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Comment by smcl | Hacker News Reader

I loved my blackberry's keyboard, but I adjusted to iOS on-screen keyboard (starting circa the iPhone 4S) pretty well. Last couple of years though iOS autocorrect has started to be extremely aggressive and frequently very wrong (incorrectly changing were->we're, ill->i'll for example. and today changing "Torvalds" to "Torshavn" or something when I was talking about Linus and not the Faroes).

If someone has a nice phone with a physical keyboard I'd seriously consider it when I replace my iPhone

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> autocorrect has started to be extremely aggressive and frequently very wrong

First thing I do when setting up a new phone is turning off auto correct and auto capitalization. Yes, I still make mistakes, but I prefer becoming quite handy at using my backspace button than having to fight the auto correct all damn time.

Thank goodness it is not just me noticing that spell check and typing functionality is degrading!

I have also noticed that touch sensitivity has increased and decreased based on which app I am using. I used to never click on ads on Twitter, but now mistake clicks happen frequently (as an example).

I miss the BlackBerry days a lot, security and trustworthiness with the company was paramount as well and now that's all a fond memory... People laughed at the demise of the company's dominance, but I knew way back then that it was a key aspect of reliability that died with the company... sniff

I still have my old 3g Blackberry touch screen model, if things keep going bad I may try to get it reactivated (if that's even possible) and then grow a beard and move up to a log cabin in the mountains. :P

> I have also noticed that touch sensitivity has increased and decreased based on which app I am using.

...no way, really?! Could any iOS developers chime in on whether their are actually ways for apps to control this?

Autocorrect is an awful feature. Humans can easily determine from context which word was meant, if a letter or two are wrong. If autocorrect picks the wrong word, as it all too often does, the meaning is lost. Instead of a lousy typist, you come across as insane.

Yeah for all my complaining, autocorrect is still just about a net benefit but it’s MUCH less than it once was.

it’s funny how when it doesn’t work the negative feels is perhaps much stronger than the positive feeling when it works correctly

Autocorrect always picks the wrong word on android.

SwiftKey is getting buggier but is still a massive step up from the default since it:

- works with more languages

- can be configured to suggest completions and corrections but not auto-apply them

(If anyone from MS/SwiftKey team wonders: these days if I delete a word and start on a new it shows both the original word and the best predictions for the new word. Thankfully it only inserts the new one - but sadly it inserts two spaces.)

And since this is a startup forum, some advice if anyone else reads this:

1. don't skimp on testers. Good testers are extremely valuable.

2. give us users a way to give you feedback! You get a lot of rubbish (I know, I am a dev who sometimes work on products with easily available feedback channels) but without it feedback like this ends up on open forums like here - or we are just silent and mightily annoyed and ready to forgive quite a lot from the next app/keyboard/service that actually fixes the stupid thing your product didn't fix.

I don't get how Swiftkey went from being almost perfect to being almost perfectly shit at predicting what I want to say. I've switched to GBoard and also hate it (e.g. it won't auto-capitalize "I" for me), but at least the predictions are usable.

I was wondering if that's a problem isolated to my first language, but apparently it got worse in English as well. Although, it surely can't be as bad in a language that doesn't have agglutination.

For example "olamayacakmış" ("ol-a-me-cek-miş", meaning something like "we found out that it isn't possible to make that happen in the future") was an easy hit before and I could write "olamyckms" and used to get predicted. For some reason not anymore.

Just wanted to share the bug (?) that reduced my mobile typing speed by 30% in a single hit.

Well... SwiftKey did get bought out by Microsoft, I wonder if that has had any impact.

There appears to be some speculation about something changing on the iOS keyboard / autocorrect, causing it to get worse in the past few years. You're not alone!

Based on my experience with my iphone, I have a suspicion they've optimised somehow for people having fatter fingers. I've noticed that sometimes the auto correct assumes I mean to press a character next to the one I wanted.

This actually would make a lot of sense.

My previous guess was the original version had spaghetti code (ex: lots of hard coding edge cases), and they tried to move it to a more standardized / maintainable code block that hasn't been fully brought up to speed.

The guess was based on a interview video I saw discussing the various prototypes for the original iphone keyboard.

Meanwhile I think Android's has gotten a lot better.

This is interesting, I used Android briefly around 2011-2012 and found text entry to be quite frustrating so if it's improved I'll need to revisit it.

there all phone with phycical keyboard, unihertz, even blackberries drop new keybaord phone this year

I hope you did not type this comment on one of those :]

yes all the ML based ones feel like they're consistently adjusting to everyone in the world at once

I can learn to use a consistent kb, but I can't learn a moving target

Ahhhhh they added ML to the iOS keyboard input? No wonder it's behaving weirdly

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