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Comment by abandonliberty | Hacker News Reader

I was really surprised when I first got an iPhone. After all the hype about it being so intuitive and polished, it was just different. Some things better, some things worse.

But Apple devices take a bit longer to go obsolete, and seem just a tiny bit less invasive as they don't rely on an advertising model for revenue.

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For the few months that I had to use an iPhone in addition to my regular Android phone, I also tried to convince myself that some things were better and some things were worse.

But the iOS keyboard was completely unusable for me as a power user, and it cannot be replaced. I was missing so many features of Gboard. I absolutely could not consider an iPhone or any other replacement phone for that matter, if it does not support Gboard.

You can install gboard on iPhones, I've been using it for several years on one.

Interesting that it hasn’t been updated in three years.

It's pretty terrible but it's still the best of what I've tried. Given the progress in LLMs the autocomplete/autocorrect choices and word suggestions are laughably bad. Swype and the MS one though still managed to be worse

It's crippled though. You can't do something simple like have the comma on main view.

Is that an iPhone restriction or is that Google not maintaining a product?

Pretty sure it's limited due to iOS. Because it does allow period to be added.

Just checked with the iOS keyboard development guide and app store review and see no rules against it. Why are you pretty sure it is limited due to the OS?

Because the exact same feature is available on the Android version. No other ios keyboard has it. And the default ios keyboard doesn't have it.

I'm not sure of another reason.

iOS must have changed some things related to keyboards. On an iPhone many years ago it was definitely a better experience. I’m not sure if some sort of predictive text gets in the way or what. Or maybe something with the spacing. Or it also seems like some sort of thread priority issue because there are times where I can distinctly tell that there’s some sort of input lag that’s messing with it.

Gboard is crippled on iOS — why can’t we just have a damn comma on the main screen?! And why can't I just get my keyboard to be at the very bottom of my screen.

It's 2025 and we have gone so far backward.

today I was texting and Google Messages began to lag.

Why DOES everything seem to get worse? I can hear the Doctorow fans coming out of the woodwork to tell me it's "enshittification" but that's a cute conspiracy theory that doesn't explain at all why Google would allow Messages to have a memory leak after working fine for years.

There's no profit motive to making a core application shittier.

We have to dig deeper, because this kind of thing is everywhere and hand waving at capitalism like Doctorow does is a cop out and an unsatisfying explanation IMHO

Why do you need to dig deeper? If you were the PM would you prioritise the fixing of the bug instead of other work that’s more important? How many customers will you actually lose?

Because random performance bugs are a giant pain to even detect, let alone root cause.

Because of agile and ci/cd practices. Meaning you ship features to production with at best a/b testing. Never mind writing tests.

Of course written by some cheap devs from India or Bangladesh.

If the code was even still written by a human at this point.

Been using iPhone for years and I swear the keyboards accuracy has turned to absolute shit. I am convinced through my experience that they have definitely changed something and made it terrible. It’s making me consider getting an android cos that’s how we use our phones - with a keyboard.

Oh and it's distinctly worse on the iOS 26 beta. Certain text boxes (like HN) are a nightmare.

I used to smoothly type without looking on iOS. It was like magic. Now, it's just a mess. I think gboard on Android is the current top experience.

FOSS heliboard is a strong competitor to Gboard.

I'll check out out, thank you.

Alas, I don't think it's available on iOS.

I use Android as my daily driver.

I just tried to use Heliboard. It has many rough edges, I'll file issues to see it they can be improved.

For one thing, the voice typing is useless. It respects neither the language of the full keyboard nor the language shown in its interface. And that separate interface needs to be brought up separately, thus requiring many taps - exactly what I'm avoiding by using voice typing in the first place.

Selecting text then pressing the Delete key does not delete that selection in Hebrew or Arabic. It does work in English.

The swiping in English works fine - probably because that library is lifted directly from Gboard. So the idea is independence from propriety Gboard is not reality anyway. Swiping does not work in Hebrew or Arabic - which together with the lack of voice typing means that I can not use this keyboard at all.

I do like the arrow keys and selection buttons in the toolbar. Gboard has that in a seperate pane, but in the toolbar is much more convenient.

I use the swipe library (Glide typing) but you need to install that seperately.

Apparently the voice input is not coming from Heliboard. You could use an alternative service like futo voice input.

https://voiceinput.futo.org/

I've noticed the iOS keyboard has fundamentally different tap recognition based on whether swipe typing is enabled.

It looks the same but behaves differently enough that I have a hard time believing it shares code. When I turn off swipe, my tap accuracy goes MASSIVELY up, and a lot of the autocorrect screwiness seems to abate considerably. I can go back to blind thumb typing.

That said, swipe is so useful, I’ve left it on, and I deal with the degraded tap behavior. But maybe that’s a trade-off for you to consider.

I can't believe this is it. But this is it. Too bad there's no quick toggle to turn it back on? It's possible to create a shortcut for it maybe. I currently have a back tap bring up a menu of different shortcuts I use. Shortcuts is another aspect that's really under utilized because the UX just sucks so much.

I think I looked for a shortcut action to no avail. But if you find one I'd be interested!

I assume it's something to do with distinguishing swipes from taps with both active, but it really is a marked difference.

Same here.

The iOS keyboard puts absolute gibberish in there in ways it never did for me before.

The Apple AI predictive text seems strictly worse.

Wow, as others have said below, disabling the “Slide to Type” feature in Settings > General > Keyboard makes typing work well again on iOS. I cannot believe I put up with this awful typing experience for the past year/years. This should be broadcast more widely somehow. I’m sure many people have just assumed they got worse at typing. I am genuinely flabbergasted.

HOLY shit. You just changed my life. You're absolutely right. It fixed the exact problem I could never quite pin down. I guess the keyboard was always a bit too eager to detect a swipe? This is absolutely nuts

edit: i can type without looking again! i hate that this was the issue.

You’ve been able to replace the iOS keyboard for almost a decade - including with Google’s

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gboard-the-google-keyboard/id1...

> But the iOS keyboard was completely unusable for me as a power user, and it cannot be replaced.

If you're still on Android, try FUTO keyboard. I found the voice-to-text feature to actually be on par with Google's, but without the delay of a phone-home.

I went from OnePlus to Nothing recently. Differences in Android skin felt like rough edges at first.

Google is collecting data but I do not see adverts in the OS.

in the very beginning, there was a lot of animation stutters on android. The UI was much less consistent, and the design language of different programs varied pretty wildly. This gave me at the time, a feeling of a distinct lack of polish..

I would say, though that in the year of our Lord 2025, largely hardware is good enough that the animations never stutter on android anymore, an android applications have largely converged on similar UI paradigms.

So I think the issue with criticism is that people hold in the heads for a very long time, I mean a clear example is how people think Linux is extremely user hostile, despite most metrics of what makes something user hostile being significantly superior on most widely available in the next distributions except of course the power user focused ones. Whereas Windows 11 and macOS clearly do not give a shit about breaking muscle memory or having UI inconsistency.

Criticisms live longer in our minds than they do in reality.

It’s gotten worse. 6 and earlier, it was uniquely friendly and approachable.

In my experience, this was true also with Google’s version. The first few iterations were great, then went shit. I need only one thing: add diacritics, and fix basic misspellings. Now all of them try to be “smart” even when they should just add a diacritic to an “a”, they suggest me something completely different even when the word which I need is in their dictionary.

Maybe most people need more, but it annoys me greatly that it tries to be more than simple misspell fixer.

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