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Comment by ramity | Hacker News Reader

35m ago edit: Apple uses many predictive systems for typing. My sentiment in pointing out just slide to type might be misguided as it does not exist in a vacuum. I'd love to see these tests redone with slide to type disabled. I'm leaving the original comment below for reference.

Slide to type. This "issue" is at most 6 years old for iOS users.

Turn off slide to type if you do not use it. Slide to type does key resizing logic. This is the direct cause of this issue. Please upvote this comment for visibility.

Please reply if you think I'm wrong. I see this get posted frequently enough I'm actually losing it.

Please refer to https://youtu.be/hksVvXONrIo?si=XD7AKa8gTl85_rJ6&t=72 (timestamp 1:12) to see that slide to type is enabled.

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I have that feature off and I am making noticeably more typing errors since the glass update.

I'm on an iPhone 12 Mini and always thought this issue was because it's kind of old. But I've seen this issue for at least 3 major iOS generations now, and I'm currently on 26.X

13 mini here and it’s definitely just since the glass update for me.

I don't use the slide feature and typing quality has gone downhill ever since iOS 17 or thereabouts IMO.

Doesn’t.helpmme At.all

I'll give this a try. My typing is better when I use slide to type but I'm still super uncomfortable with it (I feel anxious trying to think of the letters "fast enough" even though I know it doesn't matter).

FWIW I've felt my phone typing accuracy has gotten worse every single year for, whatever, almost 20 years now. That's not the case on the computer.

I almost exclusively use slide to type and what I do is not think about the letters, but about the motions I would have done if I was typing with my hands on a regular keyboard, sort of letting muscle memory take over and create the correct “shape” of the word without thinking too hard about it.

Peak swipe-to-text was on my HTC Desire circa 2010 using the third-party keyboard Swype. Everything since then has been a downgrade.

I still refer to doing it on iPhone as swyping. The portmanteau has permanently genericized in my brain. Those were the days!

I remember when Swiftkey first launched on Android, the swipe-to-text was extremely good and the built-in "learning by itself" dictionary worked well too. Of course, it seems like Microsoft at one point bought it, so I don't even have to try it again to understand the current state of it.

I have this disabled and the problem clearly exists anyway.

Key resizing has been in the iPhone since day 1. It has nothing to do with slide to type, even if slide to type may affect key sizing.

But the video clearly shows this isn’t key sizing given that they show U is selected in the keyboard UI, but j is input into the text.

General -> Keyboard -> Slide to Type

I don't have an issue with typing on iPhone, but I just disabled it to see what happens.

> Slide to type does key resizing logic.

It might be different with slide-to-type enabled, but the iPhone always invisibly resizes keys hitboxes using predictions about what key you want to use next. This can't be disabled, and has been part of the iPhone since the very first. It's a really abysmal experience for something that's so crucial to a smartphone, Apple seems to be completely disconnected with how people use these.

Apple even used to advertise this on their own site. That video definitely exists somewhere on YouTube.

> the iPhone always invisibly resizes keys hitboxes using predictions about what key you want to use next. This can't be disabled, and has been part of the iPhone since the very first.

Yes. True.

> It's a really abysmal experience for something that's so crucial to a smartphone

Full disagreement here. I expect and enjoy the predictive hitboxes, and this issue I am experiencing is not about those. It is when I type for example the letter "T" and I am certain I touched correctly and I am certain I _actually saw_ the letter "T" appear as pressed from the UI, yet when I look at the word I just typed something else which was obviously not the "T" appeared.

I thought I had a neurological disorder. (My iphone has auto-everything off. I'm not enabling slide type for fun, but I do not exclude the probability ios auto-enabled it when I changed brightness or something, as they are used to do.)

About two years ago, my phone typing suddenly gets extremely bad. Like, from occasional error to about one typo every second sentence. No matter how carefully I type. Hardware didn't change, so it must be me, right?

Let me play with that setting, I hope you are right.

I feeeeeel like this helped me but didn’t solve the problem fully. Changed it like 2-3 weeks ago.

Thanks, I’ll try this :)

>Please upvote this comment for visibility.

Lol. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button!

If YouTube ever renames or even just moves that button, millions of videos will suddenly be “broken”.

This already happened when they got rid of the 5-star rating in favor of the like button. "Rate 5 stars and subscribe" became "Like and subscribe". People will adapt.

Still funny in old videos or when they point to the right-hand side when the video info was there.

No worries, they will also introduce an AI "rephrase" (no way to opt-out) which will "translate" these in real-time!

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