The Trials and Tribulations of Writing a 3rd Party iOS Keyboard

My guess is that it's largely a sin of omission: Apple has such a strong drive to add features and keep pace with Android, that fewer resources are marshalled to do purely internal improvements (iOS 7/8 badly needs its Snow Leopard iteration). They've also been even more focused on hitting arbitrary release dates (as driven by events and new hardware) which is never a good formula for reliable softare.

This broad-stroke characterization is a little heavy-handed... one of the really powerful things about writing software on jailbroken devices is that you actually can, easily, just modify the system keyboard to add functionality, instead of having to build an "alien" work-a-like: the power of development on jailbroken systems is just how absolutely native and integrated you can be. Sure, the things that might be most memorable to you are the things that looked the most out of place, but I have seriously had people who own an iPhone as their main device--people who have their iPhone in their hand at that moment--look at me with disbelief when I show them extensions like my Cyntact (which adds contact photos to all native address book lists; iOS 7 finally added this to the Favorites list, but this story is from a time when none of the lists had this seemingly obvious feature), insisting that their iPhone also has the same feature, only to be shocked when they pull it out of their pocket and it actually doesn't. Things that blend in to their surroundings just aren't memorable in the same way as disturbing mistakes, leading to this skewed impression.