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Comment by iwanttocomment | Hacker News Reader

SwiftKey is very helpful with replacing the terrible, terrible iOS keyboard.

The iOS keyboard was without question the hardest part of the transition from Android to the iPhone for me. (GBoard for iOS is a pale imitation of GBoard for Android.) I still think it's weird that I have so much trouble with the iOS keyboard, because I've used an iPad for years, and the iPadOS "Flick Keyboard" has always been just fine since it was introduced 5 or so years ago.

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I find the swift keyboard is better than the regular one, but good lord is the autocomplete terrible. It adds 's to words so often even when my finger never went close to the S key, it suggests "ang" as often as "and", and I'll often have something entered correctly, but then adding a word will cause the word three positions back to change. I could go on. I really don't get why it's so bad when my android from a decade ago basically always entered what I was thinking.

To be fair, SwiftKey is also very helpful in replacing the terrible stock Android keyboard.

> terrible iOS keyboard

iOS user since 2014. What's wrong with the keyboard exactly?

I'm an iPhone user since last year and I wasn't able to use it for more than a day. Hard to explain, but it really is terrible to someone who is used to have a big choice of very good keyboards. It's just too basic and doesn't ever type what I want to type.

The most important missing feature is multi language support - I frequently combine multiple languages in one sentence. Switching languages every time I need to say a word or two in the other one is tiring.

I never have to switch languages just to type a word or two in another language into the keyboard. Switching keyboards is very fast from the button on the keyboard, but switching isn't even really necessary to type in multiple Latin alphabet languages. For me it even autocorrects and spellchecks correctly with mixed English-non English text regardless of the enabled keyboard. What do better solutions look like?

I don’t know if the mixed autocorrect is a new feature but if I switch to Hungárián thai is WhatsApp autó correct Ford tó my Message. French is similarité screwed up although after a few words it does seem to offer English autocorrect options. Maybe it depends on language?

For me (writing in mixed English and Spanish) it's never necessary to actually change the keyboard unless I just want the ñ key available. I wrote half of this with the English keyboard and half with the Spanish keyboard and it didn't make any difference with respect to autocorrect. If I want to use Spanish text in the middle of my sentence por ejemplo así, it just works. It autocorrects "asi" to "así" without switching to the Spanish keyboard.

It could be a function of time spent writing bilingual text. If I add a new keyboard (I tried Hungarian as well) and it didn't work for that. Or it may only work with exactly two languages? It's not a documented feature as far as I know, so it's hard to say what the conditions and parameters are.

For good measure I also tried reseting my keyboard dictionary just in case what I'm describing is just the effect of intermingling my autocorrect dictionary with so much Spanish over the years that it can code switch now, but nothing changed.

Better - and necessary for my use case - is the first word. I just type whatever I want and it suggests/tries both languages at the same time. Few words is too late since I want to use 1-3 words in the other language only.

That's generally exactly how it works for me. I don't think I've done anything special with my configuration apart from enabling two different language keyboards.

In GBoard for Android, there can be numbers on the top of the keyboard. (This is also available in iPadOS but not iOS.)

Most symbols (%@*'"!? etc.) are available on the keyboard itself with a long-press. (This is also true of the iPadOS "Flick Keyboard", but not iOS.)

There's a comma on the keyboard (why is it so hard to get a comma on literally every iOS keyboard?! This also is available on iPadOS. Yes, I use commas.)

Swype word detection is more accurate, even with the strictest privacy settings.

At the end of the day, with GBoard for Android, I never, ever needed to change modes on the keyboard or do a long swipe to type numbers, punctuation or symbols. Don't need to do it on iPadOS either. iOS, it's a total nightmare.

Maybe Tim Cook never types on an iPhone. I'm baffled as to why this is an issue. They made the iPadOS keyboard modern in 2018, the iOS keyboard remains mired in 2008.

The iPhone 15 Pro hardware is remarkable. The keyboard, though, oof, ow.

> I'm baffled as to why this is an issue.

I am baffled by 1-2 extra keypresses to use numbers or symbols & get back to the letters is such a big issue. The majority of the US & Japan (predominantly iPhone users) function just fine.

Either way it's too late for iOS to change it now because "loyal" iPhone users are used to it now.

As someone who has to communicate in multiple languages, sometimes in a single conversation, apple's keyboard is useless.

Swift allows me to configure multiple languages to be active at once allowing to type without bothering which of the languages is currently active

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