Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

496 pointsputtycat407 comments

I've had an iPhone for almost 10 years now. Since last year I've been using a 12 Mini, before that I had a first generation SE (best phone I ever had).

In the last year or so I feel that typing using the touch keyboard has become unbearable. I constantly make typos, and even with auto correction turned on, the corrections don't usually make sense and I am forced to delete and retype.

I believe that the major change had something to do with the text selection and cursor placement change that was made somewhere between iOS 14 and 15 (or 13 -14, or whatever, who can remember).

Nothing feels intuitive anymore: trying to select a word rarely works, and selection ends up being snapped on to unrelated stuff. There are at least three different types of displays falling under the category of "suggestions": auto-complete (three words above keyboard), spelling suggestions (red wiggly line+tooltip), and another kind of tooltip that sometimes appears but I still haven't figured out.

And above all, cursor scrolling using either the spacebar trick or a hard press on screen is a complete mess and usually snaps to some random part of the text, and it is apparently variable and depends on the UI context (behaves differently within URL bars vs. multiline text).

I find myself more and more often preferring not to use the phone and waiting to get to an actual computer with a keyboard to type anything beyond a few words.

Am I just getting older/going through some cognitive decline or is the mobile typing experience actually getting worse?

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When the iPhone launched, Apple talked a lot about how the typing system worked.

What I remember is that it sounded like pretty simple lookups. As you typed, the software compared your word to, essentially, a weighted dictionary to guess what you were going to type next.

If you typed “b” it was flummoxed. But if you typed “behav” it knew the next letter was almost certainly going to be “e” or “i” (for behavior). It may have been more complicated than that, but probably not much. It was 2007 and the phone CPU was not powerful.

One interesting thing I remember is that they said the phone enlarged the touch targets for highly predicted next letters. For example it would be easier to type an “e” than a “w” after you had typed “behav”, because the tap boundary expanded around the “e”. Cool stuff!

And if you did type behavw and hit space, it would autocorrect to behave.

At some point I recall Apple announcing that they had switched autocorrect to a full machine learning implementation. Rather than a simple deterministic look-up, it was trained on a huge corpus of text, and reads the whole chunk of what you’ve written so far to make predictions. Everyone does this now, it’s how they deliver the (incredibly annoying and stupid IMO) one-tap suggestions for email and text replies. “Thanks!” “Noted.” “I’ll get right on that.”

In my memory, that’s when typing got a lot more annoying on iPhones. The quality of suggestions went either down or weirdo or both. For example it just tried to sub-in “Quaker” for “quality” in the previous sentence. Why??

Do people actually send messages to each other like that? I modified all the precomposed replies on my watch to remove capitals and punctuation. Using capitals and punctuation raises the register of the message for me, and 99% of the time if I’m sending a text it’s to friends or family.

What does "raises the register" in this context mean?

Register of speak I suppose ? Formal, vulgar, technical, casual... I might be wrong English is not my first language. But that would fits nicely. I understand that as going from casual to formal, for instance.

“Raise the bar” would be the colloquially used term around here.

It means the formality level of text. I think that person was saying that within their family chats, they perceive that using capitals and punctuation makes the messages feel unnecessarily/inappropriately formal.

Yes exactly.

I normally wouldn’t say anything but since it’s the topic of conversation, I hate that. I see lowercase and deliberate no punctuation as passive aggression.

Depends on your circle of friends I guess.

I think it's not unreasonable to expect there to be written dialects as well as spoken ones. A comparatively huge amount of a person's communication is written these days, where previously it would have been face-to-face or with a phone call.

The general spoken register where I live skews informal, so I assume this has carried over to written communication. Using capitals and punctuation comes across to me as stilted and like an email or a letter rather than a text message.

It's an interesting subject definitely

  >  I see lowercase and deliberate no punctuation as passive aggression.

interesting, why does it seem as passive aggression?

for me upper/lowercase just feels redundant and its simpler for me, but i guess some people can see it as annoying...

If you're in the car, it's nice, but it simply doesn't work.. So what d you do? You first struggle 2 minutes with the phone, and fixing all the mess it made, and then just pick up the phone and quickly type a message in 10 seconds. With or without autofrustrate

Machine learning is powerful in many domains, but it's giving engineers license to be lazy. I don't know why everyone isn't using NNs and the likes as augments to existing code so that they keep what already works fine, but rather, they feel they can just replace it, which leads to all the problems we see now in Google, in autocorrect, and so on.

>Machine learning is powerful in many domains, but it's giving engineers license to be lazy.

The problem is that if you do machine learning, you just throw data at it to correct wrong behaviors. It's difficult to marry this with a logical approach, like dictionary frequency. Which one do you weight how much? 50:50? What if the user dislikes one of the two models more often, do you add another layer of machine learning here?

remember Watson in jeopardy? Even when it got the question wrong you’d often see the right answer in the list of possibilities it showed.

Users need a way to train/override the ML to “fix” mistakes.

I recently switched from Android to Apple, and this was a big difference that I noticed. I think Google/Android still use a "simple lookup" dictionary (or similar) that updates based on your own behavior, while Apple's suggestions are sometimes non-sensical, and harder to correct (happens to me when typing domains ending in ".xyz" a lot - they get autocorrected to ".cuz")

High Quakers are more fun.

>At some point I recall Apple announcing that they had switched autocorrect to a full machine learning implementation.

>For example it just tried to sub-in “Quaker” for “quality” in the previous sentence. Why??

We need to organize and get a huge number of people to start sending text messages one day, using the autocorrect as it works, and not correcting the autocorrect. Just let it put whatever words it wants in there, and send those messages, no matter how nonsensical they are.

If everyone just does this for a week, it'll completely ruin these companies' ML models and they'll be forced to switch back to simpler autocorrect implementations that are actually useful.

My 2 and 5 year olds do this every night after talking to grandparents. The paragraphs they produce are pure nonsense

Have you submitted them to https://www.damnyouautocorrect.com/?

What difference would this make? Using the ML model's output as input would merely make the model think it is indeed correct.

The ML models would not be ruined beyond how they already are. And if their current state is insufficient to force anything, this would just be more of the same.

> Sorry for the inconvenience caused to your order. Our customer is aware of the situation in the area and will be able to help resolve it.

Starting with only the word sorry. interesting that it went down a customer service path. It started suggesting corporate speak.

> Nature is a religion that has been around since ancient times but it is now being used to promote a culture of diversity in society that has not yet developed.

Starting with nature. Wow, deep stuff.

> I think you should do some research before making a post about the new game. I have played a lot with my wife but she doesn’t have a clue.

Don’t have a wife.

Are you talking about autocorrect or predictive text?

> Sorry for the late reply I just wanted to let you know that I am so sorry I missed your call yesterday I was just fine with that I was just fine with that I was just fine with that I was just fine with that I was just fine with that I was just fine with that I was just fine with that I was just fine with that I was just fine with that I was just fine with that I was just fine with that I was just fine with that

My SE seems to have a bit of a psychotic breakdown over missing things. Siri, you doing ok there?

> Nature is in the way of the planet and the planet is in the planet of the planet and the planet is in the planet of the planet and the planet is in the planet of the planet and

> I like the idea of the planet and the planet is in the planet of the planet and the planet

“She’s stuck in an infinite loop and he’s an idiot”

You need to get a wife soon. The machine learning algorithm will get on it - watch out for it signing up for dating apps on its own.

Sorry for your loss but I’m glad you’re getting better soon and I hope you feel much stronger and more confident in the next few days and I will be praying for the best of both worlds and I know that I love you and I will always be here if you ever wanna come over and see my little baby girl and we can hang out and play games and I will be happy for the rest of my life

> If everyone just does this for a week, it'll completely ruin these companies' ML models

Well, that seems to be what is going on, judging from the messages I get from older and younger relatives.

> For example it just tried to sub-in “Quaker” for “quality” in the previous sentence. Why??

Do you have an app called Quaker something installed? I had to disable predictive text because after installing the “YouBike 1.0” app my phone refused to let me type the number 10. It always got replaced with 1.0 no matter how many times I tried to correct it.

Try Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement.

Map “10” to “10”.

It’s the only way I could get iOS to stop correcting fucking to ducking. (Lol, it just tried to correct ducking to fucking and I had to override it.)

You can disable predictive text?!? Teach me your ways!

Settings > General > Keyboards, near the bottom there is a toggle for Predictive.

the unfortunate thing about this is you lose the three suggested words at the top of the keyboard if you want to get rid of the rewrite feature.

the suggested words are sometimes not correct, but jesus ducking christ just let me opt in if it’s useful in the moment!

I set up an auto-correct for 'ducking' to replace it back to what you actually want to say.

Also whilst Apple is reading this, please stop changing "were" to "we're" out of context. Ugh.

As a fellow frustrated typer (AC’d to Tyler just now) in Taiwan, thank you for pointing this out. I was absolutely flummoxed.

Sometimes I’d type out a correct spelling of a word and it’d correct it to another word that’s totally unrelated to the context of the sentence, like your Quake example.

Infuriating when in a rush.

Mine throws in random French words that look like the medical words I was aiming for.

Also for a 3 month period it was auto-correcting ’thé’ to ‘teh’ - i had to train it out of it by spending around half an hour just entering and cancelling the auto correct in notepad on both my computer and phone (because they’re linked)

Edit… oh dear, it may have discovered another association I don’t want it to have

Ugh this happens to me all the time. Earlier I typed pre-sale and it put pré-salé for some reason, and it’s in English keyboard. Why have separate ones if you’re just gonna mush the auto together anyway?

Your comments are not visible because you were shadowbanned years ago. You should create a new account.

atkailash's comment is visible to me.

Because I vouched for it. Turn on "showdead" in your settings and look at his profile.

I looked through their comment history, I couldn't see anything too controversial around the time this kicked started. Weird, maybe they can ask @dang to see what's up?

For me it always turns “well” into “we’ll”. I have no idea why. I rarely type in the second person, and grammatically they’re not substitutes. It’s maddening.

Yes! This does my head in. The number of times I've sent 'We'll done!'

Yes! And ill to I'll, or the other way around. It's driving me bonkers.

For me [on Android, which is just as excerable] it's changing "has" to "had", which it does every fucking time. No matter how many times I change it back. I'll re-read what I've written and find I've been jumping between past and present tense like a grammatical kangaroo.

One thing that could vastly improve the suggestions would be to only insert a proper noun if I've first tapped the shift key. Here again, Android has the infuriating habit of suddenly inserting a person, city or country name into the most prosaic of sentences.

My other major annoyance with this kind of typing on mobile is that; once the fuckwitted algorithm has made a ridiculously wrong choice, when you spot it a word or two later and go back to correct it, all the corrections offered are variations on the wrong word it chose, rather than alternatives for what could have been chosen initially.

And the very nature of typing on mobile means you're looking at the keyboard, not what's appearing on-screen [as people can do, to various degrees, on 'real' keyboards]. So, unless you're looking up at the screen between every single word, to make sure it's correct, a lot of the correcting has to be done belatedly. So the errors tend to pile up.

And how come neither Google nor Samsung keyboards capitalize the I? Really folks, you call that ML and also put it in your CV?

good, i hate how many devices and applications make me turn off capitalisation.

Third person?

Yes! And "in" to "I'm" and vice-versa. It drives me absolutely mental. iOS typing just gets worse and worse over time.

And evidently I'm not allowed to swear. "Fuck" gets unfailingly "corrected" to "duck" -- even if I spell it out.

Adding a text replacement from “fuck” to “fuck” (General - Keyboards - Text Replacement) allows you to swear again.

Oh nice, I never thought of that. I would love to see the list of these unacceptable words, I can almost understand it not wanting to type out "fuck" but iirc they were also not autocorrecting "abortion" at one point which is a little ... conservative

They put those various in because there was a time when it would autocorrect the other way duck would become fuck if misspelled kind of thing.

And usually a misplaced duck is less harmful in a polite/business setting than a misplaced fuck.

“I saw a fuck on the road on the way to work” in work chat is a different type of embarrassment than “what the duck were you thinking you ducking idiot” in a personal text.

oh yeah I get it, I’d just love to see the list of words out of sheer curiousity

I'd assume it must be somewhere in the source, so perhaps someone has already decompiled it.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-apple-kill-list-what-your-... might be a place to start

Thank you so much. This alone is a quality of life improvement on an ios keyboard. I'll live with s/well/we'll/ if it stops trying to police my tone when I'm annoyed

There's a blast from the past. Remember on the old Nokia dumbphones with T9 [0] predictive text. Belatedly realising you'd insulted somebody by calling them a 'duck' or an 'aunt'

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text)

That's first person plural, not second person btw.

thank you

Continue typing the following word and it will revert we'll to well if we'll didn't make sense. (In other words, it looks backward two words, not one.)

This has never happened for me.

Reset your keyboard dictionary.

Also when I dictate using Siri, maybe becomes “may be”. Wtf

I've discovered that Siri (US-English) is, IMNSHO ridiculously heavily weighted towards southern drawl. Like, where "lion" and "line" are essentially indistinguishable sounds. It KEEPs transcribing my words as if i had a southern accent, but i very much speak with a generic northern accent with fairly clear enunciation and diction and pronunciations that tend to match the dictionary.

Nit: that's the first person plural, not the second person.

I believe there is (or very much should be) something like a “principle of least surprise” in product design. Delight is great but this is unexpected, annoying behavior.

I took from all the comments to experiment with turning off auto-complete. So far its going great. You can still manually select words to substitute or complete but the algorithm won’t change any words by itself.

Swipe-to-type on Yandex keyboard on Android had a similarly infuriating habit of "correcting" my English spelling to American. So I'd swipe c-o-l-o-u-r and it would insert 'color', c-e-n-t-r-e and it would insert 'center', etc. etc.

Oh.And this was with my phone set to 'UK English' and Yandex keyboard set to use 'System Language'. If I caught it in time, I could drag the suggested word off the suggestion bar, so it would be removed from future suggestions. But the yanks have mangled the English language so much, it was a Sisyphean task.

As happy as I normally would be to laugh at Apple misfortune, everything in this thread including your comment could be about Android, and it would still sound true in my experience :(

Yeah, they're remarkably similar in this frustration, though have their own weird quirks around it in terms of implementation issues. Drives me crazy on every one of my devices.

This gets exacerbated if you are using a different language, like we Indians do. Type Hindi/Kannada/Tamil in English. Your autocorrect/predict word steers in the direction of most frequently used language and screws up all your pure english comms. Can still live with autocorrect but absolutely hate this ML based predictive nonsense, and I have completely disabled it.

In my experience suggestions also depend on the selected keyboard. When I type German on the English keyboad, autocorrect is terrible. I tried switching keyboards for a while but that did not work for me. The reason is that the placement of common letters (a to z) is subtly different between layouts and that skyrockets the error rate of my typing.

Does the iPhone not have an easy way to switch between keyboards? I just swipe left/right on the space bar to switch between Norwegian and English keyboards - but my phone isn't an iphone.

I has, but the issue is that the layout if the common keys (like letters a to z) is ever so slightly different that it wrecks my typing when I switch.

You can switch the layout in the keyboard setting. Most languages have a qwerty variant.

If you have several languages configured, there's a globe icon that lets you switch between keyboards. It's still a step down from Android that seems to just detect the language even if you switch mid-sentence.

If you don't mind the crashes, Gboard does this fine, generally detecting the difference between English, Spanish, and Portuguese for me. Although sometimes it wakes up on the wrong side of the bed and suggests only nonsense.

iOS autodetects and automatically switches languages as you described. The globe icon is just for switching key layouts. Language is independent of key layout.

> "Auto-Correction uses your keyboard dictionary to spellcheck words as you type, automatically correcting misspelled words for you." [1]

This is also consistent with my experience.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207525

If iOS has language detection like that, it's been broken for Finnish for years.

https://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability/#quicktype-ke...

QuickType Keyboard: Multilingual Typing

English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Hindi

Looks pretty half-assed implementation to me. If they have autocorrect for Finnish, it shouldn't be too difficult to do quick lookups for both Finnish and English. And everyone knows that it's Autocorrect's carefully designed brand image to screw up, switching languages would allow more creative mistakes.

I have yet to encounter a predictive text system that handles more than one language well. I type a mix of Dutch and English on my phone, because that's how I talk. But there is no reliable way to say "use both". It's one or the other.

The is one problem with letting Americans design things. They don't understand that the rest of the world regularly speaks more than one language, and that in different environments they're mixed up in different ways.

That. Auto-correction is just about impossible for me. I write in two or three languages, and sometimes mix them. In addition to that, the suggestions, even in the correct language, are always 100% wrong. Auto-correction has always, without exception, been in the way for me, so that one gets switched off first thing.

It's actually bliss to write Japanese.. even with my limited ability to do that. The only thing that pops up is suggestions for which kanji or whatever to use for what I entered. Works smoothly and fast.

> I have yet to encounter a predictive text system that handles more than one language well.

Huh, really?

I have "Multilingual typing" enabled in my Android keyboard settings and it works pretty well. I can write a message that has English, German and French mixed in (not even that uncommon in Switzerland...) and it doesn't have any problems with it.

I’ll just leave this here: https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1565341723860971520

The beauty of heuristics / expert-rules based AI. Understandable, easy, fast.

Yup. Heuristics over algorithms is The Correct Answer™ (for UX).

I once wrote a bespoke query parser for an in-house full text search app. Spent most of my time doing fit and finish for the domain specific stuff. Looked at logs of actual user searches, before and after. Even did usability testing. (Who does that any more?)

End result was "invisible", because it just worked. Totally unattainable if I'd relied solely on stock tool stack.

The gem in that tweet screed is this comment:

> This gets back to the idea of preventing frustration. I determined that it would be more frustrating to have autocorrection “guess wrong” and erroneously fix broken typing.

I work on automation a lot, and this is so hard to communicate to the endless stream of non-tech types that just want to “tweak” the algorithms to be a little bit smarter. Trust is an asymmetric proposition, requires lots of positive inputs to slowly accrete it; it takes very few negative inputs to rapidly dissolve it. It is better to be reliably/predictably helpful some of the time, than it is to usually be helpful but sometimes dishelpful all of the time.

Or as Thumper put it (kinda): “If you don’t have nuthin nice to add, don’t add anything at all.”

I agree and see Thumper's Law as a combination of the Principle of Least Surprise and the concept of Loss Aversion in the sense that a pleasant surprise, like a correctly guessing what you were going to type, is greatly outweighed by the pain of an unpleasant surprise, like when the phone changes "it's" to "it's" even though I typed and wanted the former.

I think the key insight here is that corrections you can trust are great - you can just let the autocorrect do its thing & stay in flow state. Corrections that you have to check every time because they’re not reliable enough are worse than useless because they force you to check every single correction, completely breaking flow.

The right amount of flow state is hard to achieve. I'll type two words wrong but the autocorrect actually gets it right, but by the time I've realized that, I've already hit delete several times or are on the third word, have lost the autocorrect, and lost my focus and flow. My brain's just not timed the right way for the auto correct's default settings

> [...] like when the phone changes "it's" to "it's" even though I typed and wanted the former.

A beautiful live example.

In terms of automation, I'm a fan of the 80% solution. 100% automation tends to be fragile in the non-perfect case so often it's useful to automate most of it and let a human make important decisions.

What a relief. I too thought I was losing it.

Reminds me of how much worse siri is getting every year, where it bit flips what I say to the opposite. Makes me think they're using ML models for everything which never gets anything right with %99.9 accuracy. "Hey siri turn off the bedroom lights", "Ok, turning on the bedroom". Recently tried alexa again with an old echo dot and it worked way better with basic things like I remembered it. Super sad.

Siri has languished in nifty feature hell. Apple bought it to look futuristic but hasn't made it useful.

"Hey Siri, check my messages on WhatsApp"

"You'll have to unlock your phone"

If I could handle the phone right now I wouldn't be asking....

"hey Siri, what commands do you know?"

"I can't do that."

"Hey Siri, remind me to call Bill on Thursday" (tiny pause before on Thursday with continuation sounds like "uh")

"Ok I set a reminder to call Bill."

"Change to Call Bill on Thursday"

[Adds "On Thursday" to the title]

All of these things are much better handled by Alexa or Google. Alexa does need a two word command introducer though. It joins into conversations randomly by mistaking words for "Alexa".

Siri is unusable except for the following:

- open an app. (Say Apple Podcasts, otherwise it'll open deezer)

- call a contact (but randomly replaces your most frequently called person with someone I've spoken 10+ years ago)

- set a timer

- set an alarm

that's really it. Reminders work like shit, exactly like you said.

If siri doesn't know what to do with a contact, it asks you what you wanna do, and then doesn't understand it. I turn all this crap off as much as I can. Just a bunch of wasted dev-time, battery-time, and chip/die realestate which could be used for anything else.

My Siri experience seems to degrade over time. Months ago all my lights used to respond individually. "Turn on the floor lamp in the living room" would turn on the lamp. Now that command turns on all lights in the living room. Last week my HomePod started responding with "uh-huh" within .5 seconds of it hearing "Hey Siri" well before it's given me a chance to actually say anything.

And then there's so much trouble with connecting to the internet or even setting an alarm. Like setting a timer needs to connect to the internet even when there are zero issues with my connection. Please give me a local DumbPod.

I was super disappointed to find out that after they crammed a whole iPhone SOC package into the speakers that they don't do offline processing for siri like the phone does. Seems like such a wasted opportunity

When the iPhone came out, I still had a Blackberry. The auto-type was much superior even back then.

It would easily recognize and complete phrases, so “k” would expand with a few clicks to “Kind regards, $firstname $lastname”.

On the iPhone today, it takes at least three chars to start noting that I want to insert my last name (pretty frequent in forms).

In my opinion, they should limit the text fields that auto-correct to a very limited set of applications. It becomes very problematic when attempting to type words in a foreign language.

Just last week I was attempting to type a foreign word into a translate box on a webpage in Safari and the browser or page kept removing characters I had entered, presumably it was proactively auto-correcting but it was completely unpredictable because it also seemed to retain all the letters I had typed even though it was also removing them from the text field.

Or some press-hold-stop autocorrecting this field.

I hate when it autocorrects e-mail addresses for some reason

I have my e-mail address as a text replacement. It works ... about 1/10 of the time. The Apple keyboard didn't show text replacements when it wanted to suggest a password. (Not sure if that's still true). The google keyboard is just flaky about using the replacements. I'm usually stuck manually typing through it and fighting autocorrect, sometimes without the benefit of autocorrect suggestions.

Meanwhile, I had to delete the omw replacement which, 100% of the time, replaced with the overly enthusiastic "On my way!".

Worse is its insistence on continuing to autocorrect words I’ve just gone back to fix.

If I type some letters, it autocorrects, I explicitly backspace to delete the autocorrection, and then type the exact same thing again, for the love of god stop “helpfully” correcting it for me again to the exact same thing I just undid.

This seems like such low-hanging fruit it's baffling that it's still an issue and I say this as a full-blown Apple apologist.

I agree this is infuriating. This was the reason that made me finally ditch autocorrection altogether on my iPhone. I still make mistakes but at least now they're mostly my own mistakes, and when I correct them they stay corrected.

This how I operated for a long time as well, but made liberal use of text replacement for frequent things like il -> I’ll.

Unfortunately, when I got a Mac laptop, those replacements were synched and for some reason can’t be disabled on just one device.

Now I’m back to autocorrect, fighting with the AI to learn technical terms and command line entries for when I need to talk to colleagues over chat.

Why would you use autocorrect on a keyboard?

GP is saying he would like not to but cannot shut it off because they’re not using autocorrect but text replacements. It does make sense in the general case to sync text replacements, just not if you’re using it in place of autocorrect

You’re correct, sorry for the confusion.

Phase 1: iPhone w/o autocorrect but with text replacements.

Phase 2: iPhone and macOS, but text replacements are synched without option to disable. I don’t want autocorrect or replacements while typing on a real keyboard.

Phase 3 (reluctantly): iPhone with autocorrect, macOS without it, and no text replacements.

tl;dr it would be nice if I could disable text replacement on a per-device basis.

One solution is to disable autocorrect, then tap-type when you want no correction and swipe-type when you do (since swiping necessarily uses autocorrect)

I would recommend switching to GBoard, which doesn't have this infuriating behavior

Thanks but I'd rather not use Google's keylogger. Also, if it's anything like Android's keyboard I find Apple's sans auto-correct superior.

Yes! I can ignore suggestions, but when the autocorrect corrects my correction I feel like I'm in a game of whose's on first? Eventually you need to tap another button to keep the spelling you want.

  > Worse is its insistence on continuing to autocorrect words I’ve just gone back to fix.

its really bad... so bad (except the pop-up suggestions) i just turned auto correct off completely a few versions ago

  >i just turned auto correct off completely a few versions ago...

I don;t use autocorrect at all. Never have. But I do use 'swipe-to-type' [or whatever it's called] on Android and run into the same annoyances, as it will also chooses the wrong word, for a swiped pattern, every time --no matter how often I correct it.

> I don;t use autocorrect at all.

We're gonna need to see some proof.

I'm sure there's a sub-clause in Murphy's Law which states that "No matter how many times you proof-read, any discussion on the subject of grammar or spelling will include typos"

PS --you misssed "it will also chooses"

Just one more core in their neural engine and maybe the AI will get smart enough to let you fix words it autocorrected erroneously…

This particularly infuriates me when it corrects words I've already fixed prior to the one I'm typing. There's a better highlight animation when it does it in iOS 16, but I still miss the animation most of the time (because I'm focused on the word I'm typing, not words back).

I want an option to disable that, but right now there doesn't seem to be a way other than turning off autocorrect altogether (which I've been alternating it on and off lately trying to figure out which one aggravates me least; I also briefly returned to SwiftKey [RIP] to see if its ancient less recently trained ML autocorrect model was better).

The process for teaching it a word depends critically on not hitting the space bar or return key or any other punctuation.

If you pause at the end of the word, either the first time or after correcting it, and don’t hit any key, it’ll throw up the “suggestion X” popup. Tapping X on that popup teaches it the word.

I, and a lot of others, will backspace to correct a word, then hit space, and then it immediately undoes the correction, because hitting the space bar is indicating “you can go ahead and autocorrect this as you would in everyday typing”.

This training method isn’t documented anywhere that I know of, has worked for years (perhaps for all time?), and is the opposite of well-known. I am really upset with Apple for that last one especially.

This may be the most confoundingly and consistently irritating thing about using an iPhone, to me.

I agree with this. Having the device "correct" something that you've just gone back to fix is extremely frustrating.

That said, there are times when retroactive correction is useful. If I type "new york," it's appropriate for the phone to automatically correct it to "New York" and not "new York"

many versions of iOS ago - if you deleted the autocorrect word, it suggested above the keys the original word it replaced, which made it very easy to get back to where you originally were.

they then removed this a few years ago.

utterly baffling how over-engineered and regressive it has become

It's not just the keyboard. It's also siri.. I tell siri to call XXXXXXX. I see on my screen it actually understood me, and then it changed the name into someone else who I never ever call.

Alls this "ai" stuff drives me crazy. It's just plain unpredictable. I prefer predictability in my daily drivers, and I'll go for "ai" when I need it.

Siri was great when it first came out. At some point it went machine AI and sometimes it works well but most of the time it is absolutely annoyingly batshit insane.

My current fun one is “turn off bathroom lights” will cause it to ask downstairs or upstairs and loop forever no matter what you say at that point. Then I have to get up and press a light switch like a Neanderthal!

Thank you for explaining this, I've had the same experience as the OP so was very interested when I saw the title.

And I echo their sentiment that the 1st gen SE is the best phone I've ever had. Just bought 3rd gen SE (hardware on the 1st gen SE was dying) and while it's decent, I really miss the form factor of the original.

The very first thing I do in VS is to disable the git plugin and the AI assisted autocomplete. I've never found that autocomplete to be better than having the ability to predict what autocomplete was going to suggest.

Wow, thank you for posting this, I was just thinking this!

Most people here focus on autocorrect, which isn't such a big problem for me since I'm used to having it off.

But what the hell is wrong with the cursor placement? It is so incredibly broken, it has a mind of its own, and never goes to where I mean to put it.

Simply tapping on text puts it in the wrong places, but holding and dragging cursor or holding and dragging on the spacebar to move it also works terribly, somehow it never does what I need it to.

Selecting text is just as terrible.

It's also impossible to put the cursor in the middle of a word. WHY NOT? Just put the cursor where I tap! It is so easy to do on Android.

I find it much easier to type and move cursor on my Galaxy S9 than on my iPad mini, despite the iPad having a much bigger screen.

Tap and hold on the space bar to get something akin to a trackpad to move the caret around.

They already have mentioned it.

> holding and dragging on the spacebar to move it also works terribly

The thing I can never figure out how to do is move the cursor very far, eg to the other end of a url in the address bar. Spacebar trick only moves the cursor so far. That’s mostly only useful if the text field has word wrap because you can move it up and down.

Oh wow you're right: trying to go to the far right of a URL bar is horrifically bad.

I find far left of an already typed URL even worse.

An easy fix for that would be to allow a second finger to drag the text field - hold space to activate the cursor, drag the text with a second, bingo. Or let the second finger hit "jump left, jump right" targets on the blank keyboard when you're holding space (but this is more mechanically difficult at least for me.)

For this, first hold the spacebar to get a single cursor (address bar defaults to select all), then drag the cursor itself (not the spacebar). It accelerates to the end

Wow, thanks! Hopefully I remember that when I need it.

It just works!

Srsly do the "iPhones for idiots" books have this kind of information? I would read them if so.

In my samsung you can use the "trackpad" swiping up/down. It gives Home/End functionality.

I've been using iPhone >10 years and cannot agree more. One example: from iOS 7 (that flat UI), I began to make much more frequent typos than ever before. Before that, I didn't make much typo before the update even without looking at the keyboard but not anymore after the update. What I heard is that Apple did extensive studies on usability of virtual keyboard when it's launching iPhone and as a result keyboard visual on the screen was intentionally off from the actual layout based on actual typing patterns. And for some reason it seems they scrapped that idea, or at least changed it significantly. Don't know why. Maybe I'm an outlier and everyone else is happier with the change.

But this is just one example; almost every 2~3 years, I've experienced a noticeable level of degradation of my typing accuracy, though not as much as the iOS 7 change. I wonder if there's anyone else whose experience matches to mine.

Nope, you are not alone. I noticed this change starting with iOS 7 too and compared side-by-side back in those years. I could type very quickly with either one or both hands, and made almost no mistakes. So yeah, it seemed that they changed the position or the targets of the 'keys' because I wasn't hitting the right ones in iOS 7, usually shifted by one letter to the side but my mind sort of calibrated for the rest of the word. Then I switched between different iPhone sizes over the years, so all my experiences later were different. This still keeps happening to me but now the autocorrect on the phone gets the word I was intended to type, so it's less annoying but long gone are those days of keyboard perfection.

Yep, ios 7 was the first version where I had to become conscious of where my touch lands vs where I see my finger over the letters. It’s both amazing how they could nail it from the beginning and then allow some idiot to break it and start a spiral of “degenerative enhancements” every few years.

Try disabling slide to type. I don't use it, so if it's on, it introduces inaccuracies.

This fixed it for me. Wow. Been having the exact same thoughts as OP. Thank you.

This helped my typing. Does slide to type change the target area of the keys? With it on it seems like I am hitting keys on the line below I am targeting. With it off, many fewer typos.

I’m not sure. I suspect that it does cause the phone to take more liberties regarding which key you “meant” to hit.

Slide to type uses a neighbourhood rather than a key. It’s by far my favourite way of typing on a phone. After a bit of training it’s close to magical. Google implementation beats Apple however.

One more vote. This seems to help. Thank you for the suggestion. Now I am wondering if I should also turn off "Predictive" in the settings.

Yup - I've turned off slide and predictive and it seems to be exactly how it used to be - infinitely easier to get the words in to the point where you don't even need to look at the keyboard!

I’m praying this works. I have the same experience as everyone else here.

I just disabled both, also disabled keyboard sound and enabled haptics. A much better typing experience!

You are a godsend.

Will see how it goes, but it does seem to be better now.

This crap should be disabled by default and iphone needs to request signing 20 agreements before it gets enabled

I got a notice about it when the feature was released, but I seem to recall it was a notice rather than a prompt. I immediately noticed a decrease in accuracy and disabled it. This thread is the first time I thought about that decision in years.

This is the best thing I've ever learned on the internet.

Seems to even work for samsung keyboards. Thanks, I actually have a helpful keyboard now.

Thank you! I used to think it is only me who is suffering. It seems to have helped but would need to try this for a few days to know for sure.

This should be part of the iOS setup screen: "For how many years have you been using iOS devices?" and automatically disable it if the answer is superior to 10!

It's not the default as long as you are carrying forward your settings from phone to phone. (That is, there was no "flag day" when it was turned on for everyone, afaik.)

“Try disabling slide to type. I don’t use it, so if it’s on, it introduces inaccuracies.”

What. The. Hell. I disabled slide & predictions and typed the above sentence myself to test it, and the only very few mistyped keys were those that I have seen that I’m going to mistype.

Really, Apple?

WTFF?

All these years…

This should be higher up.

This right here is the one thing that you can actually do to improve your typing and lower your misspellings by a whole lot.

Thank you!

Seems like a strange default, I wonder how many users actually slide to type?

I do, but as far as I understood slide to type was not the default, I recall having to go find a switch to turn it on when the first beta that included it came out

I believe for new installs it defaults to on

This is true. I started fresh with an iPhone 14, no restore from backup, no sign-in to iCloud, and slide-to-type was enabled.

I’m confused — merely enabling swipe typing makes the accuracy of tap typing worse??

Yes. I imagine our fingers slide a little when typing even if we don't mean to.

This should be top voted comment.

Super late to the reply party but another thank you. I thought I was losing my mind, with like a 40% accuracy rate. Im up to like 90% just turning this on.

So it's not just me. I went from a 5 to a 6 to a 12 mini. My typing is horrible on the 6 or the 12. IDK if it's the screen size or what. It's not about getting used to it; it's been years for me. When I occasionally pick up the old 5, it's instantly easy for me to type again. So it's definitely the phone's fault, not mine. I'm 26 years old. However, the cursor was always impossible to control, no change there.

Also, it's stupid that the new phones don't have headphone jacks, the gestures they used to replace the home button are wack, and the 5 was the perfect size. The sole reason I stopped using it was AT&T dropped support. Usability was more important than CPU/camera/whatever strength.

Still using my SE 2016 here for these reasons (it has the same body as the 5 and 5S). After using this phone for 5+ years, I've gotten so good at texting on it that I don't even use autocorrect! And it has a headphone jack.

Something has gone horribly rotten in the space of smartphones in the last 5 years.

The iPhone vs Android war has cooled because after years of maturing hard/software, establishing UX, and also lock-in, most people just stick with what they know. It's not so much about the tech anymore. Apple doesn't have a visionary CEO anymore, and Android was a copy of the iPhone to begin with. Seems like both sides are less interested in giving users what they want now, or giving what they don't yet realize they want. Sometimes it's about milking the userbase, like when every big phone-maker almost simultaneously removed the jack to sell new accessories. I even feel like the push for big screens was about changing the customers' habits. But this typing issue has to just be sloppiness.

The only reason I didn't get an SE 2016 is cause I had no choice. My 6 broke right before a big trip, and I needed a new phone; 12 mini is what they had.

Well said. I agree that big screens and aux jack removal are both anti-consumer moves where mature companies are ignoring a solid chunk of consumer needs to drive metrics. I'd add SD card slot removal to that list as well (makes it easier to up the ASP of phones, since some people need to pay more for additional storage) and the inevitable SIM card slot removal, too. The saddest thing about the SIM card slot: it removes customer choice with only one benefit for manufacturers: slightly less internal space usage. At least with the headphone jack and the SD card slot, companies were going after profit. Removing the SIM slot is just trading inconvenience for pennies.

It's not just you. I'm in my early 20's and I've noticed typing has gotten considerably worse over time. Me and my friends used to be able to text each other without looking at our phones while holding a conversation, but now it's a lot harder. I've had to rely on slide-to-type more and more instead.

The keyboards in the different iOSes are definitely of varying quality.

It would be lovely to see the ios6/7 keyboard available as an installable option on modern iOS.

Even with the modern regressions it’s still way better than the Graphene keyboard.

I switched from Android to iOS a year ago. My first annoyance was the autocorrect, it was slightly worse, especially switching languages a lot, but what was unbearable was that iOS would often correct my last typed word AFTER I HIT SEND. That is a deadly sin imho. I've since turned autocorrect on again because I guess I'm just not precise enough, I try to always end with a space now. I still gets me every now and then though.

I wish my Android devices didn't have similar problems. They might not be quite as egregious, but they make a mess of my typing often enough to annoy me about as much as my iPhone does (which is to say: a lot). These ML-based autocorrects are terrible.

On my Android phone, words got auto-replaced with the predicted word when I hit space. It was equally maddening. Suggesting words is fine, changing what I've already typed is not.

My name is not an English word and it’s been years but the phones (3 iPhones) have never been able to predict it correctly ever. They always predict some English word — even longer and shorter. I must have typed it a trillion times on my phone by now. But no, still not. It’s the same name on my iCloud and hence on my phone. In contact book obviously. In all the email accounts I’ve added. I have tried correcting it and accepting the suggestion in quotes. Doesn’t work. But no.

I always advise everyone that the first thing they should do on any on-screen-display keyboards is to disable autocorrect and suggestions. This makes it easier to type, avoid the irritation of sub-par corrections and best of all turns of keylogging (when all these "extra" features are enabled (as then their ToS allows them an excuse to store everything you type in their cloud, to "improve their service").

wait. I really, really don't care about my phone so I never looked that up.

But my 2016 Iphone SE "learned" french. I text in French and English on a 40/60 split. Auto-correct will feed me results in both language. I assumed that every time I was correcting autocorrect to be able to type a french words, that was going to a small DB somewhere on the phone.

It's not the case? Like.. then where are those french autocorrected words coming from?

And to your original point : why the hell is not name not memorized by now?

> why the hell is not name not memorized

Or why proper nouns from Contacts aren't included in the typing dictionary.

It's not you: it's got worse. My work phone was recently upgraded to an iPhone 12 and it's way worse for typing than the 6S it replaced.

Lots of typos, and if you hold the phone slightly wrong you end up with it not responding because the edge of one of your fingers will be in contact with the touch sensitive area so it registers as a multitouch. I have big hands with long fingers so this is hard to avoid whilst maintaining a firm grip on the phone. Super annoying.

I imagine the latter could be mitigated to some extent with a case but the phone is big enough already without bulking it up by adding a case. (I have tried cases before - not a fan at all.)

Same phone transition for me. I keep saying "typing on my phone is the most disappointing part about living in the future." (Ok, so no flying cars yet, I can handle that, but texting on my phone is embarrassingly awful, considering phones in general are so far beyond what anyone imagined they'd be like in the 70s.)

Not just you :) It's even worse if you use more than one language.

I regularly use both Romanian and English, sometimes in the same sentence and definitely in the same chat app to different recipients.

On old versions of iOS the checker eventually caved in and accepted my language mix no matter what language I had set the keyboard to.

These days it's really insane. Yesterday it managed to capitalize 3 words in the middle of an all Romanian sentence with the keyboard set to RO. No idea why, neither RO nor EN capitalize anything in the middle of a sentence and I don't have a German keyboard acivated.

The suggestions seem mostly useless as well. Even when it gets the language right.

I use SwiftKey. I was skeptical about swipe typing at first, but it has completely won me over. I would struggle going back to regular typing now.

I am often communicating in two different languages at the same time and SwiftKey can handle suggestions without breaking a sweat. Apple has come out with their own swipe keyboard and I gave it a shot, but it is nowhere near good enough.

Specifically, the dual language suggestions are essentially non-existent and as far as I remember, the current language of typing was relatively front and center on the keyboard (there was a dropdown button to switch languages) instead of something the keyboard picks up from context like SwiftKey does. It also felt kind of ugly compared to SwiftKey.

But since Apple came out with their own swipe keyboard and as of recent I've read some articles about them planning to nerf the 3rd party keyboard APIs, I expect SwiftKey will pack up shop at some point. I just hope by that time the Apple swipe keyboard is usable, because I'll get arthritis from the regular keyboard with the amount of retyping one has to do while using it.

I installed SwiftKey a few months ago. Seems nice.

Alas, as of 2022/10/05 it's no longer avail for iOS. https://9to5mac.com/2022/09/28/microsoft-swiftkey-delisted-a...

Aside, how is a virtual keyboard startup worth $250m? Acquihire? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SwiftKey#History (I just don't understand this game.)

Using SwiftKey also, it's the best solution (i found) at the moment. A shame Microsoft removed it from the AppStore this month. Whenever people need to reinstall their iPhones, they can no longer download and install it, and future iOS updates might kill it too.

Hopefully some other app will fill the gap soon :'(

I use SwiftKey (but without swipe) on both Android and iPhone. Now that MS is retiring it I am not sure what I will do when I switch iPhone (fortunately I have just upgraded to 14 a couple of months ago so for few years I should be fine..)

Totally agree about cursor scrolling. Half the time, it has no idea where my finger is.

Since I discovered Apple’s slide-to-type[0], I rarely have to key the letters, since the algo guesses more accurately than when I actually use individual keystrokes.

Also, with stt, the delete erases the whole word, so corrections are faster, too.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/how-to-use-the-iphones-new-...

+1 for cursor scrolling.

the URL/address bar on mobile is a perfect case in point. or any single-line text box for that matter. as it is, this is a useless widget because of scrolling and text selection. we need a shift of paradigm here.

the text box is not working on mobile.

Doesn’t Tim Cook ever use cursor scrolling? It’s damned near useless. I usually wind up just backspacing from the end to get to where I need to edit.

This. However if I do not hit space in between words every time, an autocorrect function replaces at random times the word I’m typing/sliding now plus the word I typed before by some utter nonsense combination. I hate this so much, but I have not found a way to turn it off. Autocorrect is off.

I’ve changed my keyboard settings and am very happy with the iPhone keyboard after readjusting. My settings:

Auto Capitalization: On

*Auto-Correction: Off

Check Spelling: On

Enable Caps Lock: On

*Predictive: Off

Smart Punctuation: On[1]

*Slide to Type: Off

Character Preview: On

“.” Shortcut: On

The ones with an asterisk make the biggest difference, and you may have to readjust to not having crazy touch targets.

[1] I like the look of “” vs "", personally, but it’s good to know regardless that it does this because it won’t work if you are typing a sting literal, lol.

Thank you.

When you make keyboard software with nine different toggle settings, most/all of which are unknown to 90% of users until they read a HN comment buried 43 pages down, you've lost the plot. :-)

Didn't Apple used to promote a design principle, sometimes to a maddening extreme, of minimizing user options/settings because they were too confusing? (e.g. single-button mouse) The ios keyboard apparently adheres to an opposite philosophy.

With the new UI updates here are a few things that I find help.

• 1. Turning ON haptics in the keyboard section

• 2. Turn OFF the “suggestions”

• 3. Teach the autocorrect what I want to type. (Correct the same word a few times and you will trigger machine learning)

• 4. Turn keyboard sound OFF

• 5. Grab the cursor directly, don’t use the “spacebar trick” unless you’re going to move to the front or end of an input box (treat it like PGUP/PGDWN)

Do you know why it seems to works with some folks but not other?

For instance I fed so much French vocabulary to autocorrect, at this point it's convenient. But some other person in this thread was reporting failing to have autocorrect memorise his/her foreign name.

Just made these changes and the improvement is insaaaane. The most important one IMO is turning off “Predictive” typing. Leaves more room for keys and screen and I never tapped those suggestions anyway. This feels so much better. Thank you.

I've always used MessagEase (both on Android and iPhone). It is a keyboard layout that was originally designed for the Palm Pilot, and it is optimised for typing with one finger. I don't use any sort of autocompletion, yet I'm usually the fastest typist in the room. More info: http://www.exideas.com/ME/index.php

Yeah. It's a shame that the project is abandoned, bugs aren't being fixed and the source code isn't open.

Yeah, I really love this keyboard, if only it was still alive, didn't find a successor

I wish there was an autocorrect for obvious errors, not changing context of a word like hell -> he'll, well -> we'll, nickel -> Nicole (this is a weird one), and many more. Better yet, it should just underline the word and let me manually correct it like software used to before everyone tried to do ai nonsense. Apparently that red underline is part of the OS but I don't recall actually seeing it.

+1 -- better manual editing UX is necessary for every kind of statistical input, especially voice

You can do this! Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> Auto-Correction [off] & Check Spelling [on].

Reading a lot of the complaints here, they really need to create some sort of onboarding for the keyboard and make it more transparent what the switches do in the settings menu.

I was pretty pissed when they launched slide to type, until I played with these and found that turning predictive off feels waaay better. It took me a little bit to get used to, but I’m much happier now and can type multiple words with out looking at the keyboard. My settings:

Auto Capitalization: On

*Auto-Correction: Off

Check Spelling: On

Enable Caps Lock: On

*Predictive: Off

Smart Punctuation: On[1]

*Slide to Type: Off

Character Preview: On

“.” Shortcut: On

Some of these are personal preference, but the ones I put with a star greatly effect the way the keyboard types. I’ve been using iPhones since 2011, so I’m used to the last two for example, but if you don’t use slide to type it screws with the touch targets big time, and the Predictive setting is the one most people here are frustrated with.

That said, I think the keyboard was better about 10 years ago when it had some slight prediction baked in.

[1] I think smart punctuation only really applies in english to "" -> “”, I think it looks nicer, but can be a nightmare if you are trying to type a sting literal on the phone and don’t realize it’s a thing, definitely something to be aware of, lol.

Guess it shows how long it’s been since I've even been in those settings, last I remember there was just like two or three options. But realizing with auto correct off it doesn’t auto capitalize I like I’d expect. There’s still some improvements to be had

I agree, considering how many words get typed on iOS a day, it really ought to be better.

Getting into the weeds here a bit but you can create a Text Replacement so that “i” gets expanded to “I”. That said, I don’t use it, when I first changed it took me a few painful weeks to get used to a new dumber keyboard, but in the end it is just so much less frustrating not using a “smart” input device. I can stand making a typo, I mean I even make them on a proper keyboard! But I am absolutely infuriated by having my correct word get replaced with the wrong one.

Yes, I absolutely agree with you. It is WAY worse than it has ever been. What you described is exactly what I have been plagued with... (I never thought I was messing up, because it was such a DRASTICALLY different experience)

In general, a lot of things calibrated for the generation of users after 2010 lost something.

I assume for the keyboard, it's focusing on making it easy for the general population to express their day to day thinking, which makes sense. But if you are using more diverse words than the general population, more complicated phrasing, technical jargon, or multiple languages, the keyboard will fight you.

It's also true for google search results quality, youtube suggestions, UI that electron apps expose and so on.

I can clearly see I'm neither a market nor a technical target for a lot of people creating products today.

Definitely and unequivocally getting worse. Seems to be the trend on most consumer devices. The latest interface on the Kindle, for instance, verges on unusable. Whoever signed off on that should be fired.

Yep! It’s so incredibly hard now. My error rate is extremely high and the prosperity of the iPhone to change things I’ve intended to type, and then do it three times in a row when I’m trying to force a specific word, drives me mad.

Like when you're trying to type "propensity", and it autocorrects to "prosperity"?

I'm continuously amazed at how many HN posters are posting from their phone. What a nightmare.

well, I read it on my phone... Definitely not easy to compose, or write at all though

haha wow....yes

I feel like something changed with autocorrect and the default correction is often wrong. And then sometimes I see myself getting a word auto corrected 3 times before I type it in a way that’s corrected properly, or I need to select the right suggestion manually. It feels like autocorrect stopped looking at the whole sentence for context and often just corrects to something that doesn’t make any sense. It didn’t use to be like that I think, but it’s all subjective feelings.

It’s some sort of oddity where v and b sometimes autocorrect add words. All sorts of weird behavior seem to happen. I also noticed the trend of it getting better then again worse

They need to seriously reconsider how fast interfaces change. Far too often I go to click on the right word suggested only for it to then change the word right before the click. Seems to happen in many contexts though.

I distinctly remember being blown away by typing on an iPod touch when it first launched: it seemed almost impossible to make a mistake. The keys plus whatever other software (predictive text?) worked incredibly well.

Now I’m on an SE2 and have typos constantly. I really thought it was just me, somehow.

I had that feeling on Windows Phone years ago.

Gboard on Android works pretty well most of the time though.

THANK YOU. I thought I was going insane. This shit is broken. Wow.

I played with a friend's Pixel a few weeks ago and I was surprised by how much better the typing experience was. Especially so if you have set up multiple languages. Support for non-mainstream languages is a joke on iPhone. Even the Google keyboard for iOS is shit, but I can't blame that one on Apple.

I can't justify changing my phone now, but I'm highly considering my next phone to be an Android.

Thank you for asking. It’s definitely worse. I keep wishing there was a way to roll back or trial new keyboard behavior engines. This experience is powered by a lot of data, none of which we can see or edit. If I could go in and unlearn some things it’s learned, that’d be nice. Safelist. Blocklist. So many things to tinker with, out of reach. It’s really sad because it’s the essence of accessibility.

I turned off autocorrect a few years back, and noticed no change in recent years with that turned off. But the autocorrect experience was very bad and in my view caused more errors than it fixed

I’ve turned it off as well and go raw. It doesn’t work period when talking about new concepts. No issues so far. People are more forgiving about typos these days anyway.

It’s not just you. They keep making changes that aren’t intuitive or wanted and never revert them. Gboard is pretty much the same. Things like guessing proper names even if I didn’t touch the shift bar and with the iPhone keyboard I absolutely hate that it changes words I’ve finished swiping even though I have autocorrect off. It spends more time trying to guess what I meant than the letters I manually type or glide type either way. Don’t even get me started on text selection on here. I miss good old Swype so much. I guess if you can’t beat them, then buy them out and shut them down. I keep swearing that I’m going to Velcro one of those small Bluetooth handheld keyboards on the back of my phone case.

It's autocorrect that kills me - feels like they've got a boolean check[0] backwards, because my iPhone is constantly switching its/it's, well/we'll, ill/I'll and others to the wrong version.

[0] - obviously there's no such code for autocorrect, I imagine it's just some AI soup now

Ill as in sick?

Yep so something like "Yesterday I was ill" would get changed to "Yesterday I was I'll" - it's not the end of the world, but it's definitely annoying.

I've felt this way for a really long time with touchscreen keyboards in general. I'm pretty sure I'd be overall faster when taking into account accuracy with my old 9-button dumb phone and no autocorrect. I used to be _really_ fast typing on those things, and could do so without looking at the screen to make sure my fingers were going where I thought they were. I had actually considered trying to find an Android phone featuring physical buttons (9 buttons, not a full keyboard) for this reason.

Vent: I'm on Android and still haven't seen a well done cursor scroll. It usually requires me to select the position accurately which is PITA. I wish there was a simple way to do that.

Hold spacebar on android and drag lefg/right lets you cursor scroll really easily.

Thanks. Doesn't work on my phone. I'll check it out in product forum.

iirc this is a google keyboard feature specifically; it was added sometime after the pixel 3 released, I think?

The keyboard I have is Microsoft SwiftKey, on a Huawei P30, so could be multiple different ways of getting it.

oh yeah swiftkey did clone the feature more recently!

This is also true for iOS. It used to be hold any key to move cursor, then they got rid of that functionality. I found out last week you can hold space bar! It's back!!!

AFAIK it was Force Touch on any key, and they changed it to long touch on the space bar when they got rid of Force Touch.

Pixel5 and bilingual user -> space bar is hacked by a language change option on long press (can;t deactivate this feature:( ), although there is ALSO a dedicated (optional) key for that that I have activated :(

Been a while since I've used Android, and it's no longer available (you'll have to find an old .apk, maybe it would still work), but Swype was hands-down the best phone keyboard I've ever used. It had an editing keyboard layout that allowed single-character movement of the cursor, easily selected by Swyping from the Swype key to something else (space bar, maybe?). Swype-X, Swype-C, Swype-V for cut, copy, and paste, and they actually worked well.

Apple's knockoff is nowhere near as good, and routinely "forgets" custom words including curses. My text language is often not PG-rated, let alone G-rated.

I'm super happy with Microsoft SwiftKey. With friends and family we type in a dialect which is not an official language but after using it for a bit it picked up most of the spelling I use and autocompletes sentences with good accuracy.

Came here to say this exact same thing.

I still remember - November 2013, I was interviewing for some jobs in Boulder CO, and was invited to dinner by a tech entrepreneur. I showed him how good Swype was. Back then I had a tiny-weenie Xperia (S, or SL or U??). I remember clearly how blown away he was. And I remember clearly how enjoyable it was to actually be able to swype one handed. I did not even ever had a case protector for this phone, and managed to never break it because I would not drop it!

I can't remember which of the phones I had after that with which I was so sad when i realized Swype had disappeared when I could not reinstall it :(I had tried Swift key, the Stock google, and I think another one, but none never came close to Swype learning algorithm :(

iPhone 7 with its 3D Touch had the best cursor scroll tbh. You hard press your thumb anywhere on the keyboard and use it like a mousepad to scroll around. I’m still mad that we don’t have that anymore.

Ah yeah, for text handling and some item selection stories 3D Touch was the best. For the rest it never really caught on as it was like a right-click, with nothing self-evident and overlapping with the 'hold' interaction. I guess they just took it out because of the added cost to the panel, but I don't really miss it now.

Yup, kinda mad as well :/ It adds so much to usability once you've gotten used to it (doesn't take long imho)...

One of the key reasons i still hold on to my 8 Plus... but i suppose iOS 16 will probably the last release they'll support on it so i better get used to the thought my next phone won't have it :(

Can I also vent about the lack of undo? I consider undo one of the most essential features of any computing device. How is it still simply not supported on the most widely used computing platform?

There's nothing like the feeling after typing a whole paragraph and accidentally deleting it without any way to undo. :) Anything more than a sentence I type in a notes app because of that

On Android, undo is supported, but your keyboard has to support it. Sometimes I have to open Hacker Keyboard just I can press Ctrl+Z. There's probably a better way, but that works for the two times a year that I need it.

That's amazing, I need Hacker Keyboard apparently. All the features GBoard has and they never thought to add an undo button option?

Try tapping with three fingers to bring up a set of editing operations including undo & redo.

Seems like this is an iOS thing? I'm talking about Android.

You can shake your phone. You do look stupid, but it works.

Not on my phone. What phone does this work on? iOS? I'm talking about Android.

IOS

Yes sorry, on iPhones.

You might not know that you can forward-delete letters with Shift+Backspace, instead of backspace. The Samsung and BlackBerry keyboards both support this.

Personally, I still use the BlackBerry keyboard on my Samsung phone because it has features that no other keyboard has. Namely:

- Word predictions are on the keys themselves, and you select them by "throwing" them onto the page (see [screenshot 1]). This means there can be 6+ predictions on screen at any time, and since they're literally on the key you're about to press anyway it is so quick to just select the prediction instead of typing it out fully. On other keyboards the predictions are above the keyboard and using them means taking your eyes away from what you're typing.

- Autocorrections are shown on the space key before you actually hit it, and if you don't want the autocorrection you can swipe up on the space key to select what you actually typed (see [screenshot 2]).

- You can backspace a word with a left swipe across the keyboard. This is HUGE. When backspacing is this easy, when you make a mistake it's almost always faster to delete the entire word and retype it again from the beginning than it is to move the cursor. You can also backspace multiple words at a time by swiping with multiple fingers (great for editing URLs).

- Swiping down across the keyboard cycles through the various symbol layers (you can create a custom layer), and selecting a symbol automatically moves back to the letter layer (you can sticky the symbol layer by opening it normally with the ?123 key).

- The ?123 also acts as a Control key, so you can use common keyboard shortcuts like cut, copy, paste, undo, and select all.

[screenshot 1] https://ibb.co/jVTPg7Q

[screenshot 2] https://ibb.co/p1PTM1S

On non-BlackBerry Android phones the BB keyboard was never officially available, but someone made a cracked version that still works great even though it hasn't been updated in years. But you have to dig around to find the APKs ever since the website got taken down.

I was using an iOS 6 device as a daily driver until April, 2022, then moved to iOS 15.

The typing experience on iOS 6, and cursor placement/word selection, is so much better than iOS 15. I hate typing on my iOS 15 device. The whole “hold the spacebar” mechanic is inferior to how cursor positioning worked in earlier versions.

(I had a short stint using a “burner” Android phone back in September and that did make me pine for iOS. Even iOS 15’s keyboard was better than whatever Android version that phone was using.)

Best response here is disable slide to type and maybe predictive text: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33257455

Another approach is to murmur to your phone -- the voice to text has gotten remarkably sound. I see lots of people press the Siri button and literally murmur sotto voce, texting paragraphs impeccably much faster than typing.

Agree with everything, and additionally I keep getting off-by-1-key typos that I didn't have years ago. Especially (for some reason) when trying to type space or backspace.

I hear you. I’ve been on iPhones since the 4 and always typed with autocorrect turned off. When swipe-to-type finally came out I was stoked, but it constantly screws things up. “To” instead of “too” or vice-versa, it’s never the one I actually want (and “of” vs “off” as well, they need to work on these types of pairs), “s” instead of “a”, “o” instead of “I”, apostrophes for words I’m trying to pluralize. And while I can’t verify, my theory is that words with negative connotations are downweighted. I mean good luck ever getting an actual curse word out of it, but I’ve also noticed it with plenty of other words.

ETA: selecting misspelled words to choose replacement seems completely broken to me. 99% of the time I can’t even tap it to select even though it’s underlined in red.

The SE was the best phone I ever had, and even though the screen was smaller, I rarely made typos. Copying and pasting text was a breeze.

I can't even tell how I'm supposed to select text correctly on my new iPhone. I think I need to look up a YouTube tutorial.

I’ve been having the exact same issues and thought it was just me.

Thanks for putting words to it and posting it.

I have used both iPhone and Android and the typing experience is one thing that is way better on Android in my experience.

I feel exactly the same way, but I'm getting older too, so it could be age. I doubt it, though. My phone keyboard frustrates the shit out of me, and I come to dread doing ANYTHING with it.

When I had a Nokia with a hardware keyboard, I could write at 90wpm with zero typos without even looking at it. It was phenomenal. Now? Every second letter is a fat finger, auto-correct gets it wrong every other word, and it's a frustrating ordeal trying to move the cursor to exactly where I want it to fix it.

It undoubtedly reduces the number of messages I send because it's such a draining experience.

Autocorrect has always been problematic - there are loads of websites devoted to such fails [0]

You've got three basic options:

- disable autocorrect and see just how bad a typist you really are (related: setup your own autocorrect shortcuts)

- use a different keyboard (Grammarly is one popular choice (though I don't use it anymore on mobile...I too often use my phone where LTE is spotty))

- type slower to not plow past the autocorrect options

-----------

[0] https://www.qwant.com/?q=autocorrect+fail

[Typed on an iPhone]

I think this may be false memories. The iPhone keyboard was utterly miraculous back in 2008 and was improved upon with software revisions and larger screens.

I really think that 14 years later we’ve all forgotten how magical it is that capacitive touch keyboards work as well as they do. Now that we no longer see it as magic we have less patience for it whenever it does the wrong thing.

As far as I can tell, typing on it right now, the current keyboard seems to me as good as it has ever been.

I just wish I could make iOS turn off the stupid "." shortcut they attach to the spacebar. All my google searches look like "how.do i.find.a better.phone"?

Not only iOS. MacOS too

I always thought I’m too stupid to search correctly. I have exactly the same issue.

Is Settings->General->Keyboard->"." Shortcut on?

Thankyou!

OMG!!!! I thought I was somehow actually pressing period for years! I didn't feel like I was but I never noticed I wasn't actually pressing it and it was instead auto inserting periods. WTF! Thanks!!!!

IM PRAYING THIS FIXES IT. I really cannot express how annoyed I’ve been at the search bar keyboard in Safari. This has been such a huge sticking point.

Sorry, it won't. Sure seems like it should though right?

I have this shortcut disabled. It still rears it's ugly head on the browser location field (and many other places).

Probably because the browser location field keyboard on Safari has a "." char on the right of the space bar. It's really annoying, I agree.

If I’ve interpreted this correctly and this isn’t sarcasm, there is a Setting under Settings>General>Keyboard named [”.” shortcut”], that should disable this behavior.

Oh how I miss force/3d touch.

With it, the spacebar trick worked on the entire keyboard, and even text selection was possible by pressing harder to start/stop selection.

As an android user, I thought it was just me that was unable to type on iOS, relieved to hear that I'm not alone.

But also, I've noticed that typing on Android has gotten worse too as phone sizes went up. I make noticeably more typos on my >5inch pixel devices than I ever did on my <5inch nexus devices. It's still far better than iOS, but I would've expected larger screens to equal better typing experience.

If machine learning worked, my iPhone could take a long string of letters and see that I’m invariably putting an “n” between words where a space should be and fix it for me.

Typing on my iPhone is my worst daily tech experience.

My worst weekly tech experience is my Amazon FireTV needing to be rebooted every time my cable internet blinks. That it can’t recover gracefully, like every other device in the house — including Amazon Echos — mystifies me.

> Amazon FireTV needing to be rebooted every time my cable internet blinks

Returned the Fire stick and purchased a CCWGTV (Chromecast with Google TV) for this very reason.

I noticed it too. Somehow, typing on earlier iOS-es produced much less mistakes. I also remember some version where it broke substantially, and I realized that just over a week or so (well, another explanation is I got old that week). Now it’s unbearable and I often leave my typos in chats as is, giving up after 2-3 attempts, or immediately because I foresee the struggle.

I also tried an android phone (and gboard on ios). Same shitty input, but better correction, especially for qwerty-typos. Sadly, the board itself feels like shit and I returned to apple one, plus I don’t trust google to handle my input pii/ads-wise.

Another apple keyboard quirk is that it is stubborn for the first letter of a word. E.g. if I type fouble, at no time it will suggest double. Fou -> For, foubl -> found, ends up with foible. These letters are not even close, what were they or their NN thinking? “Double” is a simplest, qwerty-levenstein-nearest word for this input. I don’t even know what foible means. Since that change I began to pay attention to first letters, otherwise my text turns into complete gibberish.

Gboard often does a much better job with autocorrect.

Besides software changes, I'd look at the hardware.

The newer iPhones are all too big for many peoples' hands. I thought that the iPhone 4S size was just about perfection: it felt like I could easily reach every single spot on the screen while holding the device with one hand and not straining. Everything since then has felt much harder to comfortably type and control while using.

And unfortunately, I think it might be very easy for the market to misread the sales data and think that many customers continuously want bigger and bigger screens. If the only size options available are all too big, then it makes some sense to just optimize for a better gaming/movie experience if the typing experience is going to suck no matter what so many people might just end up buying the biggest phones even though they want a much smaller one.

Give me an iPhone 4S sized iPhone with a modern camera, processor, and screen, and I'd be perfectly happy with that experience.

Same experience here.

I actually thought this was a me problem and not an iPhone problem. I figured I was just getting lazy and had become too reliant on autocorrect to clean up my mistakes over the years.

I do notice that I tend to type much faster than I did 5-10 years ago. If I deliberately slow myself down like 30% I'm able to type almost flawlessly. Does this resonate with anyone else?

Commas and periods are a great part of my native language (of course they are essential in many languages), yet I couldn't find a way to set up comma and period to show on my dad's new work iPhone the way they appear on Android -- on the first page of the keyboard.

Pagination is required to access not only periods and commas, but also numbers and to some extent accents (čšž via press-and-hold). The mentioned cursor-to-text snapping annoys me so much that I can't use that phone to write more than a couple words, yet this entire text was written on a touch-screen phone.

There exist apps to customize the keyboard, for example [0], that was recommended on reddit, but I did not test it yet. Like a lot of iPhone apps, those aren't usually free.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/bb/app/unicode-pad-pro-with-keyboards...

I think you're supposed to press on the .?123 key, keep holding, and then slide your finger to the comma or period. I assume pressing space twice inserts a period, too.

Disclaimer: it's been a while since I used an iPhone, this might be out of date.

I tried that, but half the time it would bring up the quick settings page.

Something absolutely has changed in the last couple of iOS major releases. I have noticed it as well around iOS 14 or so. I also feel like Siri (voice recognition for dictation of messages, etc) has deteriorated as well. It is getting to the point where I am considering moving to Android just based on my experience with that.

Absolutely! Typing on the iPhone is slowly becoming a frustration, especially if you are using many languages. It was so frustrating sometimes, that I must turn off autocorrection and prediction. In the initial release of iOS13, the keyboard can even freeze for an extended period of time. The updates seemed to correct the freeze, but the prediction and autocorrection is still subpar and irritating. In the last releases, the cursor scrolling, once a hallmark of iOS got worse. On the mobile website of FB, you can't move the selection properly anymore, although it works properly on Apple's own apps, so it might be a problem FB created. The most frustrating aspect about iOS keyboard is that user can not even edit the custom dictionary, they can only reset the prediction. On the top of that, typing on the iPad is getting worse, too. I wonder what the engineers at Apple are doing all the time? :(

I'll add my old man rant that physical keyboards are terrible now, and I somewhat blame Apple. Everyone seems to want as flat a keyboard as possible which does look pretty stylish I'll admit, but is not as ergonomic as the old Dell cheapo membrane keyboards. It makes sense on a laptop, but not on a dedicated keyboard. I fully acknowledge that it might just be the era of keyboards I grew up with and prefer, and luckily I can still find the old ones I like at Goodwill for $3, so my cup runeth over anyway.

As for phone keyboards, I've never been great with them but typing on a glass screen is a bundle of compromises anyway, and I haven't noticed them any worse lately. I remember reading that the touch spots for the keys are actually dynamically changing under your fingers as you type based on context, so I wouldn't be surprised if something changed and bit you though.

It’s cost. The flat keyboards use less plastic. The membrane mechanism doesn’t require much precision either. Flat keyboards with scissor switches are more expensive and feel a little better (and last longer). Full-size keyboards are superior and are still sold, but usually as a ‘premium’ option.

> cursor scrolling using either the spacebar trick or a hard press on screen is a complete mess

This sounds a lot like Android, so welcome to the party.

On the other hand, swipe typing has been the bomb for over a decade. Since it's now available on iOS, give it a chance. Maybe you'll find it makes up for the iPhone's recent declines.

I honestly have no idea how people tolerate iOS keyboard. No numbers? No common characters? In 2022? Really?

I often contemplate switching to iPhone to get away from Google, I've previously used 3GS and 4S for multiple years. But the keyboard is definitely in the top3 negative factors keeping me from it.

PS: I can't judge modern iOS autocomplete, but on Android it's a complete garbage. Simple typos when I press a nearby key are NEVER autoreplaced. Typos like - r4ady or hscker or ma ufacture etc. It seems to me it shouldn't be to hard to make an algo looking for all valid words checking each letter for replacing it with a 6 surrounding keys on a typical US keyboard and looking them in dictionary. But nope, no luck.

For example: hscker

1) - yscker,uscker,jscker,nscker,bscker,gscker - 0 dictionary words

2) - hacker,hwcker,hecker,hdcker,hxcker,hzcker - 1 actual word "hacker"

3) - hsxker,hsdker,hsfker,hsvker,hs ker - 0 words

4) - hscjer,hscier,hscoer,hscler,hsc,er,hscmer - 0 words

5) - hsckwr,hsck3r,hsck4r,hsckrr,hsckdr,hscksr - 0 words

6) - hsckee,hscke4,hscke5,hscket,hsckef,hscked - 0 words

Super simple autoreplace, map one time all groups of 6 keys surrounding each key, then write a query to lookup results in the dictionary and you're set. But nope. Too hard for a trillion dollar corp.

Can't you install a different keyboard such as SwiftKey?

I don't know. I thought Apple didn't allow anything core functionality from 3rd parties, like browsers, UI skins etc.? Currently I'm interacting with iPhones only when I need to fix something on my friends iPhone, I'll check alt keyboards next time.

I own an iPhone 12 mini since its inception and I am 44 years old. You described exactly my problems. Somewhere on the road something broke, either me or the user interface. Also, the most painful breaking change for me is the fact that in safari the url bar is placed at the bottom since a while but I keep looking after it at the top of the screen while I type, even if there's nothing there, just something that resembles a dynamic dropdown list based on whatever I think I type. My brain can't seem to be able to accept and memorize the fact that the url bar was moved at the bottom, just above the keyboard.

I recently found out that you can move it back to the top by pressing the two little AA on the left of the URL bar, then hit "Show Top Address Bar".

god dammit. thank you.

You can move the URL bar back to top like the previous comment mentions, but if you do you will miss out on the nice swipe gestures on the url bar to switch tabs or open new ones.

After 10 years of typing perfectly on various iPhones, I suddenly started mistyping frequently a year or so(?) ago. I feel like its actually the phone and not me that has changed. Are there any Apple people here who can give a definitive answer?

Thanks for posting this. All this while, I have thought it's my age making me do this.

I miss 3D Touch so much, if only because of its awesome cursor placement trick — instead of the spacebar, you could hold a finger anywhere on the keyboard and take the cursor to the right spot, plus increase the strength to select words.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned in the comments is that putting a phone case on the later generations of iPhones messes with the accuracy of the touch sensation of the screen. This inevitably leads to even more typo issues because you hit something "correctly" but the input is recognized incorrectly. Not sure if this impacts Android but definitely changed with iPhones

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/1822/how-can-i-rec...

I think it might be worse, especially the cursor stuff, but also consider that your iPhone 12 mini has a smaller keyboard than the SE, since it’s not quite as wide. You might try enabling haptic feedback which is new in ios16.

Writing on an iPhone is the only activity I have been doing rigorously day in, day out for 10+ years without getting better at it.

With the old 3-press phones, I would have been invincible and able to write with the phone still in my pocket.

So frustrating.

I turned off autocorrect and it forced me to be a much more accurate typist.

My wife migrated from Android Device (Sony XZ2 Compact) to iPhone 13 Mini (because it was impossible to buy small but fast Android device when Sony was drown in torrential rain) a 6 months ago. Every out friend with iPhone said: "You'll accommodate to iPhone/Android difference fast, and everything will be Ok". Now, after half a year, almost everything is Ok, but not typing, editing text and interacting with text fields. She is screaming and shouting and sometimes crying when she need to type substantial comment on Facebook or big message in Telegram.

Maybe I’ve always had issues with typing correctly and having the device provide the appropriate autocorrect suggestions on the smaller screen size (even on the 5+ inch screens).

On selecting a word (single word), double tapping on the word works well for me. Same way, to select an entire paragraph, triple tap anywhere on that. There is no need to move the cursor and fumble with it for selecting these.

Text selection of other kinds has a lot of issues. One thing that bothers me a lot is how it mishandles punctuation marks when selecting a sentence or multiple lines. That’s certainly a long standing bug.

I've never been able to type well on a smartphone well, ever. I feel like I have to correct 5 of 6 words multiple times each. For me I have noticed no change for years so iOS14->15 I noticed no difference.

Same with selection. It's infuriating, has been since iPhone shipped, still bad 15 years later.

Sometimes I feel like I should attach a camera to my wrist to film me trying to use it and hopefully get some popular site to show just how much poor UX I put up with every day. Unfortunately it would be hard to do, it would show private info, and it would lead nowhere.

I've just had this bug where my volume for typing tones goes WAY UP HIGH for a couple seconds before normalizing to where it should be; it happens surprisingly often, as well as general lag.

Yup, same here and I'm on Android. I'm in my late-twenties and have spent most of my life on mobile devices and keyboards like most people here. Over the last couple of years I've been getting frustrated to no end by the exact things you're talking about. I always have to retype words, basic things get auto-corrected to capitalized, proper noun versions that make no sense in context, etc. I'm starting to think that the older folks that dictate their text via microphone have the right idea.

I make so many typos lately that when I read back what I’ve just typed it is often gibberish. I’ve seriously wondered whether I’ve suffered from serious cognitive decline (iPhone 11 pro max)

For how big fingers are, it does a pretty good job. Word selection is just a long press. A long press on space works well for moving the cursor. Definitely better than the loupe we used to have.

Gboard manages to do a good job on a 1.4" watch screen.

Am just here to agree with you on iPhone SE. Also using 12 Mini now.

Oh wow and I thought I'm going crazy, because I also make so many typos when typing on my iPhone 11 (normal size)! On any other Android phone I don't make nearly as many typos, and it just feels so much better. I never understood why, maybe the "hitbox" on the iOS keyboard keys is just smaller? Because I could swear I'm tapping the right key but somehow it often triggers a neighboring key.

Also agree with the horrible cursor movement and text selection, it is wack af on iOS

It indeed seems to worse. The cursor placement sometimes even seems to hang my phone for a few seconds (it gets hotter for sure). Also, I almost never intend to say ‘duck’.

I made far fewer mistakes and could type faster using the BlackBerry physical thumb keyboard. Apple should sell attachable thumb keyboards for their phones.

fwiw ... nothing prevents you from attaching an external bluetooth keyboard to your iPhone :)

If you have two or more language keyboards it gets even worse. If you have the French keyboard installed you basically can't use English words that start with Q. Ffs, I get it if I type "Q" for the first letter of a text field and it suggests "Qu'est-ce". But, if I'm using the English keyboard and I say "Where in Q[ueens]?" and it jumps to French on the Q that's just ridiculous.

The Swiftkey app that made typing tolerable on the iPhone is now going to be killed for iOS starting next month. So there really isn't any alternative for now.

I'm not an iPhone user myself, but recently run into the fact that SwiftKey has been deprecated on iPhone when helping a friend.

Does anyone here know the details of why SwiftKey was depreciated? Did iOS change their APIs or permissions somehow or what was the reason?

Microsoft bought it years ago and essentially hasnt updated it for years. Now they're blaming iOS for canning it for good (next month).

https://www.macrumors.com/2022/09/29/microsoft-kills-off-swi...

I was wondering the same. The auto-complete seems to be purposely counterintuitive, accepting some typos for words I would never type (or don't exist) and suggesting the wrong words as well. I wondered if I was just getting old as well. One strange thing that happens is when I try to type "I", it replaces it with "ai".

The iPhone tries to guess where you want to place the cursor, because surely if you press somewhere, it’s not what you meant.

Being able to force-press anywhere on the keyboard to move the cursor with precision, was replaced with force-press on the spacebar only. Awful idea, because then you can only move half-a-line down and half-a-word left and right.

But we get the “swipe an entire word” keyboard that Android had too, and it is nice.

What baffles me is the text selection/cursor placement is either absolutely garbage or cryptic to use. Also, why are the android based solutions so much vastly superior? Often a simple one letter misspelling completely flummoxes the iPhone keyboard. I never encountered that on my android keyboard.

This is the number one item that pushes me back towards android. I type a lot on my phone.

I wrote half my master thesis on an android phone, and this includes peobably 20 times the master thesis in notes. The absolute best ways to write ended up being (in that order):

1. A keyboard

2. A good dual-swype keyboard app (it was keymonk at the time)

3. Actual typing without any autocorrect for anything where the dictionary failed, which in a master thesis can be a lot

The physical keyboard is still the best, but it is hard to use it in the rain on a bus stop.

For me the issue is that it learns the words I use. If I accidentally mistype and don't correct a word once, that word is forever cursed.

The only way out is to reset the prediction (and lost all other useful things) :'(

You're getting older and keyboards are getting worse.

I would love to see videos of Tim Cook typing on his iPhone. Like with a camera recording his fingers tapping/swiping and the screen itself, side by side. I wonder if he gets frustrated with the poor quality or if he's received some Official Training that lets him make effective use of the keyboard.

I used to be able to type quickly and successfully on iPhones without even looking at what I was typing (I’ve had them since they released and in most sizes), but that’s not been the case for at least two years. It’s bad enough I am beginning to abandon the iPhone for almost all purposes. Maybe it’s me, or my age, but no you are not alone.

Having the same issue now after coming back to an iPhone after several years. Last time I used an iPhone there was Swiftkey, which was amazing.

Now, that seems to be gone from the App Store (not available in my country at least) and I am stuck with the default which is quite crappy, honestly.

Also, keys are too small for my fingers, so frustration keeps adding up.

No, and it's not just iPhone. The same class of problems is present on Android as well.

It's because they keep getting ideas, want to make things more complicated and need to justify budgets. IMO mobile keyboards (and in general mobile input and UI in general) were a solved problem 5 years ago and should've gone into maintenance mode.

Mobile typing experience IS terrible for anything other than routine work IMO. The fact that your keyboard takes up half of your already small screen space and that you'll have to look at your keyboard to type is a massive inhibitant for productivity. Not to mention the constant autocorrecting if you are doing any industry-specific work.

> The fact ... that you'll have to look at your keyboard to type is a massive inhibitant for productivity.

I don't look at the keyboard when I type on my phone... why would you do that?! That's like assuming you have to look at the keyboard on your laptop... sure, you can, but it is much better to just practice for a bit and then stop.

I think it’s overall better. I particularly like how autocorrections are presented above the keyboard instead of as boxes above the words (although sometimes you get boxes).

I do have some problems though. My phone thinks st (short for station or saint, I guess) is something I need to type more than “at” and will often leave me with tons of st in my sentences.

The most infuriating thing is trying to select text for copying and pasting it into text fields.

Both actions never work as expected.

This post inspired me to at least try turning off auto correction. I feel like it is fighting me at times and now I intend to find out if it ever really helped me and I didn't notice it.

I wonder if the default slide to type being ON has any bearing on this?

Turning auto capitalization off too, that I definitely fight with and it rarely makes a difference.

Mobile screens and devices are optimized for ad-display. Everything else is de-emphasized or getting more and more broken.

I agree something feels different, I could usually mitigate it with 3D Touch but that was changed a few phones back:

https://technicallychallenged.substack.com/p/my-favorite-iph...

I've been getting a lot more problems with typos, even on second or third attempt. I'm inclined to blame the OS for that as I'm pretty careful when I do the corrections. I haven't found the experience getting worse in other respects, but I don't like it at the best of times.

It's the opposite for me. Typing seems to have gotten easier. Especially now that Apple added their own swype-like functionality, I've found I'm more willing to type longer pieces of text on the phone, where I previously would have waited until I could type it on a computer.

If you think the autocorrect and text manipulation is bad on the standard iOS keyboard, you should try typing with the Grammarly keyboard. The autocorrect and cursor navigation is horrible. You may have better grammar, but the words are a garbled mess that don't have suggestions.

Am a long time Android user. Typing on iPhone is lot worse IMO than on Android, and I type and write a lot.

i can’t for the life of me reason why the changes to auto correct were ever seen as useful. that it changes a word you’ve typed two words ago (so it’s outside of your attention by the time you’re focused on getting the most recent word correct) is baffling.

Additionally, by designing it this way you’re guaranteed to only notice when this feature fucks up. If you typed the wrong word and moved on, you never notice. If you typed the right word and moved on, you see auto correct has fucked up after you send the message, or as it’s fucking up because you’ve learned to not trust the keyboard anymore so now you’re constantly rereading the last few words as you’re typing.

Really a shame they put effort into a feature that’s designed to frustrate the user in this way.

Hard agree. One of my biggest pet peeves is how the iPhone will correctly guess a swiped word and then change the prior word to an incorrect guess when the next word is swiped. Now you have to look at both the word that was just guessed and the word immediately preceding it.

Not just you. Typing on the iPhone has become increasingly a chore over the last few updates for me.

Thank you for sharing, I've had similar frustrations since the iPhone 11. The only constant I've been able to compare against is that my keyboard typing has not declined in accuracy.

Just today I was telling my mom to not get iPhone for next phone if I can’t figure it out I don’t want to think what will happen to her… select a word? No.. place a cursor in a particular place? No.. double tap to select everything? No…

I've found iPhone to be weirdly inconsistent. Like sometimes, autocorrect will recognize my name and autofill it, other times it won't. Also true with OTP recognition from text messages - sometimes it will detect automatically, sometimes it won't.

I always seem to hit the period key when I am in Safari somehow when I'm intending to hit the spacebar. I have now turned off slide-to-type and curious to see it that helps fix that... also disabling the " . shortcut " setting too

The only phone keyboard that I've ever been able to tolerate is microsoft wordflow. They discontinued it, and for $reasons (who knows...) it appears to no longer work on recent versions of ios. The apple keyboard is consistently mediocre, however.

Same here. Been using an iPhone since 3s. Glad (not really) to see its not only me. I tried Pixel 2(?) for sometime in between and my typing accuracy / experience was better with it.

With all the so-called AI/ML being used, shouldn't the typing get better?!

I have completely been feeling the same thing, but for me it's been more pronounced on iOS 16.

Also, iOS 16's change in dictation UX is quite frustrating given I was trained that it would stop listening after long pauses and it no longer does that.

Not to mention, auto accidents have risen sharply with these non-clickable on-screen keyboards.

I cant type on these things worth a shit. I miss the physical keyboard of the blackberry era.

There's something weird going on because it seems to get worse over time, but if you do "Reset Keyboard Dictionary" then it magically gets better again, for a few weeks or so, before getting worse again.

I have no idea what's going on.

Yeah this is something ive noticed too. It might have something to do with moving the touch targets on the keyboard or the machine learning has made it worse. Ive been thinking of making a kb that you can calibrate yourself.

too much data. I have an android phone and swiping constantly produces the wrong words unless I swipe very slowly. it was great many years ago, i noticed that a lot of the words it suggests are words other people might be using. so I feel they are training it with dataset from a large swat of users and that's the issue. if they limited it to the most common words in dictionary then words you typed, it would be great. I suspect this is how the original worked but they got the idea to make it better by training it with "all the words"

It seems to now do multiword correction - that is, it will change two words instead of just the current word. This leads to major meaning shifts when it autocorrects, leading to confused recipients.

Recent iOS convert. I miss my number bar, but otherwise I find the typing experience on iOS to be great, especially on iOS 16. Just disable autocorrect.

I've noticed this in the last 4-5 years or so. It's really bad, but I just put up with it. I just recently bought a Pixel 7 to see how that compares and just might switch over.

The text selection on iPhone is very bad indeed. I have an iPhone only so I can relate to the users, but I use my android most as a main phone because the UX of the iPhone is so bad.

For me the biggest problem is that the registered letter is not the letter that was hit by the finger, but the letter that the finger was lifted up from. Slide-to-type is off.

Try turning Auto-Correction off and Predictive Text on.

This is the closest approximation I've gotten to the original iPhone keyboard. I have Check Spelling off as well due to other reasons.

I've used android phones since I've had modern smartphones and I've had a similar experience. The built in keyboard by google/aosp was always flaky and, especially on small screens, a pain to use. I'll describe my keyboard journey and what ups and owns I experienced on android here:

After using the built in keyboard for a while came swipe-typing and it was a lot better, but still limiting. To this day I believe that swipe-typing still hasn't reached its full potential, but the keyboards that focused on it seem to gravitate back towards hybrid regular typing and swiping which in my opinion removes many advantages it had before, making continuous use somewhat awkward.

The next step in my keyboard journey was fleksy. Fleksy was built much like the apple keyboard, in that the keyboard would look where exactly you pressed (not only the key you actually hit) and try to correlate the most likely word from that, powered by a a personal word frequency statistic lookup. It worked so well that they introduced an "invisible keyboard" mode which did exactly what it said on the box, and even without visible keyboard it would work almost perfectly, that's how good their system was. The other controls where designed around their algorithm, it was highly encouraged to, instead of correct something inside of a word, just delete everything and re-write, much like you'd do on a computer where it's much faster to just ^w^w^w^w then to go back and correct that one letter. In addition, they had gestures to cycle through the other likely predicted words their engine determined from your touches.

Unfortunately, fleksy had trouble raking in money and so the nice thing they had went the way every piece of venture capital software goes, which is down the drain. They began adding ever more things that began nagging away at their core competency until at some point they ventured to a joint ios/android app, a total rewrite. At that point they also introduced machine learning and made away with their previous engine, lowering the prediction quality noticably.

It was at that point that I decided to switch to another app and went f-droid only, because if fleksy would've been free software I could've just taken the source and maintain it myself whenever google decided to break an api it uses.

Currently I use florisboard, a fork of the aosp keyboard with some changes like the swipe behaviour of the space bar and selective deletion using backspace swiping. It's not fancy, typing hurts sometimes, but at least it doesn't try to be smart. Software that tries to be smart and fails is much worse than software that doesn't try.

Nah the typing on the iPhone ist really bad, the predictions are total crap. Android text entering is so so much better - unbelievable

Seems like a change to how touch is recognized. Used to be a light tap registered and now it requires a much more pronounced touch. Really sucks for us touch typists.

Actually yes. I’ve always left autocorrect off, but I do find myself having more typos than before lately. Can’t put my finger on when specifically I noticed though.

This feels odd - lately I was getting very confused by the quality of my typing on iOS. It's reaffirming to see so many people with a similar experience.

I am on iPhone 13 Pro.

when ios launched it was competing with blackberry, a 55wpm mobile keyboard that I could use without looking.

now it's competing with droid, and most droid devices are lower-end so whatever the experience on flagship devices, it's going to be much worse on average

not what you asked but:

I recently booted an android 10 pixel 1, 5ish years old, 3 OS versions behind current, and keyboard input was starkly better than my normal droid 12 device (both tap keyboard + swipe keyboard)

Which keyboard app are you using? It can't be the same on both

default system keyboard

relatedly, the back arrow on top of the contact card in imessage has been changed so that the region to the left of the arrow is just more contact card. I can't imagine that anyone would intentionally click there to open the contact card, and I also can't imagine that no one at apple tested the design and didn't accidentally click the contact card at least once and realize.

Using phones is a bad experience.

For me the old BlackBerry phones with their mini QWERTY keyboard was the peak in text entry usability. Touch screen keyboards are horrible.

iOS text entry and manipulation has always been a disaster in my opinion. It didn’t even have basic copy and paste for many generations. And now, text selection is nonsensical, and prediction is also similarly awful.

I still prefer to use an iPhone overall but this is one area where Android has always been superior I think.

I am exactly in the same boat. I switched from the 12 mini to the 13 mini and I think it's a little better but maybe that's placebo.

Auto-correct is the enemy of multi linguals.

It's near impossible to chat with my friends in a language different to my phone's primary language.

Does anyone else accidentally hit the Return key too often while typing? I feel like the space bar should be longer on the right side.

I type way too many periods and hit return too often. Space bar should be bigger.

I do not own an iphone, but what you are describing sounds similar to what happens when the touch/screen calibration is off.

100% agree, good to know it’s not just me. I would like my 7 plus back and apple can charge me for security updates if they like

Wow, I was thinking the exact same thing as I recently switched from an ancient Pixel 2 XL to an iPhone 12.

I thought it was just me...

Glad my iPhone 6 with Swipe is still going.

I don’t recall any period where I could successfully type a whole sentence on an iPhone. Even this one.

My thumbs are still used to the wider space bar and I am constantly inserting a period in its place!

I noticed that when the keyboard is set to the wrong language accidentally, it becomes comically bad.

The new keyboard that just came out sucks.

I prefer the iPad keyboard (I use both an iPhone Mini, and an iPad Mini).

Thanks for your comment.

I really thought I was getting older to the point of only writing messages in the computer.

well it was always shit, and text selection/cursor placement was even shittier

use glide typing or install gboard

I turn autocorrect and all auto-complete and suggestions off.

Simple UI is good. ML assist makes UI more complex.

I never considered an iPhone until I could use custom keyboards.

(I use swiftkey, but just type the usual way.)

I stopped typing altogether and use voice dictation for any messages longer than one word.

I haven’t used a better keyboard than the one on Windows Phones. Currently am on iPhone

Hello you might be interested in some slide out keyboards Android like astro https://www.androidauthority.com/keyboard-phones-845839/ You can even root some of them and install lineagos

I turned off auto correct and just use the keyboard, its so much better..

Android too. It was about 8-9 years ago that typing started to feel worse.

Yes!

I'm not alone in thinking this!

I'm not crazy! (well at least not for this particular reason)

Absolutely have the same experience here and it drives me nuts.

I have a really, really stupid question. Have you gained weight are your fingers are simply bigger? I have huge fingers and typing on any phone involves a lot of "that is not the key I pressed!"

I use fleksy keyboard. Everything is easier that way.

thanks for sharing Fleksy !

in a few generations, phones won't have keyboards anymore, "you don't need that, we'll show you what you need to see"

It has gotten far, far worse in my experience

I have been thinking the EXACT same thoughts.

The fucking period moved.

You're most definitely getting older, but no reason to worry - most people are.

Strongly agree

You are old

I distinctly recall my txt experience on the 2007 iphone being one where I could just type and not need to worry about predictive text not doing it's job. At the time I was working for a company who's product was a federated text client. And the results were good. I could type sentences without looking and when I looked down, most of the time what I expected was there--no correction needed. Perhaps this is where predicting sentence structure or personal idioms does not work as well when applied to too wide a scale.

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