[HN Gopher] iPhone Typos? It's Not Just You - The iOS Keyboard I...
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       iPhone Typos? It's Not Just You - The iOS Keyboard Is Broken
       [video]
        
       Author : walterbell
       Score  : 392 points
       Date   : 2025-12-11 15:25 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
        
       | izackp wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | DonHopkins wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | kivimaki wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | glitchc wrote:
           | 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...
        
         | noncoml wrote:
         | Mine is not being able to dial the right number on a phone.
        
       | DonHopkins wrote:
       | 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-...
        
         | neilv wrote:
         | 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?
        
       | mcphage wrote:
       | What.are.you.talking.about.the.iOS.keyboard.is.just.fine
        
         | altairprime wrote:
         | Yeahxright, worksnfor me
        
         | rationalist wrote:
         | Rhe Androidmkeyboard is jusr fine roo.
        
           | striking wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | pzo wrote:
             | 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.
        
           | verall wrote:
           | 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 :)
        
         | nixpulvis wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | AnotherGoodName wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | rogerrogerr wrote:
           | 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"
        
         | oulipo2 wrote:
         | 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
        
       | gchokov wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | phantasmish wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | RGamma wrote:
           | 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
        
             | phantasmish wrote:
             | 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.
        
         | rationalist wrote:
         | 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.)
        
           | jshier wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | PlunderBunny wrote:
             | 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.
        
         | jerlam wrote:
         | No one's getting promoted for a bug fix.
        
           | browningstreet wrote:
           | I joke that Tim Cook doesn't type on his iPhone. There's no
           | way he'd be happy with it if he did.
        
       | ksec wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | dmm wrote:
       | 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?
        
         | nixpulvis wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | anonymars wrote:
           | 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
        
             | nixpulvis wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | anonymars wrote:
               | 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
        
               | nixpulvis wrote:
               | 100%
               | 
               | Ownership is a critical and fading concept for software.
               | And it makes me really sad and frustrated.
        
               | fsflover wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | zzo38computer wrote:
               | 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).
        
             | ipython wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | iknowstuff wrote:
               | > 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. :)
        
         | brokencode wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | lotsofpulp wrote:
           | And I'd be happy with a couple more years of that.
        
           | hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
           | > 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.
        
         | codyb wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | jsight wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | crote wrote:
           | 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?
        
             | lotsofpulp wrote:
             | >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.
        
             | tasuki wrote:
             | > 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.
        
             | dpoloncsak wrote:
             | >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
        
         | ryandrake wrote:
         | > 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.
        
         | marcosdumay wrote:
         | As long as the monopolies are going strong, yes, software will
         | get worse and worse.
        
         | kibwen wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | browningstreet wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | altairprime wrote:
         | Did you file a beta report about the issue using Feedback
         | Assistant? If not, include a screen recording.
        
           | browningstreet wrote:
           | Yes, and I'll file again after the final production release.
           | Neither of the RCs resolved it.
        
         | mikestew wrote:
         | 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).
        
           | browningstreet wrote:
           | 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.
        
       | proee wrote:
       | If the UI registers the characters, but the system inputs
       | something else, how is this even possible?
        
         | tonypapousek wrote:
         | Apple's apathy and general disdain for paying customers.
        
       | grsmvg wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | or_am_i wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | grsmvg wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | apparent wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | n8cpdx wrote:
           | 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
           | :(
        
             | apparent wrote:
             | 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.
        
       | walterbell wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | iamacyborg wrote:
       | Well, I'm glad I'm not going crazy and the keyboard does actually
       | suck since the glass update...
        
         | saurik wrote:
         | The video actually says that he also can replicate the issue on
         | iOS 18.
        
       | celeritascelery wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | jmkni wrote:
         | 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
        
           | eptcyka wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | loloquwowndueo wrote:
           | 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 :)
        
             | jerlam wrote:
             | 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.
        
         | neogodless wrote:
         | 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!_
        
           | yonaguska wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | benchly wrote:
             | 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.
        
           | noisem4ker wrote:
           | Google's Gboard completes "i want t" with "to" and "the" for
           | me.
        
             | CrimsonRain wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | homebrewer wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | ASalazarMX wrote:
               | 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.
        
           | xboxnolifes wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | yipbub wrote:
             | 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.
        
           | dweekly wrote:
           | 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!
        
           | soco wrote:
           | 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...
        
         | citrin_ru wrote:
         | 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).
        
           | reactordev wrote:
           | confirmed, their glass ux has added padding to everything,
           | reducing screen real estate.
        
           | alwa wrote:
           | 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...
        
         | n8cpdx wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | jorvi wrote:
         | 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.)
        
           | nneonneo wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | ASalazarMX wrote:
             | 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.
        
           | danudey wrote:
           | > 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.
        
             | mrguyorama wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | walterbell wrote:
               | We need a github repo with a list of past tech with good
               | taste and poor market timing, for revaluation in newer
               | markets.
        
           | eviks wrote:
           | > 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
        
           | takinola wrote:
           | > 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
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | soco wrote:
           | Now we must have AI everywhere, damn that quality of life
           | those lefties keep on expecting.
        
         | ricardobeat wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | a012 wrote:
       | 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
        
         | ilogik wrote:
         | SwiftKey PCalc
         | 
         | you're welcome :)
        
         | Tier2Capital wrote:
         | I love the Panecal app, can recommend if you can handle looking
         | geeky while using it
        
         | conscion wrote:
         | If you're OK with a ridiculously tall phone:
         | https://www.clicks.tech/
        
           | n8cpdx wrote:
           | 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).
        
             | supportengineer wrote:
             | What are "salad fingers"? Lettuce discuss it more.
        
               | n8cpdx wrote:
               | https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fMmlyLdpBXM
        
         | Aachen wrote:
         | 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)
        
       | ramity wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | iamacyborg wrote:
         | I have that feature off and I am making noticeably more typing
         | errors since the glass update.
        
           | embedding-shape wrote:
           | 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
        
             | iamacyborg wrote:
             | 13 mini here and it's definitely just since the glass
             | update for me.
        
         | koakuma-chan wrote:
         | General -> Keyboard -> Slide to Type
         | 
         | I don't have an issue with typing on iPhone, but I just
         | disabled it to see what happens.
        
         | brookst wrote:
         | Doesn't.helpmme At.all
        
         | rconti wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | nkrisc wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | Y-bar wrote:
         | I have this disabled and the problem clearly exists anyway.
        
         | spike021 wrote:
         | I don't use the slide feature and typing quality has gone
         | downhill ever since iOS 17 or thereabouts IMO.
        
         | ghostpepper wrote:
         | Peak swipe-to-text was on my HTC Desire circa 2010 using the
         | third-party keyboard Swype. Everything since then has been a
         | downgrade.
        
           | mckn1ght wrote:
           | I still refer to doing it on iPhone as swyping. The
           | portmanteau has permanently genericized in my brain. Those
           | were the days!
        
           | embedding-shape wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | tehwebguy wrote:
         | I feeeeeel like this helped me but didn't solve the problem
         | fully. Changed it like 2-3 weeks ago.
        
         | lynndotpy wrote:
         | > 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.
        
           | Y-bar wrote:
           | > 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.
        
         | moralestapia wrote:
         | >Please upvote this comment for visibility.
         | 
         | Lol. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button!
        
           | jiggawatts wrote:
           | If YouTube ever renames or even just moves that button,
           | millions of videos will suddenly be "broken".
        
             | sentientslug wrote:
             | 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.
        
         | comradesmith wrote:
         | Thanks, I'll try this :)
        
       | ChrisArchitect wrote:
       | _It 's Not Just You_
       | https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
        
         | walterbell wrote:
         | This thread has more comments than all previous submissions
         | combined.
        
           | ChrisArchitect wrote:
           | Understood. Just highlighting the number of submissions of
           | this thing for 2 months over and over with interest but
           | little traction.
        
       | baseballdork wrote:
       | 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?
        
         | rconti wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | baseballdork wrote:
           | > 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.
        
             | markisus wrote:
             | 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
        
               | mock-possum wrote:
               | Yeah same -
               | 
               | Kill males kill males kill muddled kill mussels
               | (hilarious)
               | 
               | Treat myself tear myself try myself tell myself
               | 
               | It won't do it.
        
               | nothercastle wrote:
               | Kill mussels confirmed
        
             | lynndotpy wrote:
             | 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".
        
               | m-s-y wrote:
               | ...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.
        
               | leptons wrote:
               | 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.
        
           | pureagave wrote:
           | Duck me, I notice it all the time!
        
         | jjice wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | glitchcrab wrote:
           | You can install gboard on iOS - I haven't used the default
           | keyboard in years
        
             | jjice wrote:
             | 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.
        
             | lynndotpy wrote:
             | Unfortunately, it's simply not as good. I miss long-press
             | punctuation so much.
        
               | SJMG wrote:
               | 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.
        
             | PieUser wrote:
             | That buggy abandonware that hasn't been updated in 3 years?
        
             | socalgal2 wrote:
             | 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 :(
        
           | encom wrote:
           | >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.
        
           | tasuki wrote:
           | > The default keyboard on Pixels (GBoard?) is excellent.
           | 
           | Not my experience at all. Do you only write English?
        
             | mavamaarten wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | batrat wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | parliament32 wrote:
               | 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).
        
               | kergonath wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | noname120 wrote:
               | 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.
        
             | jjice wrote:
             | Yeah I only write English so I have no idea of the quality
             | of other languages.
        
         | jaffa2 wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | butlike wrote:
         | Similar story here as well. Why is editing only a nightmare
         | when it's something salacious or off-beat?
        
         | jmye wrote:
         | > 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.
        
         | nothercastle wrote:
         | My phone loves to tell people they V are fat instead of ask
         | them about their day. Also loves adding random v s everywhere
        
         | tasuki wrote:
         | 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?
        
           | baseballdork wrote:
           | Please, for the love of god, do not pull LLMs into the mix. I
           | just want the keyboard to display what I'm typing.
        
             | tasuki wrote:
             | Yea, it'd also be cool if they, like, just included a basic
             | dictionary?
        
               | socalgal2 wrote:
               | 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.
        
           | parliament32 wrote:
           | 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).
        
           | thaumasiotes wrote:
           | > 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.
        
         | zemo wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | bitwize wrote:
         | 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.)
        
         | loloquwowndueo wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | sammy2255 wrote:
           | 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
        
         | Aachen wrote:
         | 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
        
         | renlo wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
           | Except sometimes the autocorrection will "helpfully" replace
           | the prior word to jive with its model of the universe.
           | Incredibly frustrating.
        
           | engineer_22 wrote:
           | Horrifying.
        
           | haarolean wrote:
           | it's kinda bleak realizing I've been running the same cursed
           | workflow for way too long. brb gonna disable that
           | autocomplete
        
         | cg5280 wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | DamnInteresting wrote:
         | The iPhone keyboard is a living he'll.
        
         | prennert wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | obvi8 wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | majjam wrote:
           | 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?
        
             | n8cpdx wrote:
             | 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.
        
             | snailmailman wrote:
             | 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
        
               | 9dev wrote:
               | You can still tap and hold in the text itself to bring up
               | the magnifying glass gizmo, but yeah the experience is
               | awful
        
           | embedding-shape wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | mrguyorama wrote:
           | "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.
        
         | organsnyder wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | IshKebab wrote:
           | > 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.
        
           | mrguyorama wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | beeflet wrote:
         | just turn autocorrect off. You can learn to type pretty quickly
         | without it, and you aren't subject to mind control.
        
         | m463 wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | ZeroConcerns wrote:
       | 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)
        
       | willwade wrote:
       | 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..
        
       | jasonjmcghee wrote:
       | Highly recommend Gboard.
       | 
       | I've been using it for years- much better at recognizing and more
       | performant.
        
         | freeplay wrote:
         | Also sends everything you type to Google. Depends on whether
         | you care about that or not.
        
           | jasonjmcghee wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | 0_-_0 wrote:
             | what do you lose if you don't give it "full access"?
        
             | Aachen wrote:
             | 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
        
           | tasuki wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | zamadatix wrote:
             | This is a very optimistic take on why Google bothers with
             | data collection.
        
           | Aachen wrote:
           | 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)
        
       | WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
       | iPhone miscorrects apostrophes between "its" and "it's", and its
       | driving me insane.
       | 
       | sent from my iPhone
        
         | apparent wrote:
         | ^sent from my iPhone, right?
        
           | WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
           | Sorry I had to steal that part from you because it's too
           | good!
        
       | petercooper wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | crazygringo wrote:
         | 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?
        
       | PsylentKnight wrote:
       | 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
        
         | pjerem wrote:
         | 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 ?
        
           | PsylentKnight wrote:
           | I get notifications from most applications, just not
           | messaging apps (slack, telegram, whatsapp)
        
       | herbturbo wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | Ensorceled wrote:
         | Yeah, the blue lines under a random word in a perfectly correct
         | sentence is such a waste of time ... did I mistype? Nope.
        
       | farhanhubble wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | fragmede wrote:
         | GBoard for me. Can't stand the Apple iOS keyboard for some
         | reason.
        
           | neom wrote:
           | +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.
        
         | bpye wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | zjp wrote:
       | 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
        
         | crazygringo wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | chatmasta wrote:
       | 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?
        
         | crazygringo wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | RGamma wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | chatmasta wrote:
           | I tried turning it off once, and the alternative was way
           | worse.
        
             | RGamma wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | scotty79 wrote:
               | It's worse because touching the right spot on tiny screen
               | with fat fingers is astonishingly hard.
        
               | RGamma wrote:
               | [delayed]
        
       | everdrive wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | nothercastle wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | oulipo2 wrote:
       | 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
        
       | Yizahi wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | Xiol wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | rmccue wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | armandososa wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | Zhenya wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | RandallBrown wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | vel0city wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | Zhenya wrote:
           | 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.
           | ..
        
             | vel0city wrote:
             | > 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"?
        
       | Ensorceled wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | evereverever wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | Aachen wrote:
         | I don't understand. How can you press spacebar on a device you
         | say doesn't feature a keyboard?
        
           | pfortuny wrote:
           | 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.
        
       | FriedPickles wrote:
       | > 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.
        
         | mckn1ght wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | deepspace wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | Aachen wrote:
         | 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?
        
           | FriedPickles wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | n8cpdx wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | schainks wrote:
       | 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. -\\_(tsu)_/-
        
       | Havoc wrote:
       | 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
        
       | m3kw9 wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | Aachen wrote:
       | 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
        
       | iJohnDoe wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | swah wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | skygazer wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | languagehacker wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | jerf wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | christkv wrote:
       | My theory is that the keyboard team is composed of sadists that
       | enjoy making us all ducking suffer.
        
       | davidczech wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | lamontcg wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | Aachen wrote:
       | 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
        
         | parliament32 wrote:
         | Apple severely limits third-party keyboards, see
         | https://old.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1l2gg3r/thirdparty_ios...
        
       | tbensky wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | skygazer wrote:
         | 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?
        
       | evrimoztamur wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | rcarmo wrote:
       | 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)
        
       | game_the0ry wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | warunsl wrote:
       | "You are using it wrong"(tm)
        
       | thinkling wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | rezonant wrote:
         | Interesting. Just tried this out on Pixel's gboard and it does
         | seem to correct this sort of issue
        
         | ____tom____ wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | sshadmand wrote:
       | 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?
        
       | joecool1029 wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | SJMG wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | Gander5739 wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | zzo38computer wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | SirMaster wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | zzo38computer wrote:
           | 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.
        
       | nomel wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | kace91 wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | beeflet wrote:
           | It is at odds with the unix standard for programs to succeed
           | silently but fail loudly.
        
           | lurking_swe wrote:
           | 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.
        
       | socalgal2 wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | RankingMember wrote:
         | 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?"
        
       | drooopy wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | neuroelectron wrote:
       | The best part about this is it's not your phone so there's no way
       | to fix it
        
       | dpsych wrote:
       | I always end up pressing the `.` instead of enter when trying to
       | search somethin on Safari.
        
       | ____tom____ wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | deepspace wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | kbd wrote:
       | 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...
        
       | scotty79 wrote:
       | Does anyone know an Android keyboard that uses local LLM with all
       | you typed ever before as a context?
        
       | diziet wrote:
       | 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.
        
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