacts, not recent or favorite contacts) or they'll be underneath the keyboard.
- the view contacts button opens your contacts manager that also doesn't have a view for favorite contacts.
- The contacts app can initiate calls and text messages, but the only sort method it has is alphabetical, and it shows every contact you have, including those without phone numbers (you can filter them by tags/groups/account by opening the menu, but not by frequency or information). You also have to open the contact to see the buttons (which include video call; I have no idea what this does, as I have no video calling apps installed)
- start a new conversation in messages, there's a prominently placed Gemini button at the top, despite Gemini being disabled in settings.
I would switch to the Samsung dialer and messenger app, but my phone is now a Motorola. Oops.
Favorite contacts screen was removed from the dialer a while back for some unknown reason, but the useless voicemail screen remains (this screen doesn't work with either T-Mobile or with Google Voice)
Bonus: I sent pictures from Google voice weekly for the past few years, recently they never get received. (These are jpg screenshots of my work schedule, not giant photos; Google voice is convenient for viewing them myself on my desktop, phone, tablet. And Google voice still can't deal with webp or heic despite such images showing up in the image picker; in these cases the message can't even be sent)
Typing? I'm lucky. I have a nice big tablet, I only use my phone calls for text messages and calls, and for texting, swipe input has far less issues than tapping on the keyboard. Almost everything else goes through my 10" tablet. But yes, autocorrect on Android was also better when it was pure word lists without ML; sure, it was annoying to have to build a user dictionary, but you still have to do that anyways or else rarely used words will eventually get forgotten and names of contacts will eventually never be suggested if your swipe is the least bit off.
I bought an iPhone 4S way back when because I wanted a dead-simple UI for my mom.
Now she's on an iPhone SE (3rd gen), and the UI is a complete shitshow.
F you Apple.
(She also does not want a newer (aka larger) iPhone because they will not fit in her woman's jeans which notoriously have small pockets. Another "F you" from Apple to the consumers.)
If consumers cared about small phones Apple would still make the mini series. It's hardly Apple's fault the biggest phones are the most popular. In fact, they were late to the larger phone sizes, as the iPhone 6 shipped years after Android started going big.
Some consumers clearly do care, but mega-corporations aren't content with making a profit - they will kill profitable products because they're not profitable enough.
(Apparently the 12 and 13 mini had about 5% of iPhone market share in the year they were released [0]. Does that mean they were profitable for Apple? I don't know, but given how many phones Apple sells, I believe that even 5% iPhone market share would be profitable)
Even if they fix the keyboard, iOS as a whole can't really be fixed. This is a single symptom of a much larger problem. So much is broken, poorly implemented, or so laughably tasteless that it hurts my head to think about how it's positioned and accepted as a "premium" product. I understand that most people notice so little about the design of their surroundings that it's basically impossible for them to understand that this junk is inflicting thousands of tiny psychological cuts daily, but it makes me so very very sad that this is acceptable to so many people.
- As mentioned, keyboard input is offensively broken. Whiffed inputs, the entire text selection/cursor manipulation model sucks (not being able to select in the middle of a word is inexcusable unless you have Stockholm syndrome for the bandaids), the cursor manipulation is broken, keyboard gets stuck open or closed, etc. etc. I'm convinced the input design for this phone is a CIA psyop designed to drive you to madness so they can recruit you as a sleeper cell.
- Passcode inputs are also broken. Trying to enter your passcode at easily achievable speeds results in dropped inputs.
- Above point wouldn't be a big deal if it weren't for fingerprint scanning being given up for Face ID, which is complete dogshit that constantly fails-to-passcode trying and failing to scan my ceiling, or my face when it's against a pillow in the morning. It's also completely worthless when I'm unable to fully point my face at the phone (working on vehicles or in some other enclosed area) or am trying to use the phone completely off of muscle memory.
- The gesture navigation system is a fundamentally bad idea. I'm an average-sized man and reaching over to the left hand side of the screen to make back inputs requires me to shift my fingers on the back of the phone just to make the reach for the input. This is on a base-model iPhone 16, which is already a touch too large for many hands to deal with this input system. The hitboxes for navigation inputs are too small and many of the inputs are often shared with actions in apps, resulting in taking all sorts of actions you didn't want to. Android style 3-button navigation at the bottom of the screen solved this many years ago. As an aside, the 60 FPS screen on an $800 phone as a "fuck you" push to upgrade to an even fatter pig of a phone that suffers even more from the bad navigation is funny.
- The GPS is fucked up, at least on the iPhone 16. It takes forever to find its bearing, after which it usually holds onto it until losing its mind again at the most inconvenient time. The only phone I've seen with a worse GPS is a Unihertz Jelly. Being in the same league as a $150 niche night market special is shameful.
- I have a frustrating number of calls get dropped. I don't know exactly where this issue comes from but it's noticeable, I run into it a couple times a week. My previous S24 on the same carrier never dropped calls under the same circumstances, so I know not having this issue is possible.
- The flashlight implementation sucks. Being able to tap it off with screen input is incredibly frustrating when I'm fumbling around trying to do something in the dark. And of course, it turns the screen on so you can make this accidental input every time you turn the flashlight on with the assignable side button. Being able to adjust the brightness is something I've never found any use for and mostly just serves to annoy me when I accidentally turn it down with another unintended input, but maybe somebody somewhere gives a shit about this, I guess.
- The split notification/settings menu is incredibly annoying. The settings menu is already a reach on the smallest mainline models, the notifications menu basically requires whole-hand movement. 20% of the space in the notifications menu is taken up by a fuckoff huge clock that you can't configure the size of. The lack of notification icons results in me having to actually unlock the phone and check things instead of just being able to know at a glance (I know they wanted to distance themselves from the roached Android notification tray look but I don't care).
- Liquid Glass looks like shit. So does a lot of the rest of the phone but I don't really hold some moron designer's bad visual taste against a product unless it affects the usability of the product. And of course, it affects the usability of the product. I actually laughed out loud having a literally unreadable lockscreen clock after the iOS 26 update, with the factory-provided moon background to add a little more salt to the wound. It reads poorly and is tacky to boot.
- This is pretty minor but the constant nags about iCloud are very funny. These assholes just couldn't resist hounding you for 99 cents more after you bought their $800 fuckup. It's like getting nagged about a Sirius XM subscription in a Lamborghini.
Individual points may be taken care of, but the disease is terminal. The iPhone's success at this point is driven by network effects, marketing, and its posturing as a premium product. Grown adults have an emotional attachment to the brand and the lifestyle statement. Android vendors are aping this stuff now. The memories of quality software and the ability to recognize it is being actively erased from the collective memory. Hoping that any of this is going to change at this point is just pissing in the wind.
> If you do not enable Full Access, developers are not permitted to collect and transmit the data you type. Any unauthorized collection or transmission of this data without your permission would be a violation of their developer agreement. Furthermore, there are also technical limitations in effect to prevent unauthorized access.
I have had this conversation with several people. I feel like I used to be able to type with a fairly low error rate on a smaller screen with old iPhones. Now I feel that it is constant exercise in frustration as I will hit a letter and the keyboard will decide to pick the letter next to it. It is evolving backwards.
There are two very simple causes to point to why touch keyboards turned to shit:
1. Crowdsourced word weighting: your keyboard's stochastic predictions are no longer mostly based on your typing, but rather on what 'everyone' is typing as their next word. This makes the word replacements it does often suboptimal to downright nonsensical.
2. Aggressive lookbehind correction: these days you have to be seriously on your guard for your keyboard to not sneak-edit something you typed 5 words back, because autocorrect suddenly decided that the probability is high you meant to say something else there (which it clearly isn't, as your eyes and brain exist)
The problem your encountering is downstream from point 1. Basically your keyboard thinks due to the way most people construct a particular sentence, you're gonna want to type "bold" next, despite "hold" clearly clearly making more sense. So it'll force "b" on you 4 times in a row until it realizes you really want to type "h".
Going back to the old style of doing keyboards (mostly user-learned dictionaries and probability weighting, and little lookbehind autocorrrect) could be done, but within Google and Apple there are probably people who got promoted by switching to the current shitty system. They'll block off any attempt at someone messing with their pride.
(There is a third 'problem' where your visual keys do not correspond to the touchmap at all. Swiftkey has a feature where it can show you what your touchmap and heatmap look like versus the actual layout and it its often staggeringly different, with many keys vastly tilted. When you try to desperately type "h" after 4 misses, you're doing that with your index finger in "hunt and peck" mode, which does correspond to the visual layout but not with your usual typing on the touchmap layout. There is no way for your keyboard to know you're in "hunt and peck" accuracy mode.)
> The problem your encountering is downstream from point 1. Basically your keyboard thinks due to the way most people construct a particular sentence, you're gonna want to type "bold" next, despite "hold" clearly clearly making more sense. So it'll force "b" on you 4 times in a row until it realizes you really want to type "h".
In the video, the user is typing 'Thumbs up', and when they get to the first 'u' the keyboard shows a 'u' being pressed but a 'j' is inserted instead. Are you suggesting that, due to the way most people construct sentences, the OS thinks that 'thjmbs' is the most likely word? And then the next time the OS thinks that 'thhmbs' is the most likely word?
Both of the issues you've mentioned are common, and irritating, but if you watch the video you can see that that's not what's happening here. Before any autocorrection or adjustment is being done, the keyboard is registering a 'U' and the OS is inputting a J or H or I or some other nearby letter.
The video also debunks the touchmap discontinuity issues as well, because you can clearly see which key the keyboard is registering; it's not assuming that you meant to press J or it would highlight the J; it's registering a U, highlighting U, and inputting J.
It sounds to me as though you didn't watch the video and just assumed what issue was being discussed; please do watch it, because this is another, relatively new, issue that lots of people have seen and which is far worse and more frustrating than the other legitimate issues you mentioned.
The above commenter is talking about why touchscreen keyboards have become worse over time in general
Apple additionally may have just bugged up their implementation as well, but the above mentioned issues exist even on Android, and didn't a decade ago.
I still contend that the single best touchscreen keyboard and autocorrect implementation was the onscreen keyboard on the Microsoft Zune HD. A tiny tiny screen, and you could still type without looking and nearly always end up with the right text. It was magical, and creepy in retrospect.
But nobody bought it so we had less good keyboards for a decade. Then companies insisted that they could throw "Algorithms" at the problem (which is what we had been doing for a decade but whatever) and make it magically better and now everyone gets worthless autocorrect because of the everpresent "Nobody is actually average so tuning your system to the average makes it bad for everybody" problem that has infected literally all "Data driven" product decisions.
We literally had better text prediction using boring methods. We literally had working voice control on flip phones from the 90s. All on device too.
We need a github repo with a list of past tech with good taste and poor market timing, for revaluation in newer markets.
> In the video, the user is typing 'Thumbs up', and when they get to the first 'u' the keyboard shows a 'u' being pressed but a 'j' is inserted instead. Are you suggesting that, due to the way most people construct sentences, the OS thinks that 'thjmbs' is the most likely word? And then the next time the OS thinks that 'thhmbs' is the most likely word?
In addition to the other problems (the keyboard being too prone catching extremely subtle slides below UI response time), there certainly is the problem of when you crowd source enough data you crowd source all of their collective mistakes, too. In a lot of that raw data mistakes are going to be as common or more common than corrections and/or originally correct spellings.
We do have a great filter for this called a "dictionary", but as the above commenter laments companies have given up on "just autocorrect to dictionary words" for much more complex "learning" models and filtering them back to just dictionary words is antithetical to the (sunken cost) expense that went into training these models, and/or the KPIs and promotion incentives that keep prioritizing "AI" and giant crowd sourced data vats over simpler mechanics and local user specifics.
No dude it's just a bug. Watch the video.
> it's registering a U, highlighting U, and inputting J
The voiceover is deceptive (unintentionally?)...
They touch the [u] which shows the popover U but you can see them slide their thumb down off the [u] key onto the [j] key.
I guessed that was the issue, repeated it on my phone (SE) and only then looked at video and it's obvious when you see him do it in slo-mo. Edit: I have most prediction turned off (I mostly find slyde typing to be fastest, and I hate automiscorrect on uncommon words).
iPhones are very very sensitive to tap-slides which causes many UI gremlins (a variety of terrible side effects that you can't avoid if you're designing a UI).
Over time, most people seem to intuitively learn not to slide when tapping.
I'm unsure how many designers/developers even notice the effects of slide since they have learnt to avoid sliding? When I watched beginners on iPhones you see them get frustrated by things not tapping and other subtle effects (HTML event interactions, scrollable areas, buttons, inputs).
Same thing can happen on Android. One menu button repeatably failed if I used my left hand - took me a while to work out the issue (and a bit of work to increase the tappable area so a bit of slide was accepted and worked better for neophyte users).
Could it be slide to type issue as pointed in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46233219 ? Disabling it might help?
> Aggressive lookbehind correction: these days you have to be seriously on your guard for your keyboard to not sneak-edit something you typed 5 words back
If I ever meet the person that invented lookbehind correction, I’m not sure I’ll be able to restrain myself. This person has robbed me of my peace of mind as I now have to be on guard every time I type anything on a mobile keyboard
>If I ever meet the person that invented lookbehind correction, I’m not sure I’ll be able to restrain myself.
your comment reminds me of this comic from the 2000s that became a bit of a meme back in the day
swap out "comic sans" with "aggressive lookbehind correction" and it'd fit perfectly ;-)
https://www.achewood.com/2007/07/05/title.html
See this is why I turn off absolutely all autocorrection on iOS. I still make mistakes but now they are my mistakes. And I can type whatever I want without interference
The importance of letting people make their own mistakes rather than yours, is what our culture is missing in all sorts of areas.
This is a hugely underrated comment.
Can be disabled on multiple devices by Apple Configurator MDM XML plist file.
I type like a drunkard from the autocorrection on modern phones.
I keep switching it back on after having it off for a while. I want some autocorrect. I often like the type ahead suggestions. I just really hate the "update behind" mechanic.
It's real frustrating that Apple has decided to put just about everything under only a single Settings switch and won't break it out into individual things.
It's also frustrating that for about half an iOS version Apple seemed to have caught on that the update behind was catching people off guard and implemented an extra, more obvious change animation. The whole word flashed in a bright blue or yellow when it changed and had a visible undo button. That was useful. But then the button didn't survive the next point release and the animation kept getting subtler again until it disappeared.
Wow I didn't realize that was possible. I just turned off all auto correction and predictive text. Working much better already.
Apple’s settings are an absolute dumpster fire from a discoverability perspective.
I didn't even know this was possible. Thats great.
Except that if you watched the video, you would see that this is not true.
3. I stopped caring and learned to love the algorithm in 95% of normal typing. The result is that my typing speed is up but my accuracy has plummeted, yet my typing output is generally correct because of autocorrect.
Unfortunately this falls apart when I try to type anything that isn’t common English words: names, code, rare words, etc.
I also think that the keyboard could learn the different “rhythms” of typing - my normal typing which is fast and practically blind, and the careful hunt and peck which is much slower and intended for those out-of-distribution inputs. I bet the profile of the touch contacts (e.g. contact area and shape of the touches) for those two modes looks different too.
My strategy for a time was disabling autocorrect and perfect my accuracy, but this was stumped because indeed, it's harder to type these days than when the screens were smaller and less precise, it seems to pick adyacent keys on a whim.
So I realized I had exchanged correcting the same word four times in a row to correcting the same letter four times in a row.
Sometimes I think about how much harm has been done to the world just so a few people can get a vacation home on Lake Tahoe. Every increase in YouTube ads leading to millions of hours wasted - but hey that L7 got a sweet new lake house!
> There is no way for your keyboard to know you're in "hunt and peck" accuracy mode
But there is a way for your keyboard to simply show the real size/position of buttons so that in hunt and peck mode you'll be correct
>But there is a way for your keyboard to simply show the real size/position of buttons so that in hunt and peck mode you'll be correct
Yes, but the tradeoff in that case is that for most casual typing it will be less forgiving and you'll make more (uncorrected) mistakes
Why would showing real button sizes make casual typing less forgiving?
Because that would correspond 1 to 1 with the actual visible letter boxes, and the whole system of catching events outside the "real button sizes" was developed to be more forgiving than "you have to click precisely in the box".
My understanding is it's not just about including or not including some extra fixed clickable padding around each square (in which case it indeed wouldn't harm to show the whole area), but about dynamically adapting the area, based on frequent off-target clicks, probabilities, etc.
This! I switched to SwiftKey some 8 years ago and no matter how many phones I change, logging into my SwiftKey account ensures my typing experience doesn't change almost at all.
I wouldn't send all my typing across all apps on a third party company. Even worrying they get to the mobile OS company it's already stretching it...
I was a SwiftKey fan over a decade ago, but wait... you have to log onto an account for it now? Sigh, phones need a 'dotfiles' revolution.
It's extra fun because the account it needs is a Microsoft Account because Microsoft acquihired SwiftKey for the lovely Windows Soft Keyboard in Windows Phone 7/8/10 and still accessible in Windows 11 even as form factors that make good use of it continue to disappear and people also don't learn that you can still switch it to "phone mode" for one hand swipe-typing because they don't have a device where they regularly need to type on a soft keyboard.
The big reason after years of SwiftKey use I finally uninstalled it is because it became too much of an ad vector for "you should use Mobile Edge and have you tried our new Bing Mobile app yet". I also haven't used it in a couple of years, but I'd be surprised if it doesn't have some Copilot button or buttons somewhere now.
It’s sad how we’re pining for a 1960s usability solution in 2025.
The industry really does forget all the lessons it learned...
I feel like when they introduced the neurological engine, they got away from the previous algorithm and it's just gone to shit since then. Apple being Apple, they John Force their way to victory by keeping their foot on the gas even when the wheels are spinning and the engine is smoking.
> The problem your encountering is downstream from point 1.
*you're
At this point we should make "your" serve dual duty as an official alt spelling of you're and be done with it... let context determine which "your" it is
I feel this way with Android's keyboards, too.
I still feel the pinnacle was ~2011 Windows Phone. It was some kind of swipe-to-type, but maybe not Swype specifically? At any rate, it seemed to use "how humans actually talk" as a guideline, because it was do a great job of predicting what words I would actually mean to use in a row.
Modern keyboards are like, I know you just said "I want" but instead of predicting "to" I predict "rip". I mean the letters are close. And "I want rip" makes way more sense than "I want to." You're welcome!
The absolute zenith of mobile keyboards was the Blackberry, which included F & J nubs. I could type without looking at my phone at full speed and not get a character wrong.
The fact that Apple will as often as not autocorrect grammar from actually-correct to wrong -- and systematically screw up spelling -- in not just transcribed Siri but also in typing is just inexcusable at this point. It will even Randomly capitalize Certain words!
Nokia E61 perfectly aped the blackberry form factor and also had a great keyboard (with f & j nubs). I still fondly remember mine.
I swear the android autocorrect got so much worse at some point. Somewhere between 5 and 15 years ago. I used to be able to type vaguely coherent sentences and all of the typos would magically become the words I meant, even if they didn't look right. Now I frequently type completely correct sentences and the correctly spelled words get changed into other words that make no sense in context.
And i used to be able to backspace the wrong word and fix it and it would learn thats what I meant. Now if I try that, it'll frequently keep trying to edit to the word I didn't mean unless I press the little checkmark in the autocorrect panel. Just annoying UX.
I remember when I could blindly type because autocorrect was so good. I've been enjoying FUTO keyboard a bit, but I dont yet know if it's the same experience.
Bit of an aside, but I just checked them out and TIL that Immich (which I use as my primary photos solution) is also a FUTO product (the website says "powered by FUTO").
I'd be giving the keyboard a try!
SwiftKey has this one where you can erase the wrong word and try to correct it, and it instead adds two words: the one you erased and the second attempt after it.
Google's Gboard completes "i want t" with "to" and "the" for me.
Which is the better option now. But the one he's talking about is the OG windows phone swipe keyboard which would predict next word almost like from a LLM these days. For that reason, you can swipe like a maniac but it'd still type the correct thing.
Apple keyboard is shit. Swype (the one Microsoft bought) is better but still shit. Gboard is ok. But none of them are close to that windows phone keyboard. I still miss it.
Google's keyboard is okay for English. It's a complete tire fire for two other languages I use (both popular and with a very large training data set).
Suggests words that make no sense, preferring rare words to much more widely used and obvious matching picks. Has the vocabulary of a poorly educated five year old idiot savant — fails to complete many words you use fifty times a day, but sometimes surprises you by suggesting something you'd hear a couple times per decade. Doesn't know other forms of the same word, forcing you to correct it manually over and over again, often failing to remember the word until you type it in four or five times.
Yes, I've downloaded all the dictionaries, tried it on many phones, and my friends are of the same opinion: it really is just bad.
I write in English and Spanish on it, and it seems the shittiness gets multiplied when you use a bilingual instead on monolingual layout. I've tried switching languages manually, but that sucks even more when writing Spanish with English technical terms sprinkled.
This is a patent case where IA made a function worse instead of better, yet companies clinged to it for some reason.
Never used the Windows Phone keyboard but after Swype fixed its worst error ("me" was very often rendered as "nee", as in the term for a maiden name) it was fantastic. The last time I was able to use it was ca. 2016 when my Nexus 6P suffered the dreaded battery-goes-to-worthless-one-night-and-never-recovers problem. The editing keyboard allowing precise cursor placement, the Swype-X/C/V shortcuts, Swyping above the keyboard to indicate capitalization - WHY WHY WHY were they dropped?
The swiping keyboard from Apple simply refuses to do "and" for me. I get "abs" (I'm not a gym rat; I don't talk about that) or "Abbas" (the only one I know is the Palestinian president, and I don't talk about him either) almost every time. I hate the autocorrect-something-five-words-back problem, but not being able to recognize one of the most common words in the language is unacceptable crap.
I'll give Swiftkey another try.
The keyboard I know is best, is the slide out hardware keyboard from the olden days. I pine for the days of old when me greasy fingers could write a book on a phone in a rainstorm.
Troll answer: A-Z label maker keyboard
My old Windows phone had a slide out keyboard that was conceptually nice but had a bizarre ortholinear layout and particularly poor switches.
Okay but are there any other Android keyboards to swipe better? And for even nicer, to _actually handle_ multilingual input? I'm fed up of garbage concepts where you can only have ALL languages at once (who the heck wants that), or suggesting random words (I don't even know from where) and definitely unable to learn anything - not even my own name...
My phone constantly autocorrects "the" to "Tue" (short for tuesday), even when that makes no sense in the sentence. I presume I'm accidentally typing "tue" but why it always corrects it that was is baffling
Microsoft acquihired SwiftKey to help make that pinnacle Windows Phone keyboard. It's too bad SwiftKey itself became mostly a vector for ads for Microsoft.
Android got really annoying recently, I think in the past few months, almost 30 percent of the time some random menu will pop up. They added a new top layer menu and I keep fat fingering it.
I have the same experience, and my hands are pretty small. Some paranoid bell rang in my head about it being an intentional annoyance to start getting us to use voice-to-text more,
Even switching to the Hacker's Keyboard and tweaking some settings still has me smacking the "tab" key or whatever when hitting space.
Just out of curiosity, who here is a one-handed texter, like me? I just assumed my constant need for error correction was because I only use one hand (and thus, one thumb) to type, but this thread has me wondering.
Not long ago I turned on my original iPod touch (2007), to see how the keyboard felt and if I was romanticising the past, and guess what?
Absolute perfect typing experience, better responsiveness and almost entirely free of mistakes. It's mind-boggling.
This!
It wouldn’t be so bad if suggested corrections would take into account sibling-letter-on-keyboard typos, and if the spellchecker would recognize when words don’t make sense in context. We had better spellcheckers 25 years ago in word processors.
Now we must have AI everywhere, damn that quality of life those lefties keep on expecting.
I guess as iPhones have gotten bigger Apple has put less resources into optimising newer iOS versions for smaller phones
Frustrating if you are a 13 mini user
Even the larger ones suck for typing. It is the keyboard. It works a lot better if you are using a language they don’t have autocorrect for.
Dunno man, I’m on a 17 and there are a ton of context menus that were clearly not tested properly on a screen this size (6.1” or something) - the “delete” option is nowhere to be seen for example, you have to scroll down to find it.
Guess they’ll want us to carry iPads in our pockets for these UIs to actually work :)
Regarding typing on the iPad - Apple has removed the landscape split keyboard on the iPad, making it even more awkward to use, but not on the iPad Mini.
Perhaps they wanted to sell more Smart Keyboards.
Here's what happens:
* I type a word, it shows up correctly
* I type a second word, my phone CHANGES THE PREVIOUS WORD
* A silent tiny rage removes several seconds from my life
One can find many iPhone sourced typos in my HN history which I leave, usually, as a method to preserve sanity.
A decade ago this would have been a bug. Today it's a "feature".
iPhone SE user here - it feels that even if Apple is not making small screen experience intentionally worse at least they optimize iOS for large screen sizes as a result with most updates UX on SE becoming worse. Using keyboard on this phone is a frustration but guess it's generally hard to make it work well on a small screen (and given that Apple wants to sell large phones unlikely they invest into small screen optimizations).
Except that it always used to work well on the SE / 13 mini form factor. That was part of the original iPhone-vs-BlackBerry magic, wasn’t it? It’s phenomenally hard to make typing work on a soft keyboard, especially at that size, and yet they did. And now un-did.
By contrast, the typing experience on a 2.5” Unihertz Atom screen is shockingly acceptable…
I just googled Unihertz Atom and the AI section has this:
Your comment shows as having been written four hours ago. I cannot help but draw conclusions.Ha!! That may be the first time I've been cited in a search result! I'm flattered :)
Though of course Google's Gemini-whatever does manage to subtly miss the mark even there: I said (and think) that the typing experience is acceptable, I said nothing about the screen. If I remember correctly, the last one I handled, the screen was resistive rather than capacitive, and it felt weird and squishy. Still not bad for the price, and it's a minor miracle how much Android software can still draw a coherent layout with that kind of resolution, but...
They have a Jelly Max https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-max and this looks too good to be true. I am sure one catch would be that it's not sold in my geography but still. Does it have at least few years of OS update support and more than few years of security updates?
My impression was that their update cadence is ~never and that the Jelly Max is rather closer to iPhone-SE-sized. The last one I handled was for ephemeral use on a trip abroad. It was durable, functional, and it worked wonders as far as breaking the phone-checking dopamine cycle.
I'd never come anywhere close to trusting it with anything important, but then again maybe that's not such a bad relationship to have to a smartphone...
confirmed, their glass ux has added padding to everything, reducing screen real estate.
I moved from 13 mini this year to 16 Pro, the keyboard is just as bad either way, not a noticeable difference. Maybe slightly worse on the 16 because the ergonomics are so bad.
> with old iPhones
My first iPhone was a 4S and i was astonished how correctly i'm typing. At least in English.
I even managed to bully the spell checker into reasonably accepting both English and Romanian, back when they didn't have multiple languages at the same time on the keyboard.
I'm not sure when it started to go downhill, but I was using an XS and it was at at least one more version after whatever XS shipped with.
SAME. There’s weird glitches that happen way too often. Used to feel like magic.
Switched from pixels to iphone in the last year or two and the keyboard is the biggest pain point by far. I tend to use swipe, so this particular issue isn't something I've come across. What I do run into is weird censorship issues where I'm trying to type "kill myself" or something similar and the phone will do anything to not provide that as an option. Then, when I try to manually change it, editing is a nightmare. Inevitably trying to change the ending of a word results in the entire word being deleted. It inserts spaces where I don't want them.
Is this some sort of psyop to get me to use siri to send texts?
Similar switching story. I'm very happy with an iPhone overall, but god damn they keyboard took some adjusting. The default keyboard on Pixels (GBoard?) is excellent. The autocorrect is also unimaginably better on the Pixel. It's embarrassing how bad the iPhone's autocorrect is. Not just missing obvious cases, but actively sabotaging correct cases.
>autocorrect is also unimaginably better on the Pixel
Pixel user here. That depends on the language you're typing. Autocorrect and spellcheck, not just on Android but other Google products, will change correct danish to incorrect danish. It's infuriating. The issue I encounter most often happens because Google apparently assumes english grammar is universal, and insists on splitting compound words, which is never done in danish.
Danish is already being heavily eroded by foreign influence, and this isn't helping.
> The default keyboard on Pixels (GBoard?) is excellent.
Not my experience at all. Do you only write English?
I personally haven't found any keyboard that works better than gboard. And exactly because it's the only keyboard that just lets me type in two languages without having to "switch", and it does that well. Right now my spacebar just says "NL - EN" and it lets me combine Dutch and English just fine.
From my experience it is much worse than it used to be 5 years ago. I have been writing English, French, and to a lesser extent German on an iPhone since ~2008. Initially, the dumb autocorrect would just correct to the closer word in the dictionary corresponding to the current keyboard, but over time it would pick up more and more words I used regularly. At some point around 2018 or so, it was nearly flawless. I think it changed the dictionary depending on the language or the sentence, because I had different suggestions for the same mistyped word in the same document. Also, I assume that by then my personal dictionary was quite extensive.
And then they bragged about a new machine-learning improved keyboard and it went downhill. First, all keyboards became monolingual, which was a 10-years regression. And even in that language, it was very flakey. They added multi-language keyboards somewhat recently and it got slightly better, except that for some reason it changes the keyboard back to the English-only one regularly for no reason I can see.
It is maddening. For a couple of years it was fantastic.
And that’s not the worst. On the Apple Watch not only is the multilingual keyboard completely broken, but worse than that: if you change the language of the keyboard by long pressing the space button it shows the new language, but the autocorrect proceeds to just ignore it completely and autocorrects everything as if I were typing in the system language rather than the one I selected.
And contrary to the iPhone you can’t even disable autocorrect! This + the super-aggressive autocorrect of watchOS (the screen is small after all so you are likely to make a mistake and we better fix it automatically!) makes it an absolute NIGHTMARE to type on an Apple Watch in multiple languages. Your only option is to use speech to type because that one for some reason works when you change the language whereas the keyboard doesn’t care.
Edit: the language switch bug on watchOS seems to have finally been fixed on watchOS 26.1. The bug was already long present on watchOS 11, so not something that watchOS 26 introduced.
This scarily aligns with my experience. 2018 was the golden age for keyboards for whatever reason.
Completely agreed. Apple seriously regressed the multi-lingual experience. They probably have a model per language. If you have to mix languages in a sentence, well, good luck!
I just want to talk to the folks who made the language switching logic so complicated instead of just a constant rotation like desktop IMEs. It seems like they expect the user to remember the previous language or prioritize languages in a clear order, but did it not occur to them that I might switch languages chaotically (A->C->D->B), keep it there, then hours later when I forgot what $previousLanguage was and press switch, I might as well be spinning a roulette?
> And exactly because it's the only keyboard that just lets me type in two languages without having to "switch", and it does that well. Right now my spacebar just says "NL - EN" and it lets me combine Dutch and English just fine.
I can't stand keyboards that do this - especially those that don't let you turn it off. If you write in another language that doesn't use the Latin alphabet, you end up with nonsense suggestions - common English words like "the" or "and" will get replaced with obscure words in another language that just happen to sound vaguely phonetically similar. I almost never switch languages mid-sentence when typing, and yet the keyboard can't seem to grasp that.
This. I use romanian, english and turkish at the same time. Sometimes goes sideways because we mix a lot of words in english and romaninan in the same sentence, but it's ok. No other keyboard comes close.
Multilingual typing is a godsend. I did have to tweak settings though, like disabling the "suggestion strip" (because sometimes I'd be typing fast and accidently click the GIF button, then an image, which in many apps sends it immediately without a draft which was extremely annoying).
I use 3 languages with SwiftKey and it works really well.
That said, it got bought by Microsoft and now they try to cram in some AI nonsense :(
Yeah I only write English so I have no idea of the quality of other languages.
I've switched to GBoard on the iphone. I don't like the fact that I need to use a third-party software for something that's so crucial. But GBoard is so much better than the default iphone keybaord.
I was a gboard user on iOS for years but it progressively got so inexplicably unusably slow I gave up.
Maybe your comment means it's got back to being usable.
Edit: https://apps.apple.com/pt/app/gboard-the-google-keyboard/id1...
No updates in 3 years? And search results complaining about gboard on iOS 26? Doesn't sound promising.
Have you noticed any degradation of experience on mobile Safari with new glass interface?
You can install gboard on iOS - I haven't used the default keyboard in years
It's abandoned and buggy. I'm surprised google hasn't just removed it from the store. I suspect as soon as it actually requires an update because of a change in the OS it will disappear.
Yes, I loved it, but it crashed in too many apps and I had to switch to the Apple one :(
Unfortunately, it's simply not as good. I miss long-press punctuation so much.
This 1000x over! On Android you have this and you can tune how long a long-press is. It's amazing and should be an advanced feature on iOS.
I wish Apple would get over itself and expose settings for all-the-things, like how you can write default finder settings on macOS using the terminal.
Yes! I miss it very much. When I was on Android, I used to have it set to 100ms. I used to very quickly send well-punctuated text. On iPhones, it seems like the digitizer has 100ms of hysteresis built in.
now i just Lettuce my iPhone sden whatever it wants with no punctuation its not real good
Unfortunately, MacOS doesn't have settings (which I am told it had) for animation scales, like Androids have. The interface is sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow.
Yeah I tried it and it doesn't stand up to it on Android in my experience. I figured I'd rather not give Google any data if the experience isn't going to be the same.
That buggy abandonware that hasn't been updated in 3 years?
The key is to work around the text input. If you want to say "kill myself", you input "kill my" then complete the "self" portion by pressing delete (remove space), then s-e-l-f. I feel like most of my typing time is spent making these corrections, as it's very quick to swipe but corrections are almost always necessary and they are an order of magnitude slower. Yesterday for example I tried to swipe "succession" but it really wanted to output "secession", so I change my strategy to "success" (it really liked this word), then delete (remove space), i-o-n.
I think every time I swipe I need to do at least one correction like this, where I type one similarly spelled word with as minimum an edit distance as I can think of in the moment, then do a manual correction.
it's kinda bleak realizing I've been running the same cursed workflow for way too long. brb gonna disable that autocomplete
Except sometimes the autocorrection will “helpfully” replace the prior word to jive with its model of the universe. Incredibly frustrating.
Horrifying.
I've never noticed the "censorship issue", but once it gets a word wrong once, it's game over. Editing is awful. If I'm trying to replace the word entirely, I inevitably do the "wrong thing" and fall victim to the editing again, or tap something wrong, or.. I don't know, but I either have an undiagnosed brain injury, or the "correct" thing to do to get the phone to just take the damn word you typed changes every day.
Duck me, I notice it all the time!
> I've never noticed the "censorship issue"
Really? If you swipe "kill" and then try "yourself" or "myself" does it ever get it right or provide it as one of the options? Doing it right now myself and I can't get it to do either. I have manually entered those words and hit the "myself" in the suggestion box to try and convince it that that's an acceptable correction to no avail.
> I inevitably do the "wrong thing" and fall victim to the editing again, or tap something wrong, or.. I don't know
Every. Time. I like to think that I'm not an idiot and can generally pattern recognize, but it just feels so inconsistent that I'm always doing the wrong thing.
Further, iPhones are so bad if you exist anywhere outside the mainstream and language orthodoxy.
Their voice recognition stubbornly refuses to acknowledge Linux, instead transcribing Linux.
Typing "tboy" or "transfem", common terms in the trans community, gets changed to "toby" or "transfer". I can understand "toby", but the latter is especially bad, as the "r" and "m" keys are nowhere near each other. I'll type these words several times a day, every day, and it'll never get recorded. But one typo of the form "unbeleivalbe" gets permanently etched into the autocorrection.
Any intentionally unorthodox english gets invisibly censored and editorialized. You can say "here come dat boi" nowadays (which is good if you're a fan of 2016 memes) but not "wrasslin". Phrases like "what you doin today" has its tone and informality stripped when it's changed to "what are you doing today".
I would at some point throw my phone out the window if it worked like this. Instead I choose to have zero help correcting anything I type on my phone. I proofread, and fix any errors before I hit "send". I'm also on a folding android phone with a large screen and a 3rd-party keyboard app with adjustable size keys, so it's very easy to type.
…and when I type standard, but clique-centric, abbreviations and slang among my own groups, the iPhone messes those up, too.
Options also exist to pre-populate the predictive wordlists with our own terms, and to turn off predictive text altogether.
But you can not disable predictive button resizing.
Predictive text replacements are very bad, but they mitigate the worse issue of the fact that the keyboard is incessantly shifting with every single keypress.
I’ve confirmed this on my iphone as well.
Using swipe, no space bar after kill: Kill maps Jill myself Jill myself
Using swipe, manually pressing space bar after kill: Kill mussels Kill mussels Kill mussels
Yeah same -
Kill males kill males kill muddled kill mussels (hilarious)
Treat myself tear myself try myself tell myself
It won’t do it.
Kill mussels confirmed
I switched from Android to iOS like five or six years ago and still think about this almost every day, how much I miss the Android keyboard because the iOS keyboard is so, so, so terrible. Years later I still find it a frustrating, type-inducing mess.
You can always switch back.
Same for me. My Pixel magically fixed scrambled words (and was very fast doing it). iOS is terrible, even without described bug.
I am now much faster typing with the speech-to-text feature. Maybe that is what they are pushing. Maybe Apple wants to remove the keyboard and it is slowly increasing the friction so people use it less and less? Similarly how Chrome degrades browser performance until it gets restarted to force an update.
Do you have any proof about Chrome? It gets slower nonetheless.
> Then, when I try to manually change it, editing is a nightmare.
It feels like the editing and cursor process has gotten exponentially worse over the last few iOS versions. I do not understand what anyone is doing on the Apple side with this, but every change they make, makes it significantly worse.
Haha sometimes I want to type f*ck and it gets auto corrected to duck. But once I was trying to type “pura” (pure in Spanish, I do have Spanish enabled for auto correct) and it auto corrected it to “puta” (look it up). Shrug.
I'm in the same boat. This is bewildering to me, because I recall Apple making a joke about (it being fixed) in this in the 2023 developer conference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD0u0aNyzz8
The workaround is to add fuck as a shortcut for fuck. They intended the translation for doing things like translating omw to "On my way" but it works as a hack to let you use profanity without autocorrect killing it.
Fun you should mention this - I do have a few shortcuts but I find I don’t use them anymore because it tends to not recognize/expand them. It’s faster to just type the whole thing than to type the shortcut, realize it didn’t expand, curse at the thing, backspace over it, and have to retype it all anyway.
In spite of the manufacturing drama it introduced, 3D Touch was an insanely great feature for editing alone. Push a little harder on the keyboard and have a cursor to easily place where you need it.
I was real grumpy when they took it away. Editing had only become even worse since. I’d love to know what they’re trying to achieve.
"3D touch" was always marketing wankery. Every capacitive touchscreen and touchpad can sense pressure.
No android phone needed a trademarked name to have that feature. If modern iPhones no longer allow you to easily move the cursor around for editing, that's a software engineering decision. Android's implementation was not as nifty, you could only move "linearly" along the text input, rather than freely in two directions, but the intent is you just place the cursor roughly at the place you want and drag the space key for exact placement, though IMO it's too sensitive. Constraining axis in that context is a good thing.
Meanwhile, my Mac's "3D touch" keyboard functionality only results in it insisting to show a dictionary definition for most of the words I click and making it so "drag this file onto an app to input it" doesn't work half the time because dragging a file from Finder just doesn't work sometimes!
"Mac touchpads are so much better than everything else" people tell me as I yet again cannot do the one interaction that is the killer app for multi-window graphical workstations and that we figured out in the 80s on computers that couldn't even do color.
I'm not just grumpy, I'm baffled. Suddenly, when there is an URL or number input, when the hold-on-spacebar UX doesn't work because there is no spacebar, how could you even move the cursor left or right? Tapping in-between tiny letters is borderline impossible, and it isn't always in the right place to do the hold-and-slowly-move thing either, because the magnifying glass doesn't show up, so you can't see where you end up... It seems to me like for the last 5-6 years, the people who do decisions at Apple doesn't actually use the products themselves, or actually understand functional UX. Jobs would be ashamed.
Mine still does that, I just press and hold on the spacebar and can move the cursor around, are you sure its no longer available on your phone?
This was changed, and it is pretty easy to think the feature got removed.
When it was pressure-sensitive, you could push harder anywhere on the keyboard. But now that it’s tap-and-hold, it only works on the space bar. Most other pressure-sensitive actions just got replaced with tap-and-hold with no changes. But doing that on any other key brings up letter-specific accents, so they moved it down to spacebar.
It also used to be faster. Now you have to wait, but before it was pressure sensitive. You could trigger it instantly with more pressure. Edits were so fast and convenient, but now it’s a slight pause each time
You can still tap and hold in the text itself to bring up the magnifying glass gizmo, but yeah the experience is awful
Doesn’t work If the keyboard doesn’t have a spacebar - happens with numeric input. IIRC the old 3D Touch version worked on any key.
The iPhone keyboard is a living he'll.
I don't think it's "censorship" so much as it's defaulting to less-problematic phrases to avoid the opposite happening (you meaning to say "fill myself" or something). That could be jarring and lead to embarrassing situations.
Maybe 99 times out of 100 someone means to type "fuck" instead of "duck", but it's a completely legitimate UX decision to optimize preventing that 1% case, even if it's annoying the other 99% of the time.
> it's a completely legitimate UX decision to optimize preventing that 1% case, even if it's annoying the other 99% of the time.
Maybe, but only if there's a way to opt out of being annoyed 99% of the time. An "I'm a grown-up" button.
IIRC, there was once a setting somewhere you could toggle to allow autocorrect to do "naughty" words.
I think this used to be true on Android as well.
I didn’t pick up on the censorship issue. I just spent a few minutes trying to swipe type “kill myself” and found myself completely unable. I wonder if this is intentional. If so it feels like an embarrassing waste of time.
it's not just you.
the iphone keyboard has gone to shot.
and auto-correct has lost me data. I've typed in something important to remember and later when I go look at it ("call spaghetti before 5pm!"), I can't figure what I typed in.
In the end, I learned to disable auto-capitalization, auto-correction and smart punctuation.
and editing is a nightmare. Getting the cursor in the middle of a word is just about impossible, like highlighting just the characters you want to cut or copy.
My phone loves to tell people they V are fat instead of ask them about their day. Also loves adding random v s everywhere
Similar story here as well. Why is editing only a nightmare when it's something salacious or off-beat?
theres a setting to turn off whole word delete. So if it does the wrong word when you press delete it will only delete the letter by letter not the whole word. It helps but iphone keyboard is still horrendous.
just turn autocorrect off. You can learn to type pretty quickly without it, and you aren't subject to mind control.
I recently learned of the early 20th century cult called the Royal Fraternity of Master Metaphysicians. Their best known stunt was attempting to raise a baby to become immortal by never exposing her to the concepts of death or disease—our ability to contemplate death being the thing that dooms us to die, in their worldview.
Big Tech's attempts to shape us by conforming our capability to express ourselves to "algospeak" seems similarly misguided... though not out of character for Big Tech. (AI can be seen as a form of hermetic magick: an attempt to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth by first constructing a machine-god.)
Does Pixel somehow have a good keyboard? I use GBoard and find it atrocious: for English it's ok, but it doesn't know basic declensions in Czech nor Polish and autocorrects them to something nonsensical. This happens every time I try to type something, so I avoid writing on the phone.
It's the age of LLMs! Language has been solved! LLMs are great at both Czech and Polish. This problem is orders of magnitude easier. Why doesn't my keyboard even know these words exist?? Is there an Android keyboard that actually... knows basic forms of basic words?
If you are multilingual, you can also try SwiftKey (now owned by Microsoft) or the open source FUTO keyboard (bad for swipe typing)
Do you have an example? I type in Polish in GBoard regularly and haven't noticed too many anomalies (although I do have the right language pack installed, and the keyboard is set to it, and I "add to dictionary" occasionally).
Please, for the love of god, do not pull LLMs into the mix. I just want the keyboard to display what I'm typing.
Yea, it'd also be cool if they, like, just included a basic dictionary?
what do you mean by this specifically? iOS (and I'm guessing Android) both have dictionaries. I can select a word I've entered and look it up in nearly any text area.
> Does Pixel somehow have a good keyboard? I use GBoard and find it atrocious
I use Google Pinyin Input. Since it was discontinued in favor of (the much worse) GBoard, I have to keep a backup of the apk and sideload it onto new phones.
Google does not appear to think of input methods as something that should be convenient for the user to use. Not sure why.
It refuses to type "white people"!
It's also infuriatingly difficult to type "and" (I get "ABs" all the time)
[dead]
You're on Android. If the keyboard is censoring you and you don't want that, install a different keyboard from any store/repository you like
I've also got a Pixel from work and the keyboard doesn't even support swiping. It's a nightmare. I don't really want to install another one due to paranoia related to the work I do, but on my personal android phone, replacing the OS keyboard with Swiftkey (for which I have a data folder with over a decade of training in it) and denying it internet access is the first thing I do after rooting. I'm amazed that so few people seem to even realise that software is replaceable (also the launcher, which is an even-more-commonly-heard complaint after changing/upgrading phones)
Edit: wait I misread which way around you switched. Nvm and good luck
35m ago edit: Apple uses many predictive systems for typing. My sentiment in pointing out just slide to type might be misguided as it does not exist in a vacuum. I'd love to see these tests redone with slide to type disabled. I'm leaving the original comment below for reference.
Slide to type. This "issue" is at most 6 years old for iOS users.
Turn off slide to type if you do not use it. Slide to type does key resizing logic. This is the direct cause of this issue. Please upvote this comment for visibility.
Please reply if you think I'm wrong. I see this get posted frequently enough I'm actually losing it.
Please refer to https://youtu.be/hksVvXONrIo?si=XD7AKa8gTl85_rJ6&t=72 (timestamp 1:12) to see that slide to type is enabled.
I have that feature off and I am making noticeably more typing errors since the glass update.
I'm on an iPhone 12 Mini and always thought this issue was because it's kind of old. But I've seen this issue for at least 3 major iOS generations now, and I'm currently on 26.X
13 mini here and it’s definitely just since the glass update for me.
I don't use the slide feature and typing quality has gone downhill ever since iOS 17 or thereabouts IMO.
Doesn’t.helpmme At.all
I'll give this a try. My typing is better when I use slide to type but I'm still super uncomfortable with it (I feel anxious trying to think of the letters "fast enough" even though I know it doesn't matter).
FWIW I've felt my phone typing accuracy has gotten worse every single year for, whatever, almost 20 years now. That's not the case on the computer.
I almost exclusively use slide to type and what I do is not think about the letters, but about the motions I would have done if I was typing with my hands on a regular keyboard, sort of letting muscle memory take over and create the correct “shape” of the word without thinking too hard about it.
Peak swipe-to-text was on my HTC Desire circa 2010 using the third-party keyboard Swype. Everything since then has been a downgrade.
I remember when Swiftkey first launched on Android, the swipe-to-text was extremely good and the built-in "learning by itself" dictionary worked well too. Of course, it seems like Microsoft at one point bought it, so I don't even have to try it again to understand the current state of it.
I still refer to doing it on iPhone as swyping. The portmanteau has permanently genericized in my brain. Those were the days!
I have this disabled and the problem clearly exists anyway.
Key resizing has been in the iPhone since day 1. It has nothing to do with slide to type, even if slide to type may affect key sizing.
But the video clearly shows this isn’t key sizing given that they show U is selected in the keyboard UI, but j is input into the text.
General -> Keyboard -> Slide to Type
I don't have an issue with typing on iPhone, but I just disabled it to see what happens.
I thought I had a neurological disorder. (My iphone has auto-everything off. I'm not enabling slide type for fun, but I do not exclude the probability ios auto-enabled it when I changed brightness or something, as they are used to do.)
About two years ago, my phone typing suddenly gets extremely bad. Like, from occasional error to about one typo every second sentence. No matter how carefully I type. Hardware didn't change, so it must be me, right?
Let me play with that setting, I hope you are right.
> Slide to type does key resizing logic.
It might be different with slide-to-type enabled, but the iPhone always invisibly resizes keys hitboxes using predictions about what key you want to use next. This can't be disabled, and has been part of the iPhone since the very first. It's a really abysmal experience for something that's so crucial to a smartphone, Apple seems to be completely disconnected with how people use these.
Apple even used to advertise this on their own site. That video definitely exists somewhere on YouTube.
> the iPhone always invisibly resizes keys hitboxes using predictions about what key you want to use next. This can't be disabled, and has been part of the iPhone since the very first.
Yes. True.
> It's a really abysmal experience for something that's so crucial to a smartphone
Full disagreement here. I expect and enjoy the predictive hitboxes, and this issue I am experiencing is not about those. It is when I type for example the letter "T" and I am certain I touched correctly and I am certain I _actually saw_ the letter "T" appear as pressed from the UI, yet when I look at the word I just typed something else which was obviously not the "T" appeared.
I feeeeeel like this helped me but didn’t solve the problem fully. Changed it like 2-3 weeks ago.
Thanks, I’ll try this :)
>Please upvote this comment for visibility.
Lol. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button!
If YouTube ever renames or even just moves that button, millions of videos will suddenly be “broken”.
This already happened when they got rid of the 5-star rating in favor of the like button. "Rate 5 stars and subscribe" became "Like and subscribe". People will adapt.
Still funny in old videos or when they point to the right-hand side when the video info was there.
No worries, they will also introduce an AI "rephrase" (no way to opt-out) which will "translate" these in real-time!
I’ve been complaining about the iOS Keyboard for years, and the people I’ve been complaining to would act like I’m insane.
I suspect this last iteration broke it just enough for it to impact more people and make some of the problems I’ve been experiencing mainstream.
But yeah things like deleting when I meant to space, putting an “I” instead of “K” and a bunch of other little things like “thinks” instead of “things”, unintended periods; complete failure of spelling just generating gibberish “x” instead of “c” leading to un-autocorrectable failures; and if you want to reference the name of something that doesn’t fit the grammatical structure of the sentence but isn’t a mainstream item, forget about it.
Also “od” instead of “of”.
Seeing this video is super validating. Emotionally, it does a lot to make me feel vindicated.
Someone was telling me you can install 3P keyboards, does anyone have any recommendations?
What gets me is if it autocorrects the wrong wrong the first time, I can deal with that. It's when I backspace, re-type it the exact same and it autocorrects again - that's a huge UX problem. Then there's the lack of autocorrect where it makes sense, like you're "od" example. I know they probably do need to do a little tap point correction, but whatever they did with this last version is way off. Maybe they're trying to determine viewing angle since that could affect the perceived place you're tapping?
not just the keyboard either, but the text editor box (or address bar /search) in general. i cant count the number of times i try and put the cursor before a word, i see it is before the word, i let go, and the cursor moves to the end of the word. if i wanted it at the end of the word i would have put it there before letting go.
also, the damn period next to n in the address bar. no i didnt mean to type every word in a sentence with a period delimiting between words.
If you long press on the space bar and drag left and right, it moves the cursor around. Obscure UX but useful.
It has the exact same bug as mentioned above. I solely use the spacebar for cursor movement, and the cursor returns to the end of the line/word at random times. I couldn’t find a pattern when it happens. It’s especially annoying when it happens with something long like a long path in a URL bar.
> i see it is before the word, i let go, and the cursor moves to the end of the word. if i wanted it at the end of the word i would have put it there before letting go.
Having never implemented something like this, I wonder if the algorithm could take into account how long the cursor lingered on each position before being let go. If it spent significantly longer in a position before the word, and your finger happens to move a little bit when you let go, that slight movement shouldn't affect the cursor position.
Apple is usually pretty good about this stuff but they've really been slipping on the keyboard.
I dont think it is a last second twitch. It's some kind of autocorrection that has decided I meant to do something differently than I meant to.
Yeah it’s the worst phone keyboard I’ve used, hands down. Every android keyboard has been far superior.
the third party ones seem to be suffering in similar ways in my short use
I intended to tie experience where it says short use
I intended to tour type where it says tie
I intended to type type where it says your
I intended to type tour where it says your
jesus…it might be time to consider android
Just as a sanity check: 3rd party keyboards are an absolutely terrible idea.
I think the Apple software UI team has cultural problem in adhering to "one source of truth", and that's where most of the problems come from. I've seen this many many times throughout the years, from toggles, to actions, account creation (I have dupes from tapping a button too fast), etc: the UI doesn't match the internal state.
Another example is most any toggle that's linked to Apple cloud stuffs, like settings in your iCloud account or parental controls. You see it toggle immediately, but that's unrelated to the actual state. You can't know the actual state until you exit the page and go back. Meta gets this right with their apps: you toggle, the toggle turns disabled, then the toggle is re-enabled when the state is confirmed remote side.
Part of apple’s language design is to not show failure whenever possible.
It’s everywhere once you’re told. at most a loading icon remains loading or a setting resets itself when you don’t look, but those “there was an error -accept” popups that are a constant in windows are rarely seen this side of the fence.
It tends to become stupid when the network is involved, where lack of coverage, interrupted downloads and the like are common. They have to show it just works I guess.
It is at odds with the unix standard for programs to succeed silently but fail loudly.
It's probably KPI-driven. Devs are punished by any visible error. So dev hides errors.
and you know what, that actually might be reasonable if the iPhone was smart enough to retry a few times - either with exponential backoff or when network connectivity is restored.
instead, it just pretends everything is working great lol.
I pranked a friend in college by tricking him into installing a “utility” on his Amiga 1200 that swapped adjacent keys into the key stream as he typed, but only above a certain speed. He called and woke me the next morning in a panic about losing the ability to type. He would type slowly and it would work fine. Then at normal speed and he’d get constant errors. He’d quickly pull his hands up to see what keys they were over. Did he have a brain tumor? How could he be a journalist if he couldn’t type! Did he need to change majors?
Apple is unintentionally pranking the world.
Oh my god that’s insanely evil
I would never want to leave my computer open within 300 meters of you
Today he's an electrician.
And delighted that he has a stable career that isn't threatened by the coming AI apocalypse.
Is software just going to get worse from now on? Was the level of quality and feature improvement we've come to expect an artifact of high levels of investment based on expectations of growth that are no longer seen a valid?
We've built stacks so high we're afraid to jump off.
Nobody is really competing because nobody can build a complete product. So there's less pressure to fix the little irritations. Users are mostly satisfied, and problems get worse slowly enough that for the average user they don't notice right away how bad it's getting. So they stay because it's too hard or completely impossible to leave.
I think the bigger issue is the update model. In the past, if a new version sucked, people wouldn't upgrade. Now with subscriptions / continuous delivery, there's less ability to vote with one's wallet/feet
That's related.
If you're dependent on updating your OS for security fixes and basic compatibility, you are also forced to update the things you may not want to. It's all bundled together.
But it's not just the OS, but apps too, to say nothing of web SaaS products.
How many times have you launched something only to find the UI had been redone, some feature was now gone or changed, something that worked was now broken, etc.
But it's fine, you see, because we have telemetry and observability and robust CI/CD.
Users and their work are nothing more than ephemeral numbers on a metrics dashboard
100%
Ownership is a critical and fading concept for software. And it makes me really sad and frustrated.
Except if you use OS that respects you, e.g., Debian. In the latter, security updates can be installed independently. On phones, there is Mobian.
This does not always work for specific programs which do not do that, and even then, there are updates that you might want other than security updates without updating other parts of the same program. Separate programs can usually be updated individually, but if they are all in one program then it can make it more difficult (sometimes configuration can be done but not always; sometimes they change things that make this not work either).
100% this. And cars are following down this road as well. For example, my Tesla 3 radio will go bonkers every so often and will refuse to change the channel, no matter what I do. Tapping a new channel icon changes the "currently playing" view, but the audio from the original channel continues to play. This happens until you restart the entire UI (by turning off the car or rebooting the display).
But, hey, they managed to add a Tron cross-over tie-in feature, and maybe some new fart noises!
Undoubtedly when they fix that radio bug, something else will fail. Like the SRS (supplemental restraint system, aka airbag) error message that was introduced at some point in the past six months, then silently got fixed with a more recent firmware update.
> But, hey, they managed to add a Tron cross-over tie-in feature, and maybe some new fart noises!
And, you know, FSD 14.2. :)
Incentives Rule Everything Around Me. What incentive does Apple have not to be shit? People aren't going to switch to anything else, they'll just suck it up and shove it in their enormous sack of learned helplessness.
Yup, it's time to let go. The forces that eat away at quality software are running an indoctrination campaign with budgets in the billions of dollars to ensure that people don't remember what quality software is. You can do right in your own work and with your own people but most peoples' experiences are going to suck for the foreseeable future.
There have been bugs and regressions since forever. It’s easy to look back with rose colored glasses, but I don’t think software has actually gotten worse.
Just look back at the Snow Leopard release of OS X. It was specifically marketed at having no new features and just being a fix and optimization release because Leopard was such a mess. And people were happy about this.
> Just look back at the Snow Leopard release of OS X. It was specifically marketed at having no new features and just being a fix and optimization release because Leopard was such a mess.
This is wrong. Leopard wasn’t “such a mess”. No one was saying Leopard was more buggy than Tiger.
Further Snow Leopard wasn’t a bug fixing release. It had a lot of new features. The difference is the features were not user facing but geared towards the underlying tech.
From Wikipedia:
> The goals of Snow Leopard were improved performance, greater efficiency and the reduction of its overall memory footprint, unlike previous versions of Mac OS X which focused more on new features.
> Much of the software in Mac OS X was extensively rewritten for this release in order to take full advantage of modern Macintosh hardware and software technologies (64-bit, Cocoa, etc.). New programming frameworks, such as OpenCL, were created, allowing software developers to use graphics cards in their applications.
And I’d be happy with a couple more years of that.
I suspect that people not really paying for certain things has had an impact. Remember when there were a lot of high quality, paid keyboards for Android?
I doubt those were particularly profitable, but there was a lot of innovation back then.
Why pay for a keyboard app when the default keyboard is already good enough?
Moreover, why risk installing a 3rd-party keyboard app when the App Store is filled with adware and malware? All those handy flashlight and camera apps are a Trojan's Horse, why should one assume that the various keyboard apps in the App Store aren't keyloggers trying to steal my login info?
In 2025 I can do mostly error-free blind typing on the Pixel 7 keyboard, with all autocorrect and predictive spelling intentionally turned off. Why would I need innovation?
>why should one assume that the various keyboard apps in the App Store aren't keyloggers trying to steal my login info?
Honestly, you shouldn't.
Theoretically, Apple + Google take a % of all payments that go through their store, with the expressed reason being to "monitor and police the safety of the apps on the app store". You really should be able to trust apps on the official app stores, but I don't trust Apple or Google, so the whole system is moot I guess
>Moreover, why risk installing a 3rd-party keyboard app when the App Store is filled with adware and malware? All those handy flashlight and camera apps are a Trojan's Horse, why should one assume that the various keyboard apps in the App Store aren't keyloggers trying to steal my login info?
And unless the app gets acquired by the big companies, it will eventually turn into malware.
> Why pay for a keyboard app when the default keyboard is already good enough?
That's probably what people would have said before Swype was invented too. But lots of people use that in their default keyboards thanks to the people that _did_ pay for keyboards back then.
Who knows what innovations we are missing out on today just because we've consolidated things down to 2-3 suppliers?
> Why pay for a keyboard app when the default keyboard is already good enough?
I'd pay for an actually good keyboard. I find the default keyboard (GBoard) atrocious for languages other than English.
I fully expect Apple to "AI" correct your typing in the future without allowing you to change anything because they know better.
It will be designed by the same idiot who decided Safari should auto login you to everything without asking.
As long as the monopolies are going strong, yes, software will get worse and worse.
Improving quality (or degrading, for that matter) of existing features doesn’t figure into career promotions anymore. Only new features count. Or changing the visual design.
> Is software just going to get worse from now on?
I mean, yes? I think, as a pretty universal rule, you can expect commercial software to (on average) get worse every time it is changed. Companies spend little or no time fixing bugs and spend most of their time cramming (wanted or unwanted) features. Of course software is just going to get worse and worse over time.
I mean look at Mac OS 26...
The features were the ugliest icons I've ever seen and notification summaries that may be wrong.
Great.
The #1 problem I have typing on my iPhone is that I hit letter keys (mostly 'n') instead of the space bar and the phone just doesn't anticipate this as a possible typo and doesn't offer the right corrections. (I have AutoCorrect off.) It doesn't seem able to learn that this is a common typo, either.
Hah! I have exactly the opposite problem, I hit the space bar, instead of N, and the iPhone doesn't understand this a possible typo, so all the suggestions and auto-corrects are wrong.
Interesting. Just tried this out on Pixel's gboard and it does seem to correct this sort of issue
It’s problems like this that make me wonder what high level leaders do anymore. Do they not use technology? Infinite tolerance for bugs? How is it someone with authority does not make it a mandate to file down some of these regular annoyances in everyday software.
It is risk aversion in low level managers, and profit margins in high level managers, and since they're the market leader in the US and smartphones are pretty mature there's little risk of anyone jumping ship (go to android, start over, lose all your apps, get differently frustrating issues).
They don't have a Steve Jobs anymore to sit down with the product, get frustrated beyond belief with it, and start sticking boots up asses on general principle.
Nobody is going to step up to do that because all the other executives would hate them for it and knife them in the back, and it would be seen as a waste of effort. And nobody could ever tie fixing those bugs to making a financial number go up, and would argue instead that it was pure cost for no benefit.
Everyone has gotten so used to software being extremely shitty and hostile that they just think this is how it is. People work around the jank sometimes hundreds of times a day and don't look at the big picture.
I know at work I get work around windows taskbar jank at least a few dozens times a day. Granted, I can't do anything about it.
That’s the thing, if you are in charge of Teams, YouTube, Spotify, the Windows taskbar, whatever - you have the power! Surely you must be encountering the same annoyances that enrage the rest of us. Why not tell the team to fix the things that bother you? Set the agenda and improve your own life!
Instead, seemingly trivial bugs exist in huge software products for years. It somehow feels like the people in charge actively avoid dog fooding their own products.
Because they are too busy coming up with new “features” that nobody needs or wants so they can talk about delivering value in a yearly review.
Fixing broken UX is not a priority at Apple any more. They stopped enforcing HIGs for 3rd party apps a long time ago, and their own apps violate many principles that used to matter. Music app on iOS is a great example of slop UI.
Honestly, it's stuff like the horrible typing experience, which makes me wonder, if I am somehow missing something fundamental when people are praising Apple for the UX. How on Earth can they possibly fuck up a basic phone feature like typing? I've been using iOS for a few years now and it's such a mess, absolutely not growing on me. Hardware doesn't matter, if you're locked in software hell.
The key that is punched into the input field is based on where your finger lifted up. So if you have slide-to-type on, the pop-up paddle that showed up on key-down won't change to where your finger slid to for key-up. That's why when typing fast with slide-to-type on you can get confusing UI hints like this.
It kind of seems like the grace period for the paddle hiding with slide-to-type needs adjustment. I just leave slide-to-type off.
Well, I’m glad I’m not going crazy and the keyboard does actually suck since the glass update…
The video actually says that he also can replicate the issue on iOS 18.
Thank You. Keep being told that it was not the new iOS fault.
Not only Alan Dye, Eddy Cue, Craig Federighi also need to go. Bring back Scot Forstall.
I had an iPhone day 1 in 2007, and my typing on that day was better than it is today.
Once they added the suggestion bar above the keyboard things got noticeably worse. Every time they try to fix it they make it even worse than before.
With the current version, it’s not just the issue in the video I see as an issue. The two big problems I have are 1) repeated words, where I will type a word once, but auto-completion will inject another one. 2) The autocorrect will seemingly look at the whole paragraph I’m typing and change random words I typed several lines up and deemed correct. I will catch it doing this in real time, and sometimes it will flip a word back and forth repeatedly. I find I don’t just need to proofread while I’m typing, but also need to go through and re-read everything. It wasn’t always like this.
Maybe it’s my rose colored glasses, but I often think the iPhone peaked with the 4S.
I literally cannot type "its" without iPhone putting an apostrophe into it every goddamned time, even when it's obvious from the beginning of the sentence that the next word must be a verb not a possessive pronoun.
If I ever lose my marbles I know I'm going to accuse iOS of being in on it.
I have always used SwiftKey and Android. This year I switched to Apple because Android was being bloated by Samsung etc. I'm shocked by how horrible Apple keypad is. I also feel like the touch sensitivity of iphone is worse than Samsung phones.
I installed SwiftKey on iPhone too but even it seems sluggish.
Long a swift key fan but ever since it got sold to MS, it has gone downhill. I have it on my iphone and I think the development on that has stopped. My favorite keyboard is just unusable.
I went to apple keyboard and had to disable autocorrect because it would uncorrect it to the wrong word until five words down and decides which word makes more sense.
I went the other way this year, from an iPhone to a Z Flip 7. It's generally been a pretty good experience - the bloat on Samsung devices seems significantly less bad than it used to be 7 or 8 years ago.
I've stuck with Samsung's keyboard and it has mostly been fine, though it's less aggressive about adding punctuation for contractions etc.
GBoard for me. Can't stand the Apple iOS keyboard for some reason.
+1 on GBoard - every time an app has that weird bug where it selects the native ios keyboard instead of GBoard it doesn't take long for me to notice, it's crazy how bad the Apple iOS keyboard is by comparison.
I actually keep a bluetooth keyboard when I'm at my desk but am forced to use my phone. I really, really dislike touchscreens and touchscreen typing, and it's baffling to me that so many people seem to like it. The bluetooth keyboard is actually a little Logitech K380, and it's quite convenient as I also have it paired with my work laptop and my steam deck. I just push the button to seamlessly swap between pairings.
I guess I'm in an extreme minority here but... it's not broken if autocorrect is off.
I raw dog my typing everywhere. Zero autocorrect. The last time I did use typing assistance was on BB10 with the 'flick to complete' because it was out of my way enough that I could ignore it was there or use it to save a small amount of time. Otherwise I too have the fond memory of Windows Phone's keyboard (I ran it on the HTC HD2), I couldn't tell you why it was good other than it felt good to use, again without autocorrect.
However, I'm CERTAIN there's an ergonomics thing at play, the 'brain calibration' time for me to type accurately on a big screen takes longer. I ran the original iPhone SE's as long as I could and always carried a second android device that was huge by comparison. Today I have the 15 Pro and a OnePlus 11. If I spend a lot of time using the iPhone it takes a little time maybe 20 minutes or so to stop making easy errors on the OnePlus 11. However, going back to the smaller iPhone after being on the OnePlus for awhile, there's not really an adjustment, I can hit all the letters accurately.
I have large hands, I still want the smaller device. There is extra work to need to move your hand and eyes across a larger device. More space to misclick on.
Swipe to type is enabled on android/ios for me. I use it sometimes, if you are hesitant at all on iOS or have a tendency to drag fingers at all don't enable it or it will mess up your typing. It's of course enabled by default like autocorrect. Some people have issues with it.
Dictation is underrated on iOS at least. It just works better and faster than the shitty autocorrect for typing. Obviously not applicable to a lot of situations but when I don't feel like typing it works really well.
EDIT: And I really have to have it off, I switch between devices too much and even with them learning my style of writing, I write differently for different contexts and each OS does its own thing differently. I don't want to spend the extra mental bandwidth correcting the autocorrect or having to think of how that specific autocorrect will behave.
Also in the minority. I use pretty atypical language and grammar for effect frequently, which is a nightmare to edit on iOS. I'm probably a little slower typing now for run of the mill message, but like you said dictation is actually great for that.
I'm overall happy with the decision and would recommend others try it.
I use Thumb-Key, an android keyboard that doesn't have features like autocorrect and swipe-to-type, and it works quite well for my purposes.
Looks like your experience isn’t universal
> The best thing we can do is just report it via the feedback app and wait for a bug fix
iOS supports third party keyboards. Surely anybody this bothered by it should investigate those and pick a better option?
There was an absolutely mind-blowing keyboard which supported multi-finger swiping called Nintype, but development on it has stopped.
Apple’s support for 3rd party keyboards is notoriously difficult to work with. It’s not surprising to me that we don’t see many high quality alternatives.
Working with 3rd party keyboards is still the same nightmare it was when the feature was introduced many years ago. For one, iOS will randomly switch you to a different keyboard. Or the keyboard will just crash.
What does it matter that development has stopped? I haven't updated my software keyboard in a decade because I'm simply happy with the way it works. Why not use Nintype if you like it?
Mostly I'm worried about bit rot, i.e. breaking changes in subsequent iOS updates. But your point is valid, I'll try Nintype again. It's extremely quirky and opinionated in an entertaining way.
At least on Android, Nintype has a few annoying bugs now and has gotten terribly slow. But it's an incredible idea and I wish it would get revived by someone - I still use it despite the bugs, but I need to switch over to Gboard sometimes.
The third party keyboards are OK, but it depends on if you trust sending 100% of your typing content to a third party. The two big options are owned by Microsoft and Google. It’s bad enough I have to trust Apple. And Gboard still isn’t as good as the Android keyboard.
By default third-party keyboards on iOS do not have internet access to phone home your data with, that's something you have to grant it.
I literally just had a dream about this. Where I needed to urgently send a message, but I kept messing up the text. Weird. At least now, I know I'm not just fat fingering it.
I have a frequently reoccurring dream (nightmare scenario) that I'm somewhere unpleasant where I don't want to be, and need to leave right away, so I try to order an Uber on my iPhone, but the app is just so fucking hard to use and figure out, with all the important commands hidden so that the user interface is clean and sleek and beautiful and minimalistic without any visible scrollbars or labeled buttons or visual affordances, so much that I can't even use it, and I'm trapped in some horrible place in a nightmare I can't get away from, desperately fumbling with my iPhone.
I think it's a manifestation with my pain and disgust with Alan Dye's vain cosmetic approach to user interface design.
Now maybe my nightmares will shift to being trapped in the Facebook user interface, now that Alan Dye is at Meta. They totally deserve him, and I hope he destroys Facebook once and for all.
I have a similar dream: Every time I click anywhere on the Uber interface, it enrolls me into Uber One.
Come to think of it, maybe that's not a dream...
I have this exact same dream. Can’t type the correct address to save my life, and the app keeps “helpfully” steering me towards options I don’t want.
I have tried to set a "lucid dream recognition breakpoint" on my iPhone's user interface being impossible to use, but I keep hitting it in real life that I can't wake up from, and I keep getting terrorized by it in dreams without recognizing it.
Sigh.
The only way out of this insipid inception is for Apple to get their shit together and actually fix their UI, but that's never going to happen.
Mine is not being able to dial the right number on a phone.
Same here. I even blamed it on switching between Italian and Spanish all the time and thought my brain was short-circuiting. But when you see the right key light up and a different letter shows up, something’s clearly off. Also: with battery saver on it’s basically unusable - the lag makes typing way worse. The video was oddly comforting. Turns out I’m not losing it.
I know because I hqte iPhone keyboard so much, and the calculator app. I wish there’s an alternative timeline where we still have Palm keyboard with big screen
If you're OK with a ridiculously tall phone: https://www.clicks.tech/
Unfortunately it turns the iPhone into a lever that is always trying to launch itself from your hand. The iPhone part is much heavier than the keyboard part. And the ergonomics of the camera control become impossible (unless you have enormous salad fingers or something).
What are "salad fingers"? Lettuce discuss it more.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fMmlyLdpBXM
There's no alternative calculators or keyboards on iOS? (I don't have an Apple device to check on so I genuinely don't know)
I love the Panecal app, can recommend if you can handle looking geeky while using it
SwiftKey PCalc
you're welcome :)
iPhone miscorrects apostrophes between "its" and "it's", and its driving me insane.
sent from my iPhone
^sent from my iPhone, right?
Sorry I had to steal that part from you because it's too good!
The first iterations of the apple keyboard were perfect. They literally did everything perfectly without any notes.
Then it seems like they’re started teaching to the bottoms of the class and added a bunch of terrible decisions: Substituting touch to select instead of touch to move cursor was a genuinely awful decision that now makes typing a constant chore, and it seems like their autocorrect is overcompensating so hard that it prevents me from writing perfectly good words simply because they’re not common ones.
Side note: anyone else have moments where you can’t press delete once predictive text has shown up?
> Side note: anyone else have moments where you can’t press delete once predictive text has shown up?
Chiming in just to say: yes
Shameless plug, but back in 2014 trying to play with swift I made Type Nine, and I'm still using it to this day[1]
I also did a few other experiments that I unfortunately haven't had time to explore further[2]
[1] https://www.typenineapp.com
[2] https://medium.com/porsager/a-better-iphone-typing-experienc...
I just installed it and it seems really promising. Glad you shared it here.
I’ve spent more time than I care to admit searching for a good keyboard app in the App Store, and I’ve tried a lot of them. This one never surfaced for me in any of my usual searches, which is a shame (likely more on Apple’s search than on you).
I really like the T9-style approach, and I appreciate the clean App Privacy section and straightforward privacy policy.
Thanks a lot! I haven't done much on the marketing side, but I always felt it had great potential.
It needs a little tlc to align with the latest iOS update changes, but my time is too limited at the moment.
I switched to iPhone from android three years ago and it still frustrates me when I have to edit a word.
Say I accidentally typed ebit instead of edit.
In android it is as easy as clicking on the letter “b” and backspace then correct it to “d”
In ios, I have to long press the space key to move around and or do some circus to edit it.
I don’t understand why Apple does this.
Is there a trustworthy third-party "Retro" keyboard app - none of the shenanigans that made the default keyboard bad, and also no typing exfiltration to third-party servers?
I imagine the problem could be severe enough to some that they would pay the price of the Apple Developer program just so they may install such a Retro keyboard app from Github - if one exists?
iPhone keyboard is probably one of the several biggest factors I consider when once again I think "hmm, maybe this time I should upgrade to iPhone?". And then I'm confronted with this, ummm... thing, and immediately remember why I ditched iPhones years ago :) . How do you deal with it daily? I'm at a loss really. PS: I've owned 3GS and 4S and a few iPads, so I'm not just baseless here.
Exactly the same here. I've considered switching from Android multiple times and the two things that always stop me are notifications and the keyboard.
No long-press punctuation, no switch.
I also can't trust Apple to let 3rd party keyboards work smoothly everywhere, so that's not really an option I'm willing to take the risk on.
Doesn't solve the notifications either.
I switched from iOS to Android and it's actually kind of insane how much higher quality a lot of parts of the OS are. I wasn't expecting this, I was expecting customization and the associated jank. But no, it's been pleasantly surprising.
There's still some jank. Sometimes searching for something in setting takes upwards of 5 seconds. I can only assume it's downloading a bitcoin miner or something.
Yeah, something happened a few months ago where by iOS I'm now "hitting" the wrong key a lot, words like we'll and we're are constantly being automatically "corrected" to well and were and, most frustrating, it will auto"correct" the last word in a sentence from what is on the screen when you hit send. It went from almost always helpful to often frustrating.
My “favorite” version of the last issue is trying to acknowledge with “K” which inevitably becomes “I”.
I haven't been getting notifications from any messaging apps for a few months. I've checked all the relevant settings (do not disturb etc.). I also get random keyboard issues such as this one. This is my first iPhone. I have no idea why I paid premium prices for a premium phone if they can't even get notifications and typing right
That's a really strange issue you have here. Never heard of anything like this. Could it be possible that some aggressive filtering exists on your network that would disallow your iphone to connect to Apple's push servers ?
I get notifications from most applications, just not messaging apps (slack, telegram, whatsapp)
It's definitely a setting issue, the problem is Apple has multiple settings which all interfere with notifications. My mom gets this problem a lot and it takes entirely to long to track down which setting is overriding what.
The most infuriating “feature” of autocorrect is that it includes all your contact names in your dictionary, with no way to opt out of this aside from disabling autocorrect entirely. This can lead to some awkward texts when your innocent typo (or even correctly spelled technical term) turns into a mention of someone’s name who should not be in your phone…
I wonder if this is related to the fact that every Apple app shows up as “recently accessing” contacts in App Privacy Report. And I don’t mean only photos (face recognition), but: Safari, Camera, Shortcuts, Mail, Health… why? I’ve never even configured a Mailbox. Why are these apps all accessing my Contacts?
This drives me nuts because I put things like "(Alexander)" after someone's name to indicate who I met them through, who they're friends of, where I met them, etc.
Then whenever I dictate "Alexander" it shows up as "(Alexander)" in parentheses. Drives me mad.
I'm astonished people on this site use autocorrect at all. IMO it's a mind-bogglingy insane antifeature, even more insane than that weird "replace arithmetic expressions with their result" thing Apple once did.
I tried turning it off once, and the alternative was way worse.
It's worse because it keeps the text you intentionally entered? To be sure: I'm not talking about next word suggestions, only about it changing words after you already wrote them.
It's worse because touching the right spot on tiny screen with fat fingers is astonishingly hard.
Holding spacebar for corrections works fine though. Maybe my error rate is too low...
See, I just learned this was a feature when I read your comment a few seconds ago. I’ve had an iPhone since the iPhone 4.
Love the sick burn at the end:
>Who knows? Maybe they're just trying to simulate the butterfly keyboard in software.
Apple truly has some incredibly incompetent people working for it, obsessively focused on cosmetic style instead of substance and usability.
Alan Dye voluntarily leaving certainly won't solve the root problem that they didn't fire him years ago.
Bad Dye Job:
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
Gruber: Apple employees ‘giddy’ about Alan Dye’s departure:
https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/04/gruber-apple-employees-giddy-...
This is far from specific to Apple.
When I first saw your name, a few decades ago, it was because I was interested in HCI and human factors engineering.
Today, my impression is that the field of HCI has mostly disappeared. Most people who might have been interested in HCI are now studying and practicing UX instead.
In UX, the designer/engineer in practice is usually directed by the goals of the party who decides how the thing will work, rather than the goals of the party using the thing.
There are some intellectual elements to UX practice (e.g., aesthetics, fashions, A/B testing, and dark patterns). But I wonder whether the transition from HCI to UX means that the field is not only perversely anti-user, but also losing the intellectual and/or institutional capacity to be user-oriented on occasions that they want to be?
The 3rd letter is the key here. If you are going to look up a possible word that a user is typing, iOS waits until the third letter typed to do the lookup. Too many possibilities before then. So at the third letter typed, in the video it displayed the U, but his finger was low on the button. It displayed, then did the lookup, and while it was doing that lookup the u was still displayed, but the input moved to J without the display being updated. Maybe the lookup being spawned on the background thread caused enough delay on the main thread to not update the highlighted key before the touchUp event fired?
What words begin with “thj”?
I always end up pressing the `.` instead of enter when trying to search somethin on Safari.
I am surprised that there isn't a comprehensive test suite of (at least) virtual button presses replaying actual typed sentences for a product used by so many people that apple would run on a daily basis against each device.
This has been driving me up a wall. I was seriously considering if I had just gotten 'old' or something. I've had every iPhone since the first one, and suddenly I feel like I'm typing with mittens on.
I can't help but feel like some product manager is behind all this...
Why would it go from what felt like a predictable error to what feels like someone moving the keys around? I am guessing someone presented aggregate research that showed higher accuracy overall, but ignored the case that the errors feel like the voices are getting louder :D.
Hopefully they come up with a setting to change this, but knowing apple it probably won't happen. Is it time for custom keyboards to come back?
The issue is that when you press down, the key you pressed down on first is not the registered character, it's where you release your finger at. When you type fast and you slide your fingers around, it misregisters.
One-handed finger swiping to type doesn’t work as reliably as it used to either. I am not sure why.
My recent experiment has been very disappointing. Mostly post upgrading to iOS 26? I’ve had to painfully change my behaviour to two-handed typing by default.
My suspicion— they’ve changed the ML system that inferred words based on swipes, and the new one isn’t as good in real world use.
As a bilingual/trilingual user (I have English, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, French and Chinese keyboards enabled, and use the first three on a daily basis), I have had surprisingly few issues with either swiping or pecking at the keyboard, perhaps because I automatically switch to pecking the instant I spot swiping going down the “wrong” decision tree.
But I also think having this many keyboards enabled makes iOS basically throw up its tiny virtual hands in frustration and nullifies most fancy predictions.
(This was mostly swiped in on an iPhone 15 Pro running iOS 26 with very minor hiccups)
All commenters here missing the big picture/long game…. Apple just doing their part to poison the well for future LLM training data across the internet. With enough typos littered about the Internet, that’ll really grind foundation LLM trainers’ gears.
What is me though is neglecting to proofread before hitting send!
Also wth happened to the alarms page. Feels like they made the clickable area of the toggle 1/4 the size just to annoy me. Usually takes a couple tries to hit them when sleepy in morning
I’m using a 12 mini and I’m running into so many typos since the new iOS. Maybe the combination of buggy software with their smallest screen is making it even worse.
Wish it was only the keyboard enshittified. Literally everything became worse with the update, I had to google how to turn off the silly transparency (Accessibility Settings -> Display -> Reduce Transparency) so that the battery that used to happily last for the entire day on iOS 18 does not die in a matter of some 4 hours. And don't even get me started on now-always-lagging home screen swipes and the Safari overhaul madness! Wanna close the active tab? That will be three taps, thank you very much. Oh, you want them taps to register _every time_, too? This basic phone UX used to be Apple's major USP over Android, now fewer and fewer reasons to stick to this ecosystem.
For the power users: you can swipe up from the bottom URL bar and then swipe from rtl on a thumbnail to close. That’s two actions instead of three.
You can also swipe right or left on the URL bar to switch tabs.
Alternatively hold the URL bar and press close.
Is there anything in iOS 26 that makes it worth updating for an older iPhone? I am holding out for now, based on the bad reviews regarding battery impact.
Please, save yourself, stay away. It is a buggy, slow mess on a 16 Pro.
I paid for 120hz but it can’t even hit 60 on the Home Screen :(
Thank you! I was thinking of moving over at 26.1, but it sounds like maybe I'll have to stay away for even longer. Honestly there isn't a lot that I'm excited about, other than perhaps call screening. But I can do that by just sending callers to voicemail and seeing watching the transcript come in on iOS 18.
I have a lot of trouble texting, independent of the issues here. I'm just clumsy and can't seem to do it in any productive way.
I'm working on this keyboard substitute with larger keys and split up keyboards: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/icantext/id6748927092. Give it a try if you want.
Why is the first row oversized and sliding back and forth with keys sliding off screen. Hitting letters on this moving row is like a carnival game. Is that intentional or a bug on my Pro Max phone?
Hi! Thanks for trying it. The "slow sway" is part of the plan! It's so the oversized first row of a qwerty keyboard can show all possible letters on the top row. If it feels too much like a game, slow it down using the main app from your home screen.
WTF Apple. And, yes, I've been the same boat. Thank for pinpointing that this is not me but rather another genius Apple design.
The iPhones autocorrect is one of my biggest frustrations coming from Android a few years ago. The biggest frustration for me is the tendency to correct the _second to last word_. I have never gotten used to this. I know i can stop it by "clicking" on the word instead of hitting space - but that feels slow and bad.
It's Not Just You https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
This thread has more comments than all previous submissions combined.
Understood. Just highlighting the number of submissions of this thing for 2 months over and over with interest but little traction.
Worst thing about iOS keyboard is that it corrects the last word when hitting send before even showing what it would change.
When i hit send, i want to send the message that is on my screen, not the message iOS thinks i meant to send.
(And that you cant just click into the middle of a word to edit one letter)
I can't comprehend how that's even an issue. Like it's the sort of thing you might read in an old bug report online and go "wow, that must have been an awkward few days for everyone" but to hear that it is "normal"? Wild. Utterly unacceptable.
I detest Apple's, and Google's, and Amazon's, and nearly every tech company's feedback system.
Apple's is by far the worst. All feedback is private. There is no way to show or advertise support for feature. Like I want to go upvote the feedback from this video, but all I can do is file my own feedback, which is more work, and therefore more people will choose not to give any.
Both Apple and Google and Microsoft have "users help users". These are infuriating as there is no official answer or help. There's just some fan with an often completely wrong or irrelevant answer. There is zero indication that any of these companies look here to see what's broken.
You've reminded me of the hellscape of Microsoft's "help" forums filled with people asking specific questions and getting their question closed with a barely-relevant response followed by many others commenting, essentially, "me too! why won't anyone help us?"
Any one know why the iPhone will put a random v or similar letter in the text by itself? It’s a really annoying bug.
I use android (samsung flagship) and have been struggling with accurate typing in recent months
I havent found a root cause yet, tentatively chalked it up to advancing age.
I may have inadvertently selected a different keyboard (Samsung vs Google ) or wrong layout/settings when switching to newer phone.
After a recent update, my keyboard started typing "and" as "and's". This happens 100% consistently, but only when swiping. I don't understand how such a bug happens. Yes, 's' is next to 'd', but "and's" is not even a word.
while I definitely agree the autocorrect has gotten worse, what I find more of a problem is all the various other pop-ups that occur. For example, they recently added the ability to 'undo' an autocorrect, but this pop up grabs focus, and you can't click on text near this pop up, because the pop up will claim the click.
I've also had trouble getting rid of pop up menus (copy, etc). If I want to click on text, but it has decided to pop up a menu, it can be a real pain to get rid of it. (I had no problem on previous versions of IOS).
There's a fundamental law of features: Every feature you add may may make it better for people who use it, but it makes it worse for everyone else.
If you keep adding features, anything will eventually become unusable.
Although I do not use it myself, I had seen that some other people do, and that apparently you cannot disable autocorrect while still having prediction enabled (at least, that is what they told me); I think it might be useful to enable prediction without autocorrect.
What are you talking about? Auto-Correction and Predictive Text are 2 separate toggles in the keyboard settings.
I have Auto-Correction enabled, and Predictive Text disabled. I can switch it around the other way too.
Maybe whoever told me that was wrong, or that was an older version that could not switch them separately, or I was confused and it is different for Android vs iPhone, etc.
My theory is that the keyboard team is composed of sadists that enjoy making us all ducking suffer.
There's another issue that's much more infuriating IMO:
- You're in the middle of writing a sentence.
- The phone is trying to guess how that sentence will eventually be constructed.
- It goes back 3 words and changes one to match its guess.
- Its guess is @)%(*%@ WRONG
Seriously. Drives me up the wall. Once I've written a word and seen it, I've confirmed that's the word I want. If it wasn't, I would have changed it then. I don't ever want it to "correct" a previous word based on a new one. Ever. Yet still, more than a decade later, there's no way to turn this off.
And it takes so long to keep backspacing to delete it, or move the cursor to make a surgical edit. The WORST.
My son has an Apple Watch SE 3 and it doesn't feature the keyboard and you literally cannot type a lower case 'n'. The only hack was putting in a space and then it will sometimes do an n (or multiple characters). It's bonkers bad.
I don't understand. How can you press spacebar on a device you say doesn't feature a keyboard?
The apple watch has a kind of small space for writing letters, and underneath, a long “space” key. The character recognition is somewhat not optimal.
I wish Apple would let you load different “dictionaries” for technical specialties so it wouldn’t try to autocorrect everything. For example, “IT”, “Automobile”, “Medical”, etc.
I have found myself doing a lot more voice typing lately.
My biggest gripe is that when I say "want to" it replaces it with "wanna" unless I specifically enunciate "want to".
"Wanna" is NOT a word in english but there is no way to exclude it.
Frustrating.
I use voice typing for almost the same thing every day.
I run to/from daycare to drop off my son and I title the run "Daycare drop-off". It constantly types "Take care drop-off" which drives me nuts. Those words don't even make sense together. A simple Markov chain should do better.
Wanna is in a number of notable and respected English dictionaries including the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, and Collins. I don't know what else defines if a word is or is not in the language.
Its an informal word, and it does not belong in a device used for professional communications.
"Wanna is used in written English to represent the words `want to' when they are pronounced informally. I wanna be married to you. Do you wanna be married to me? "
Pronounced - not written.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/wann...
> Its an informal word
Ah, good then, great to see you've changed your mind and now we both agree it is most definitely a word commonly used in English for over a hundred years.
Its incredible the dictionary pronounced it to you instead of showing it to you in a written form. When I go to the link I definitely see it written!
I do agree with you that it is an unprofessional word and probably not the most charitable and professional dictation result. But in the end there's two different directions dictation software can go: what was more accurate to what the person actually said (or what it thinks the person actually said), or the more correct way of saying what was said. If someone was legitimately saying "wanna", should the dictation software always auto-correct it to "want to"? If you were to type "wanna", should the keyboard auto-correct to "want to"?
dude - cool it.
Maybe it’s just me, but it’s not just typing - I’ve found that after I type a message in iMessage, it takes SEVERAL pressed to acknowledge a send?!
I don’t know wtf it thinks I’m doing because it doesn’t do any other action.
Swiftkey on Android does this also and it's a very nice feature. I sometimes see a key lighting up that I didn't mean to press. I was just barely on that key, and it figured out that I didn't mean to press it
Not sure how it works. Maybe it looks at touch surface area movements during the couple milliseconds that I'm pressing down for? Or dynamically adjusts hitboxes as this video says iOS does? Whatever the method, it works very well after like fifteen years of training (I copy the data folder between devices and never update it or let it access the internet, so I'm sure it's just me training it and not anything else, nor incompatible versions ever throwing data away)
Note that this is different from the context-based autocorrect since that only triggers on spacebar or suggestion selection
I assumed it was just me getting worse at typing but combined with aggressively wrong autocorrect and mysterious blue lines under everything I type they seem to have ruined yet another perfectly good UX.
Yeah, the blue lines under a random word in a perfectly correct sentence is such a waste of time ... did I mistype? Nope.
Another long running one is duplicateduplicate words: https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/mpo20r/iphone_will_occ... .. been happening for me for years and still does from time to time, but it's only once every few days so I just let it bebe.
OMG yes. Pretty sure that bug has been around for something like a decade. Insane they haven't prioritized it, or I wonder if they hide behind the fact there doesn't seem to be any way to reliably reproduce it?
Someone just has to look really hard at the code and find the bug. Surely the relevant code can't be that long?
I just hope them to provide an option to get rid of all those predictive models and just use a static, consistent layout. At least I can blame myself if my typo is from my own mistake.
The best touch keyboard on a phone for me was always on the Blackberry Z10 phone. The phone UI is also one of the best I used. Unfortunately, Blackberry went to shit.
I type in Dvorak and frequently the iOS keyboard's swipe typing bugs out and acts as if the layout is in QWERTY. I kind of don't believe it will ever be fixed...
I've wondered for a while whether it's a dark pattern where they're trying to optimize for more text to speech in this post-literate world.
The iOS keyboard "just not working" is something I gripe about pretty much every day as a symptom of the world getting quantifiably worse than even five if not ten years ago, alongside a whole laundry list of enshittification transgressions.
I remember back in the late 90s that, if you ignored the matter of hardware driver quality (and that is a big "if", no question) that open source software tended to be higher quality in general than a lot of commercial software. Not because of any moral characteristic per se, but just the "many eyes make bugs shallow" sort of thing. Since it was mostly only programmers using open source anyhow, if someone hit an annoyance, statistically speaking, there was a good chance that someone who could fix the problem had hit the same annoyance.
Then maybe in the 2010s commercial software at least caught up.
But it seems to be swinging back around to, if I want my software to effing work I want to be seeking out open source again. Statistically speaking, fewer of the users who may encounter problems can fix any problems they find, as the systems have gotten much larger, but it is still possible, and on the compensating side, no one on the emacs team is figuring out how to stuff AI where it doesn't belong [1] or how to monetize it via ads or any of the other exciting ways to arbitrage long-term software quality against short-term money.
It's an opinion, it is clearly highly path-dependent, and I won't deny this is just my impression... but it is something I've been noticing again lately. Especially as Windows seems to be heading down the catastrophe curve and this time I'm not sure they can stop it.
[1]: I'm not anti-AI at this point... but there are places where it belongs, and there are places it just doesn't, and stuffing it where it does not belong is not a win.
If OS developers lack QA processes and resources, can they offer usability bounties?
LLM HUD displays can annotate ads, marketing copy and shopping carts with customer usability feedback.
I get frustrated by how many real/normal words Apple's macOS and iOS typing dictionaries don't recognize and mark as misspellings.
The auto-capitalisation of Apple trademarked phrases like Liquid Glass and Apple Intelligence is what really drives me round the bend.
Touchscreens are an awful user interface. You'll never change my mind.
I want an iPhone but without a touch screen. Give me a damn real physical keyboard.
This is a big issue and I’ve noticed I significant decline in my accuracy. Would love to hear a response to this from Apple with proper fix.
I swear I have felt like I have dealt with this for the last few years on iPhone. So frustrating. It has forced me to use the the dictation feature.
Using raycast for dictation has been pretty great for me (longer sentences ofc). I wish apple would just acquire and integrate, with local models one day this will be crazy fast.
What.are.you.talking.about.the.iOS.keyboard.is.just.fine
This isn't just double space = '.' either since you can just turn that off in options.
iOS also changes the keyboard layout depending on usage. So when you're in a browser like safari or Chrome and you tap the address bar which these days is 99% used as a search bar with no particular need for a prominent '.' you get a prominent '.' for no good reason.
A huge '.' right next to the space that's not even correctly recognizing the touch area in a context where you actually likely type '.' less often than any other form of writing. You cannot change this behavior.
Fwiw i made a mistake of switching to iOS from Android due to a lot of peer pressure. "iOS is better, you should switch" the wife said. Well I've switched. Now i have a terrible keyboard, i don't have any call screening and non existing text spam filtering. I'm yet to see any improvements.
There’s two great reasons to have a prominent . key in the search/address bar:
1. For typing actual web addresses
2. More importantly, for typing “site:reddit.com”
I remember when this first became an issue, then they tweaked something and I noticed it a lot less. Something changed again recently (last couple years) where this is happening a lot again.
I appreciate how Apple pioneered the touchscreen mobile device, largely due to the implementation of the keyboard, but it needs to be more stable than this.
Rhe Androidmkeyboard is jusr fine roo.
SwiftKey was actually good. I could pound out a solid 30WPM without even trying, no typos. But then they added a "Ask Bing" context menu item to all my selections after an update and after leaving it on principle I've been suffering ever since.
Yeah also I thinkc they rewrote it in some crappy way because app got so bad and laggy and irresponsible that I had to remove it.
try thumb-key [0] if you're willing to go for something unorthodox :-) the swipe-style keyboard cut my typos by ~90% (though i was particularly bad at using phone keyboards, lol).
[0]: https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key
this is what all of my texts from my pixel look like
but it's nice to hear it's no better for the apples. misery enjoys company :)
that's the most annoying to me, when they put a large "enter" key, or "@" or "." just next to the space, and you want to type with both hands, and you keep hitting that with the right thumb
Yeahxright, worksnfor me
And it's possessed a random, multi-second lag ever since ~2012, even with spell check, replacements, and prediction turned off.
Another problem I'm having is.. with the latest iOS public betas, when you swipe down to bring up Siri search, it takes 2-4 seconds for the keyboard to show up. Every time. Went to an Apple store and they said, "re-install from scratch". Which isn't really easy these days, given work MFA accounts etc.
It’s a beta, Apple Store isn’t going to help. File a bug, as Apple is famous for their timely bug feedback and fixes (that would be a strongly sarcastic statement, for those that have not dealt with Radar).
I'm aware of the beta trap.. and I'm waiting for the final release to come out to see what happens, but given that we're on the 2nd RC, I'm willing to bet all my money that the bug persists.
Did you file a beta report about the issue using Feedback Assistant? If not, include a screen recording.
Yes, and I'll file again after the final production release. Neither of the RCs resolved it.
That learned helplessness at the 2-minute mark... Install a different program if you don't like this one. There are options beyond "submitting a bug report and hoping for the best". The video makes it sound like Apple is some kind of holy spirit to which you can only pray. If there's no good options, and you can't code, you can even get together and fund someone to fix an open source keyboard if it's bothersome enough. There's always more options, especially in software
Apple severely limits third-party keyboards, see https://old.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1l2gg3r/thirdparty_ios...
"So the playing field isn’t just uneven — it’s tilted like a ski slope."
This is a ChatGPT written post
maybe what has happened is that the team needed some experts to measure improvements and tapped ppl with a career in optimizing for "User Engagement" so the more we fight the keyboard the more they cheer and grow the team
I've been suffering from de quervain tenosynovitis for the last 6 months or so. I thought it was the cause I can't type anymore.
This is a feature to get you to stop typing and to just speak. I have a couple friends that are almost exclusively speech to text. One friend is ESL and just finds the brain work easier and the other just figured it worked better.
Seeing this video has convinced me it’s a feature. I can’t see iOS development practices that shit and to read comments here about similar Android issues.
that to me looks like a error in whatever logic is behind the positional error code. You'd think they would have transformer models based on different layouts but maybe some weighting issues going on.. ie I would have thought its a model that is altering based on likelihood weights and maybe something up with that..
My backtick muscle memory no longer worked after the update. Feels like someone just rewrote it.
Does anyone know an Android keyboard that uses local LLM with all you typed ever before as a context?
all.my.google.searches.look.like.this
omg yes same. No matter how much I try it still happens.
We need someone like Steve Jobs to berate the engineers to make these products good again.
The best part about this is it's not your phone so there's no way to fix it
Well, possibly unrelated to all of this, but in my experience, multilingual spell-checking has gotten noticeably worse on both iOS and Windows, to the point where I had to disable auto-correct wherever that's possible (and that's, unfortunately, pretty far from everywhere!).
This particular problem manifests as: you're conversing in one language (say, French) and then use a single English word, at which point the spell-check and auto-correct permanently switches to that language, mis-correcting pretty much everything from that point onward.
(Classic) Outlook on Windows is pretty much entirely broken for me these days (even if I repeatedly mark the entire message as being in the majority language), as is Safari on MacOS: even in a completely-Dutch conversation, it always insists on auto-completing 'lang' ('long' but can also be 'tall') to 'language' and it's absolutely infuriating, and with no apparent way to disable the madness... (and, interestingly, no mechanism to detect that I dismissed the auto-complete for the 100th consecutive time, and that it's possibly not a desirable substitution)
iOS and macOS have been broken in so many small death-by-a-thousand-cuts kind of ways that it's frustrating to even write a comment about how broken.
My goodness. I honestly believed I was experiencing a decline in finger dexterity due to age, given the sudden increase in typing mistakes on my iPhone (I have been an iPhone user since the OG iPhone).
Tim Apple really needs to let go the clowns who managed to regress the keyboard input functionality.
I have benn beating ths drum for yrs
There's a slightly different (I think) bug which I've been hitting since the update with URLs. The URL keyboard allows long-pressing on the . to open various TLDs, speeding how long it takes to write a URL.
In prior versions, you could long press to open the choices, then letting go would insert the default (eg .com)
With iOS 26, the touch target seems to be slightly different for triggering the options vs selecting them. I now frequently long-press, see the TLD choices with the default selected, and then releasing incorrectly inserts a single . instead of the TLD. This is infuriating when typing fast.
Dude - crazy. When I saw this post I was like - finally someone said it. But it isn't just "iPhone". Why is spell check so bad EVERYWHERE..... still?. Like, how is it I am still even able to share texts, emails, etc that have mistakes at all? I feel like "spell check" is so old school. Intent, and matching intent, without typos is way over due. A bit meta: but, I am going to have to re-read this post - why? I still send texts that say "What re you doing?" - hwy?
oh dear god, tears of joy…they told me I was crazy. this is so validating
I’m so glad other people are having this problem too. The keyboard is just so bad now.
The autocorrect does help sometimes. But it fucks things up that were previously fine just as much as it helps so overall it’s probably worse than it used to be. Now You need to constantly monitor every key pressed to make sure it hasn’t screed it up later.
I'm gonna be that guy and say that this has never occured on Android. And if it did, I can install any keyboard I want and the issue would likely be gone (I use FUTO keyboard). Apple is ridiculously controlling and anti-hacking I still have no idea why hackers use it
My english keyboard is broken but the two international keyboards that I have installed are borderline unusable. The keyboard situation has been atrocious for the past couple of versions of iOS but OS26 send it over the cliff.
THIS. I'm constantly sending typos in texts now even when typing slower on purpose. The software is clearly making choices for me that are wrong and I can't do anything about it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The most annoying to me is how close they put "enter" or "@" to space on the right side, so when you type with both hands you keep hitting those when you want to type a space
Thank you!! How can one of the biggest tech company be blind to such a basic thing ? It enrages me whenever I type.
Does no engineer at Apple use iOS or they never face this problem ?
What’s funny is steve jobs saying actual keyboards on phines were dumb. Apparently they were not dumb. They were just reliable AF
Wow, I thought I was the only one. I too can confirm that my typing has gotten more error prone since the ios 26 update.
And liquid glass is still ugly and buggy. Apple has become enshitified.
Many things are broken on iOS. Apple, please get your shit together.
- Random invisible touches and phone calls - BUggy Glass UI - Stupid battery management ..to say the least.
No one's getting promoted for a bug fix.
I joke that Tim Cook doesn't type on his iPhone. There's no way he'd be happy with it if he did.
I've seen soooo many rendering errors in Safari. And bugged-out keyboard + inputs (input touch location offset from its visible location on the page after the keyboard opens—a real problem if you're trying to paste). Never ever seen it 1/10 this buggy after any prior release, and I've been on iOS since... 5, I think? And did some development work on the platform as early as version 3 or 4.
That's in addition to so many dropped frames in the animations that I disabled as many as I could because it was driving me crazy, and to a bunch of word-based buttons becoming confusing icons. I think this has topped 7 for my least-favorite iOS release, and the gap widens by the day. It's terrible.
[EDIT] What it most reminds me of (I was on early Android and have done even more development work on Android over the years than I have for iOS) is Android. The jank, the pile of little confusing UI choices that all add up into an overall off-putting experience. The uncertainty what kind of bad thing might happen when you touch anything. Feels like an above-average 3rd party Android skin, like from Samsung or someone (so, pretty bad). The stuttering animations. No other iOS release has ever felt like Android to me.
Normally I tend to wait before each major release, but I got lured by unknown caller screening. Then I noticed there's no unknown caller screening for me (just a useless setting to move unknown callers to a different list). They also removed blocking numbers directly from the recents list and the new phone layout is a complete mess.
For me it's been going downhill since the update that changed the settings app to show apps (even system ones) on a different page. Iwas seriosuly inpressed with the settings app when I first switched to Apple from Android, and now it's terrible.
Meanwhile you still can't freely set the search wngkne for Safari, contacts always forgets my custom labels, camera doesn't allow free control over the flashlight,...
P.S. Typos due to iOS26
I was recently gifted an Apple Watch and it forced an update on me, so I jumped straight to the x.1 patch, and I'd still call this beta-quality, even setting aside my strong disagreements with the design and UX direction.
I've seen other releases much complained-about online then found them to not bother me much, or even at all, when I upgraded, but this one's an exception. It really is very bad.
On Android, I used to be able to easily send text messages and now my contact from the dialer. Swipe to call, swipe the other way to text, long press to get the selector that shows the contact info button. Extremely useful: I only need one button for both calls and texts on my homescreen. I have a new number for my dentist after they moved, long tap them from recent calls and add the new number.
Now? All gone. - You can make a call from the text app, but only after you open the conversation, and it's a tiny button in the corner next to the menu. You haven't texted them? Sorry. - You can send a text from the dialer: switch to recent calls view, tap a recent call (the name, not the icon) and you can text that person. You haven't called them recently? Sorry. - Edit a contact from the dialer? Tap a recent call (the icon, not the name) to see their info, then click edit contact. Haven't called them recently? Sorry. - Want to call someone from your starred/favorite contacts? Tap the favorites section to expand it, you get 5 contacts on screen at a time with tiny hard-to-read names - Want to call a frequent contact that doesn't appear in the recent list because of a bunch of incoming calls? Tap the search button, if you're lucky you'll get a nice big target to tap, but more likely they won't show up (this is suggested contacts, not recent or favorite contacts) or they'll be underneath the keyboard. - the view contacts button opens your contacts manager that also doesn't have a view for favorite contacts. - The contacts app can initiate calls and text messages, but the only sort method it has is alphabetical, and it shows every contact you have, including those without phone numbers (you can filter them by tags/groups/account by opening the menu, but not by frequency or information). You also have to open the contact to see the buttons (which include video call; I have no idea what this does, as I have no video calling apps installed) - start a new conversation in messages, there's a prominently placed Gemini button at the top, despite Gemini being disabled in settings.
I would switch to the Samsung dialer and messenger app, but my phone is now a Motorola. Oops. Favorite contacts screen was removed from the dialer a while back for some unknown reason, but the useless voicemail screen remains (this screen doesn't work with either T-Mobile or with Google Voice)
Bonus: I sent pictures from Google voice weekly for the past few years, recently they never get received. (These are jpg screenshots of my work schedule, not giant photos; Google voice is convenient for viewing them myself on my desktop, phone, tablet. And Google voice still can't deal with webp or heic despite such images showing up in the image picker; in these cases the message can't even be sent)
Typing? I'm lucky. I have a nice big tablet, I only use my phone calls for text messages and calls, and for texting, swipe input has far less issues than tapping on the keyboard. Almost everything else goes through my 10" tablet. But yes, autocorrect on Android was also better when it was pure word lists without ML; sure, it was annoying to have to build a user dictionary, but you still have to do that anyways or else rarely used words will eventually get forgotten and names of contacts will eventually never be suggested if your swipe is the least bit off.
Thanks for qualifying my pain with the iOS phone app. The rock bottom of usability seems very far away now.
I bought an iPhone 4S way back when because I wanted a dead-simple UI for my mom.
Now she's on an iPhone SE (3rd gen), and the UI is a complete shitshow.
F you Apple.
(She also does not want a newer (aka larger) iPhone because they will not fit in her woman's jeans which notoriously have small pockets. Another "F you" from Apple to the consumers.)
If consumers cared about small phones Apple would still make the mini series. It's hardly Apple's fault the biggest phones are the most popular. In fact, they were late to the larger phone sizes, as the iPhone 6 shipped years after Android started going big.
Some consumers clearly do care, but mega-corporations aren't content with making a profit - they will kill profitable products because they're not profitable enough.
(Apparently the 12 and 13 mini had about 5% of iPhone market share in the year they were released [0]. Does that mean they were profitable for Apple? I don't know, but given how many phones Apple sells, I believe that even 5% iPhone market share would be profitable)
0. https://www.rickyspears.com/tech/the-rise-and-fall-of-apples...
Still using my 12 Mini on iOS 18 - I won't go without a fight.
the iphone keyboard words prediction is the dumbest in this era of AI tech. It very consistently and focused on predicting the wrong word i'm after.
"You are using it wrong"™
Even if they fix the keyboard, iOS as a whole can't really be fixed. This is a single symptom of a much larger problem. So much is broken, poorly implemented, or so laughably tasteless that it hurts my head to think about how it's positioned and accepted as a "premium" product. I understand that most people notice so little about the design of their surroundings that it's basically impossible for them to understand that this junk is inflicting thousands of tiny psychological cuts daily, but it makes me so very very sad that this is acceptable to so many people.
- As mentioned, keyboard input is offensively broken. Whiffed inputs, the entire text selection/cursor manipulation model sucks (not being able to select in the middle of a word is inexcusable unless you have Stockholm syndrome for the bandaids), the cursor manipulation is broken, keyboard gets stuck open or closed, etc. etc. I'm convinced the input design for this phone is a CIA psyop designed to drive you to madness so they can recruit you as a sleeper cell.
- Passcode inputs are also broken. Trying to enter your passcode at easily achievable speeds results in dropped inputs.
- Above point wouldn't be a big deal if it weren't for fingerprint scanning being given up for Face ID, which is complete dogshit that constantly fails-to-passcode trying and failing to scan my ceiling, or my face when it's against a pillow in the morning. It's also completely worthless when I'm unable to fully point my face at the phone (working on vehicles or in some other enclosed area) or am trying to use the phone completely off of muscle memory.
- The gesture navigation system is a fundamentally bad idea. I'm an average-sized man and reaching over to the left hand side of the screen to make back inputs requires me to shift my fingers on the back of the phone just to make the reach for the input. This is on a base-model iPhone 16, which is already a touch too large for many hands to deal with this input system. The hitboxes for navigation inputs are too small and many of the inputs are often shared with actions in apps, resulting in taking all sorts of actions you didn't want to. Android style 3-button navigation at the bottom of the screen solved this many years ago. As an aside, the 60 FPS screen on an $800 phone as a "fuck you" push to upgrade to an even fatter pig of a phone that suffers even more from the bad navigation is funny.
- The GPS is fucked up, at least on the iPhone 16. It takes forever to find its bearing, after which it usually holds onto it until losing its mind again at the most inconvenient time. The only phone I've seen with a worse GPS is a Unihertz Jelly. Being in the same league as a $150 niche night market special is shameful.
- I have a frustrating number of calls get dropped. I don't know exactly where this issue comes from but it's noticeable, I run into it a couple times a week. My previous S24 on the same carrier never dropped calls under the same circumstances, so I know not having this issue is possible.
- The flashlight implementation sucks. Being able to tap it off with screen input is incredibly frustrating when I'm fumbling around trying to do something in the dark. And of course, it turns the screen on so you can make this accidental input every time you turn the flashlight on with the assignable side button. Being able to adjust the brightness is something I've never found any use for and mostly just serves to annoy me when I accidentally turn it down with another unintended input, but maybe somebody somewhere gives a shit about this, I guess.
- The split notification/settings menu is incredibly annoying. The settings menu is already a reach on the smallest mainline models, the notifications menu basically requires whole-hand movement. 20% of the space in the notifications menu is taken up by a fuckoff huge clock that you can't configure the size of. The lack of notification icons results in me having to actually unlock the phone and check things instead of just being able to know at a glance (I know they wanted to distance themselves from the roached Android notification tray look but I don't care).
- Liquid Glass looks like shit. So does a lot of the rest of the phone but I don't really hold some moron designer's bad visual taste against a product unless it affects the usability of the product. And of course, it affects the usability of the product. I actually laughed out loud having a literally unreadable lockscreen clock after the iOS 26 update, with the factory-provided moon background to add a little more salt to the wound. It reads poorly and is tacky to boot.
- This is pretty minor but the constant nags about iCloud are very funny. These assholes just couldn't resist hounding you for 99 cents more after you bought their $800 fuckup. It's like getting nagged about a Sirius XM subscription in a Lamborghini.
Individual points may be taken care of, but the disease is terminal. The iPhone's success at this point is driven by network effects, marketing, and its posturing as a premium product. Grown adults have an emotional attachment to the brand and the lifestyle statement. Android vendors are aping this stuff now. The memories of quality software and the ability to recognize it is being actively erased from the collective memory. Hoping that any of this is going to change at this point is just pissing in the wind.
If the UI registers the characters, but the system inputs something else, how is this even possible?
Apple's apathy and general disdain for paying customers.
[dead]
Highly recommend Gboard.
I've been using it for years- much better at recognizing and more performant.
Also sends everything you type to Google. Depends on whether you care about that or not.
IIUC this is only true if you "Allow full access"
From 3rd party keyboard agreement:
> If you do not enable Full Access, developers are not permitted to collect and transmit the data you type. Any unauthorized collection or transmission of this data without your permission would be a violation of their developer agreement. Furthermore, there are also technical limitations in effect to prevent unauthorized access.
Wanted to read more about this. Source of the text seems to be a pop-up in iOS if I understand it correctly: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8519296?sortBy=rank
what do you lose if you don't give it "full access"?
gifs / stickers / search stuff
Turn off its internet access? That's what I do for my keyboard (owned by Microsoft but I'd probably still do that if it was made by the pope himself)
I doubt it does. If it did, it'd have learned basic declensions of basic words in Czech and Polish, because I've corrected it a million times already.
This is a very optimistic take on why Google bothers with data collection.