So I got a newer one, from 2025. Fortunately, radio & media do work. But product managers wouldn't have been product managers without spoiling something. Somebody decided the alarm and night mode must work together in unison, and also they dropped the turn-off-for-30-min feature, and they decided to make night mode smart, that it doesn't turn on if the phone was active at the time. So, now you can get spam calls or sms make it ring loudly at night, because night mode didn't turn on, because you used the phone. Next time when you notice night mode should be on, but isn't, you turn it on. But now it's permanent -- till the end of the universe, unless you turn it off. And alarm clock won't ring, because deep in there, a "waking up alarm" box is unchecked, that should have made it work despite the night mode. Did any human actually test it work on themselves?
[It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken](https://youtu.be/hksVvXONrIo)
The one that keeps getting to me is that iOS insists on putting periods instead of spaces when I only pressed the space bar once so.I.end.up.with.sentences.like.this. (when it starts doing it it can be extremely consistent); yes I know about the double space -> period shortcut but like in the video that's not it.
There was a time where the iOS keyboard just worked.
If anyone has a recommendation, please reply.
Unfortunately, it's still bad. It's a bit better than dragging the handles of the selected area, but if I go to far and want to reduce the selected area, it doesn't work anymore.
> You just wanted to move the cursor. Now everything is selected.
> You want to position the cursor at the end of a line. You tap. It selects the last word. You try to grab the handle — it doesn't respond and deselects. You tap again, now it selects the whole sentence. You tap blank space to deselect — nothing. You tap five more times. On the fifth, it selects all. You switch apps hoping the selection disappears. You tap and hold — sometimes text selects, sometimes a menu appears, sometimes nothing. Got a Magic Keyboard? Good luck — trackpad selection just doesn't work half the time, but touching the screen does. Eventually you select all, delete everything, and retype from scratch. Apple has had 17 years to figure out touch text selection. This is where they landed.
Devs love the symmetry of their touch handling code and often have the finger-down, finger-moved, and finger-up callbacks from the system all call the same handleTouch function they wrote. As you can tell, however, the touch from the finger up callback is often better discarded or handled differently otherwise you get these sort of bugs
It can take a few times to get the selection right, but by that time you forgot why you wanted to highlight that passage in the first place.
It totally breaks my flow of consciousness while reading and marking.
It happens on iPhones and iPads, with and without the Pencil.
If Google ever discontinues the keyboard for iPhone I think I'll go back to dumb phones.
However, my biggest issue with mobile text selection is accidental scrolling or scrolling too fast/far while dragging on the screen to select longer text parts. This is especially annoying in landscape mode when there is just a tiny gap between the visible text and the touch keyboard. I don’t know how to solve this, but it just makes the text editing process feel incredibly insecure/slippy and annoying for me.
In case it isn't clear to people, that research was actually done by Google. It's a shame the researchers didn't have the political clout to ship it.
I guess one issue with it might be the "press harder" bit. That isn't a thing anywhere else in the Android world at all and I expect hardware has pretty poor support for it.
Text selection is cute, with the magnifying lens. It seems like this should work. Though the rest of the process is unpredictable and The Bad Kind Of Magic: Nick turns self into toad, poof!
REFERENCE - from the site:
* "iOS Text Selection is Pure Chaos"
* You just wanted to move the cursor. Now everything is selected.
* You want to position the cursor at the end of a line. You tap. It selects the last word. You try to grab the handle — it doesn't respond and deselects. You tap again, now it selects the whole sentence. You tap blank space to deselect — nothing. You tap five more times. On the fifth, it selects all. You switch apps hoping the selection disappears. You tap and hold — sometimes text selects, sometimes a menu appears, sometimes nothing. Got a Magic Keyboard? Good luck — trackpad selection just doesn't work half the time, but touching the screen does. Eventually you select all, delete everything, and retype from scratch. Apple has had 17 years to figure out touch text selection. This is where they landed.
I run into the other bugs, but text editing is such an absolutely basic feature... it should just work, and it doesn't!
Android stuff has been ahead of apple since like 2014. Apple is really good at optimizing the one thing that they use in advertising, while the rest of the stuff falls by the wayside. Was the exact same thing with Apple silicon and battery life. Sure, your laptop battery lasts a while when all you do is browse web and watch movies, specifically because of dedicated hardware for that. My phone with a similar capacity battery bank does the same. Once you start actually supersizing the cpu, the battery life drops significantly.
battery will explode on you, they overheat - it will try store your photos in 5 different places