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Comment by jaysonelliot | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately the keyboard force touch only works about ~70% of the time, which is too unpredictable for me to start incorporating into regular use as a user.

It's odd that after ten years of development, Apple still hasn't made their keyboard just work. Selecting and manipulating text is still buggy and unpredictable.

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I agree. I got really excited about the keyboard thing (when I edit code on my phone, proper cursor movement is severely lacking), but when I tried it on a friend's 6S I was severely underwhelmed. The activation force seemed random, and the cursor would never land where you expected. It was slower than using the little magnifying glass on the actual text.

Touch keyboards are a hard problem, but we use them so often (I'm using one now) that I think Apple would be smart to put some more thought into it.

That's an accurate assessment. I use the trackpad on my 6s+ frequently. 50% of the time it works perfectly. 50% of the time I apparently don't lift my finger in the speed or direction iOS expects, so the cursor moves forwards or backwards 1 or 2 characters from where I wanted it to stop. And I have to try again because there's no other way to nudge the cursor a character or two.

Just a little tweaking and it would be perfect. I don't have this problem with using the keyboard normally, which is quite accurate.

I just looked at the changelog for iOS 9.3 and it says:

> Improves reliability when using 3D Touch on the keyboard

Hopefully this means "just a little tweaking" was done and the feature is more comfortable to use.

If you try to use the force-touch "trackpad" too soon after you've typed a character, the keyboard thinks you're still typing and refuses to do it. You have to pause for a bit or tap somewhere outside of the keyboard then try to force-touch. At least, that has been my experience. It's incredibly frustrating because I almost always want to use it to correct something in the word I just typed.

I have the same problem with the dictation icon. Sometimes I'll start typing a message and then realize that I'd rather dictate it. Once you start typing, the keyboard goes into "typing" mode. If you try to tap the dictation icon, it thinks you're aiming for the space bar.

I think that the keyboard is trying to be "smart" by altering its behavior based on what it thinks you'll do next. The problem is that those changes aren't reflected in the UI, so there's no way for me to know about them. I'm sure I benefit from that intelligence some of the time, but I only notice it when it when the keyboard stubbornly refuses to do what I want.

If you ever find yourself trying to activate the keyboard cursor but the phone thinks you're typing, simply let off on the pressure a little (without removing your finger from the screen) and then press down again. This will switch you into cursor mode. I've found this to be 100% reliable.

wow, this works.

The 3d touch 'trackpad' thing on the keyboard is great, but i could never get it to reliabily work... but i think using this (slight push, then harder again) makes it almost completely usable.

I don't have a 6s but I think you could tweak a little bit in the Keyboard settings under _Accessibility_.

I went through a period of thinking the same: sometimes it would seem to want to type a letter instead of triggering the cursor movement. I think the key is that you just keep your finger on the screen while applying a bit more pressure (press harder, then release the pressure without lifting off the screen) to trigger the trackpad mode. I now find it 100% reliable and can't figure out how to trigger the odd behaviour I was previously experiencing.

There are a few gotchas that you have to learn which come with practice and it really pays off.

There's a delay for how quickly you can use it after the last time you've used it. The delay could/should be smaller, but don't get frustrated. Go slow and don't press too hard.

When you get used to the timings and pressures, it pays off and it's suddenly a pleasure to go and delete or correct something, or the whole input. Now I get frustrated on phones without it.

On the subject of keyboards, I have always found the iOS keyboard to be the most satisfying to use, possibly also the most accurate. What do other people like using?

I liked the windows phone keyboard, thought the Fire phone was okay, but am chronically unsatisfied with the Android typing experience. I have played with a few but settled for a while on Google Keyboard before moving onto Fleksy which isn't bad. Shame its broken for HTML text input fields...

SwiftKey on Android is still by far the best for me, but unfortunately other problems with Android (namely the dearth of high-end devices under 5") are probably going to force me to switch to iPhone.

The default Apple keyboard makes me incredibly frustrated, especially when used one-handed (which is 90% of my usage). No flow typing, and nearly all numbers, punctuation, and symbols are locked away behind layers of menus. I do find it the most accurate for typing in unpredictable plain text, but that's not very useful even for passwords (LastPass + most of my passwords have symbols in them).

Most of the third party keyboards are crippled shadows of their Android counterparts, but I can least get flow typing through them.

> SwiftKey on Android is still by far the best for me, but unfortunately other problems with Android (namely the dearth of high-end devices under 5") are probably going to force me to switch to iPhone.

The Xperia Z Compact line is, for my money, the most pleasant Android phone I've found. The Z3C is still plenty snappy and is my personal favorite, but after sacrificing mine to the pavement deities the Z5C is still pretty great.

You can access the second mode of the keyboard by tapping on the "123" icon, dragging your thumb over to the key you want to select, then lifting. This also works with capitalization + shift and international keyboards.

It works every time. Just wait for the cursor to start blinking and then deep press. It takes a while to get used to but then it just works.

Wait until the cursor stops blinking. Takes some tenths of a second after you stop typing. I was tearing out my hair until I read that.

It's not odd at all. PEBKAC is tough to solve with the constraints of a mobile device.

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