iPhone Typos? It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken [video]
youtube.com352 points by walterbell 7 hours ago
352 points by walterbell 7 hours ago
I have had this conversation with several people. I feel like I used to be able to type with a fairly low error rate on a smaller screen with old iPhones. Now I feel that it is constant exercise in frustration as I will hit a letter and the keyboard will decide to pick the letter next to it. It is evolving backwards.
There are two very simple causes to point to why touch keyboards turned to shit:
1. Crowdsourced word weighting: your keyboard's stochastic predictions are no longer mostly based on your typing, but rather on what 'everyone' is typing as their next word. This makes the word replacements it does often suboptimal to downright nonsensical.
2. Aggressive lookbehind correction: these days you have to be seriously on your guard for your keyboard to not sneak-edit something you typed 5 words back, because autocorrect suddenly decided that the probability is high you meant to say something else there (which it clearly isn't, as your eyes and brain exist)
The problem your encountering is downstream from point 1. Basically your keyboard thinks due to the way most people construct a particular sentence, you're gonna want to type "bold" next, despite "hold" clearly clearly making more sense. So it'll force "b" on you 4 times in a row until it realizes you really want to type "h".
Going back to the old style of doing keyboards (mostly user-learned dictionaries and probability weighting, and little lookbehind autocorrrect) could be done, but within Google and Apple there are probably people who got promoted by switching to the current shitty system. They'll block off any attempt at someone messing with their pride.
(There is a third 'problem' where your visual keys do not correspond to the touchmap at all. Swiftkey has a feature where it can show you what your touchmap and heatmap look like versus the actual layout and it its often staggeringly different, with many keys vastly tilted. When you try to desperately type "h" after 4 misses, you're doing that with your index finger in "hunt and peck" mode, which does correspond to the visual layout but not with your usual typing on the touchmap layout. There is no way for your keyboard to know you're in "hunt and peck" accuracy mode.)
> The problem your encountering is downstream from point 1. Basically your keyboard thinks due to the way most people construct a particular sentence, you're gonna want to type "bold" next, despite "hold" clearly clearly making more sense. So it'll force "b" on you 4 times in a row until it realizes you really want to type "h".
In the video, the user is typing 'Thumbs up', and when they get to the first 'u' the keyboard shows a 'u' being pressed but a 'j' is inserted instead. Are you suggesting that, due to the way most people construct sentences, the OS thinks that 'thjmbs' is the most likely word? And then the next time the OS thinks that 'thhmbs' is the most likely word?
Both of the issues you've mentioned are common, and irritating, but if you watch the video you can see that that's not what's happening here. Before any autocorrection or adjustment is being done, the keyboard is registering a 'U' and the OS is inputting a J or H or I or some other nearby letter.
The video also debunks the touchmap discontinuity issues as well, because you can clearly see which key the keyboard is registering; it's not assuming that you meant to press J or it would highlight the J; it's registering a U, highlighting U, and inputting J.
It sounds to me as though you didn't watch the video and just assumed what issue was being discussed; please do watch it, because this is another, relatively new, issue that lots of people have seen and which is far worse and more frustrating than the other legitimate issues you mentioned.
The above commenter is talking about why touchscreen keyboards have become worse over time in general
Apple additionally may have just bugged up their implementation as well, but the above mentioned issues exist even on Android, and didn't a decade ago.
I still contend that the single best touchscreen keyboard and autocorrect implementation was the onscreen keyboard on the Microsoft Zune HD. A tiny tiny screen, and you could still type without looking and nearly always end up with the right text. It was magical, and creepy in retrospect.
But nobody bought it so we had less good keyboards for a decade. Then companies insisted that they could throw "Algorithms" at the problem (which is what we had been doing for a decade but whatever) and make it magically better and now everyone gets worthless autocorrect because of the everpresent "Nobody is actually average so tuning your system to the average makes it bad for everybody" problem that has infected literally all "Data driven" product decisions.
We literally had better text prediction using boring methods. We literally had working voice control on flip phones from the 90s. All on device too.
3. I stopped caring and learned to love the algorithm in 95% of normal typing. The result is that my typing speed is up but my accuracy has plummeted, yet my typing output is generally correct because of autocorrect.
Unfortunately this falls apart when I try to type anything that isn’t common English words: names, code, rare words, etc.
I also think that the keyboard could learn the different “rhythms” of typing - my normal typing which is fast and practically blind, and the careful hunt and peck which is much slower and intended for those out-of-distribution inputs. I bet the profile of the touch contacts (e.g. contact area and shape of the touches) for those two modes looks different too.
My strategy for a time was disabling autocorrect and perfect my accuracy, but this was stumped because indeed, it's harder to type these days than when the screens were smaller and less precise, it seems to pick adyacent keys on a whim.
So I realized I had exchanged correcting the same word four times in a row to correcting the same letter four times in a row.
I feel this way with Android's keyboards, too.
I still feel the pinnacle was ~2011 Windows Phone. It was some kind of swipe-to-type, but maybe not Swype specifically? At any rate, it seemed to use "how humans actually talk" as a guideline, because it was do a great job of predicting what words I would actually mean to use in a row.
Modern keyboards are like, I know you just said "I want" but instead of predicting "to" I predict "rip". I mean the letters are close. And "I want rip" makes way more sense than "I want to." You're welcome!
I swear the android autocorrect got so much worse at some point. Somewhere between 5 and 15 years ago. I used to be able to type vaguely coherent sentences and all of the typos would magically become the words I meant, even if they didn't look right. Now I frequently type completely correct sentences and the correctly spelled words get changed into other words that make no sense in context.
And i used to be able to backspace the wrong word and fix it and it would learn thats what I meant. Now if I try that, it'll frequently keep trying to edit to the word I didn't mean unless I press the little checkmark in the autocorrect panel. Just annoying UX.
I remember when I could blindly type because autocorrect was so good. I've been enjoying FUTO keyboard a bit, but I dont yet know if it's the same experience.
The absolute zenith of mobile keyboards was the Blackberry, which included F & J nubs. I could type without looking at my phone at full speed and not get a character wrong.
The fact that Apple will as often as not autocorrect grammar from actually-correct to wrong -- and systematically screw up spelling -- in not just transcribed Siri but also in typing is just inexcusable at this point. It will even Randomly capitalize Certain words!
Google's Gboard completes "i want t" with "to" and "the" for me.
Which is the better option now. But the one he's talking about is the OG windows phone swipe keyboard which would predict next word almost like from a LLM these days. For that reason, you can swipe like a maniac but it'd still type the correct thing.
Apple keyboard is shit. Swype (the one Microsoft bought) is better but still shit. Gboard is ok. But none of them are close to that windows phone keyboard. I still miss it.
Google's keyboard is okay for English. It's a complete tire fire for two other languages I use (both popular and with a very large training data set).
Suggests words that make no sense, preferring rare words to much more widely used and obvious matching picks. Has the vocabulary of a poorly educated five year old idiot savant — fails to complete many words you use fifty times a day, but sometimes surprises you by suggesting something you'd hear a couple times per decade. Doesn't know other forms of the same word, forcing you to correct it manually over and over again, often failing to remember the word until you type it in four or five times.
Yes, I've downloaded all the dictionaries, tried it on many phones, and my friends are of the same opinion: it really is just bad.
I write in English and Spanish on it, and it seems the shittiness gets multiplied when you use a bilingual instead on monolingual layout. I've tried switching languages manually, but that sucks even more when writing Spanish with English technical terms sprinkled.
This is a patent case where IA made a function worse instead of better, yet companies clinged to it for some reason.
Android got really annoying recently, I think in the past few months, almost 30 percent of the time some random menu will pop up. They added a new top layer menu and I keep fat fingering it.
I have the same experience, and my hands are pretty small. Some paranoid bell rang in my head about it being an intentional annoyance to start getting us to use voice-to-text more,
Even switching to the Hacker's Keyboard and tweaking some settings still has me smacking the "tab" key or whatever when hitting space.
Just out of curiosity, who here is a one-handed texter, like me? I just assumed my constant need for error correction was because I only use one hand (and thus, one thumb) to type, but this thread has me wondering.
Okay but are there any other Android keyboards to swipe better? And for even nicer, to _actually handle_ multilingual input? I'm fed up of garbage concepts where you can only have ALL languages at once (who the heck wants that), or suggesting random words (I don't even know from where) and definitely unable to learn anything - not even my own name...
It wouldn’t be so bad if suggested corrections would take into account sibling-letter-on-keyboard typos, and if the spellchecker would recognize when words don’t make sense in context. We had better spellcheckers 25 years ago in word processors.
Now we must have AI everywhere, damn that quality of life those lefties keep on expecting.
I guess as iPhones have gotten bigger Apple has put less resources into optimising newer iOS versions for smaller phones
Frustrating if you are a 13 mini user
Even the larger ones suck for typing. It is the keyboard. It works a lot better if you are using a language they don’t have autocorrect for.
Dunno man, I’m on a 17 and there are a ton of context menus that were clearly not tested properly on a screen this size (6.1” or something) - the “delete” option is nowhere to be seen for example, you have to scroll down to find it.
Guess they’ll want us to carry iPads in our pockets for these UIs to actually work :)
Regarding typing on the iPad - Apple has removed the landscape split keyboard on the iPad, making it even more awkward to use, but not on the iPad Mini.
Perhaps they wanted to sell more Smart Keyboards.
iPhone SE user here - it feels that even if Apple is not making small screen experience intentionally worse at least they optimize iOS for large screen sizes as a result with most updates UX on SE becoming worse. Using keyboard on this phone is a frustration but guess it's generally hard to make it work well on a small screen (and given that Apple wants to sell large phones unlikely they invest into small screen optimizations).
Except that it always used to work well on the SE / 13 mini form factor. That was part of the original iPhone-vs-BlackBerry magic, wasn’t it? It’s phenomenally hard to make typing work on a soft keyboard, especially at that size, and yet they did. And now un-did.
By contrast, the typing experience on a 2.5” Unihertz Atom screen is shockingly acceptable…
confirmed, their glass ux has added padding to everything, reducing screen real estate.
I moved from 13 mini this year to 16 Pro, the keyboard is just as bad either way, not a noticeable difference. Maybe slightly worse on the 16 because the ergonomics are so bad.
Switched from pixels to iphone in the last year or two and the keyboard is the biggest pain point by far. I tend to use swipe, so this particular issue isn't something I've come across. What I do run into is weird censorship issues where I'm trying to type "kill myself" or something similar and the phone will do anything to not provide that as an option. Then, when I try to manually change it, editing is a nightmare. Inevitably trying to change the ending of a word results in the entire word being deleted. It inserts spaces where I don't want them.
Is this some sort of psyop to get me to use siri to send texts?
Similar switching story. I'm very happy with an iPhone overall, but god damn they keyboard took some adjusting. The default keyboard on Pixels (GBoard?) is excellent. The autocorrect is also unimaginably better on the Pixel. It's embarrassing how bad the iPhone's autocorrect is. Not just missing obvious cases, but actively sabotaging correct cases.
> The default keyboard on Pixels (GBoard?) is excellent.
Not my experience at all. Do you only write English?
I personally haven't found any keyboard that works better than gboard. And exactly because it's the only keyboard that just lets me type in two languages without having to "switch", and it does that well. Right now my spacebar just says "NL - EN" and it lets me combine Dutch and English just fine.
From my experience it is much worse than it used to be 5 years ago. I have been writing English, French, and to a lesser extent German on an iPhone since ~2008. Initially, the dumb autocorrect would just correct to the closer word in the dictionary corresponding to the current keyboard, but over time it would pick up more and more words I used regularly. At some point around 2018 or so, it was nearly flawless. I think it changed the dictionary depending on the language or the sentence, because I had different suggestions for the same mistyped word in the same document. Also, I assume that by then my personal dictionary was quite extensive.
And then they bragged about a new machine-learning improved keyboard and it went downhill. First, all keyboards became monolingual, which was a 10-years regression. And even in that language, it was very flakey. They added multi-language keyboards somewhat recently and it got slightly better, except that for some reason it changes the keyboard back to the English-only one regularly for no reason I can see.
It is maddening. For a couple of years it was fantastic.
And that’s not the worst. On the Apple Watch not only is the multilingual keyboard completely broken, but worse than that: if you change the language of the keyboard by long pressing the space button it shows the new language, but the autocorrect proceeds to just ignore it completely and autocorrects everything as if I were typing in the system language rather than the one I selected.
And contrary to the iPhone you can’t even disable autocorrect! This + the super-aggressive autocorrect of watchOS (the screen is small after all so you are likely to make a mistake and we better fix it automatically!) makes it an absolute NIGHTMARE to type on an Apple Watch in multiple languages. Your only option is to use speech to type because that one for some reason works when you change the language whereas the keyboard doesn’t care.
Edit: the language switch bug on watchOS seems to have finally been fixed on watchOS 26.1. The bug was already long present on watchOS 11, so not something that watchOS 26 introduced.
This. I use romanian, english and turkish at the same time. Sometimes goes sideways because we mix a lot of words in english and romaninan in the same sentence, but it's ok. No other keyboard comes close.
Multilingual typing is a godsend. I did have to tweak settings though, like disabling the "suggestion strip" (because sometimes I'd be typing fast and accidently click the GIF button, then an image, which in many apps sends it immediately without a draft which was extremely annoying).
You can install gboard on iOS - I haven't used the default keyboard in years
It's abandoned and buggy. I'm surprised google hasn't just removed it from the store. I suspect as soon as it actually requires an update because of a change in the OS it will disappear.
Yes, I loved it, but it crashed in too many apps and I had to switch to the Apple one :(
Unfortunately, it's simply not as good. I miss long-press punctuation so much.
Yeah I tried it and it doesn't stand up to it on Android in my experience. I figured I'd rather not give Google any data if the experience isn't going to be the same.
>autocorrect is also unimaginably better on the Pixel
Pixel user here. That depends on the language you're typing. Autocorrect and spellcheck, not just on Android but other Google products, will change correct danish to incorrect danish. It's infuriating. The issue I encounter most often happens because Google apparently assumes english grammar is universal, and insists on splitting compound words, which is never done in danish.
Danish is already being heavily eroded by foreign influence, and this isn't helping.
I switched from Android to iOS like five or six years ago and still think about this almost every day, how much I miss the Android keyboard because the iOS keyboard is so, so, so terrible. Years later I still find it a frustrating, type-inducing mess.
The key is to work around the text input. If you want to say "kill myself", you input "kill my" then complete the "self" portion by pressing delete (remove space), then s-e-l-f. I feel like most of my typing time is spent making these corrections, as it's very quick to swipe but corrections are almost always necessary and they are an order of magnitude slower. Yesterday for example I tried to swipe "succession" but it really wanted to output "secession", so I change my strategy to "success" (it really liked this word), then delete (remove space), i-o-n.
I think every time I swipe I need to do at least one correction like this, where I type one similarly spelled word with as minimum an edit distance as I can think of in the moment, then do a manual correction.
it's kinda bleak realizing I've been running the same cursed workflow for way too long. brb gonna disable that autocomplete
Except sometimes the autocorrection will “helpfully” replace the prior word to jive with its model of the universe. Incredibly frustrating.
I don't think it's "censorship" so much as it's defaulting to less-problematic phrases to avoid the opposite happening (you meaning to say "fill myself" or something). That could be jarring and lead to embarrassing situations.
Maybe 99 times out of 100 someone means to type "fuck" instead of "duck", but it's a completely legitimate UX decision to optimize preventing that 1% case, even if it's annoying the other 99% of the time.
> it's a completely legitimate UX decision to optimize preventing that 1% case, even if it's annoying the other 99% of the time.
Maybe, but only if there's a way to opt out of being annoyed 99% of the time. An "I'm a grown-up" button.
I've never noticed the "censorship issue", but once it gets a word wrong once, it's game over. Editing is awful. If I'm trying to replace the word entirely, I inevitably do the "wrong thing" and fall victim to the editing again, or tap something wrong, or.. I don't know, but I either have an undiagnosed brain injury, or the "correct" thing to do to get the phone to just take the damn word you typed changes every day.
> I've never noticed the "censorship issue"
Really? If you swipe "kill" and then try "yourself" or "myself" does it ever get it right or provide it as one of the options? Doing it right now myself and I can't get it to do either. I have manually entered those words and hit the "myself" in the suggestion box to try and convince it that that's an acceptable correction to no avail.
> I inevitably do the "wrong thing" and fall victim to the editing again, or tap something wrong, or.. I don't know
Every. Time. I like to think that I'm not an idiot and can generally pattern recognize, but it just feels so inconsistent that I'm always doing the wrong thing.
Further, iPhones are so bad if you exist anywhere outside the mainstream and language orthodoxy.
Their voice recognition stubbornly refuses to acknowledge Linux, instead transcribing Linux.
Typing "tboy" or "transfem", common terms in the trans community, gets changed to "toby" or "transfer". I can understand "toby", but the latter is especially bad, as the "r" and "m" keys are nowhere near each other. I'll type these words several times a day, every day, and it'll never get recorded. But one typo of the form "unbeleivalbe" gets permanently etched into the autocorrection.
Any intentionally unorthodox english gets invisibly censored and editorialized. You can say "here come dat boi" nowadays (which is good if you're a fan of 2016 memes) but not "wrasslin". Phrases like "what you doin today" has its tone and informality stripped when it's changed to "what are you doing today".
…and when I type standard, but clique-centric, abbreviations and slang among my own groups, the iPhone messes those up, too.
Options also exist to pre-populate the predictive wordlists with our own terms, and to turn off predictive text altogether.
I would at some point throw my phone out the window if it worked like this. Instead I choose to have zero help correcting anything I type on my phone. I proofread, and fix any errors before I hit "send". I'm also on a folding android phone with a large screen and a 3rd-party keyboard app with adjustable size keys, so it's very easy to type.
I’ve confirmed this on my iphone as well.
Using swipe, no space bar after kill: Kill maps Jill myself Jill myself
Using swipe, manually pressing space bar after kill: Kill mussels Kill mussels Kill mussels
Yeah same -
Kill males kill males kill muddled kill mussels (hilarious)
Treat myself tear myself try myself tell myself
It won’t do it.
Same for me. My Pixel magically fixed scrambled words (and was very fast doing it). iOS is terrible, even without described bug.
I am now much faster typing with the speech-to-text feature. Maybe that is what they are pushing. Maybe Apple wants to remove the keyboard and it is slowly increasing the friction so people use it less and less? Similarly how Chrome degrades browser performance until it gets restarted to force an update.
In spite of the manufacturing drama it introduced, 3D Touch was an insanely great feature for editing alone. Push a little harder on the keyboard and have a cursor to easily place where you need it.
I was real grumpy when they took it away. Editing had only become even worse since. I’d love to know what they’re trying to achieve.
I'm not just grumpy, I'm baffled. Suddenly, when there is an URL or number input, when the hold-on-spacebar UX doesn't work because there is no spacebar, how could you even move the cursor left or right? Tapping in-between tiny letters is borderline impossible, and it isn't always in the right place to do the hold-and-slowly-move thing either, because the magnifying glass doesn't show up, so you can't see where you end up... It seems to me like for the last 5-6 years, the people who do decisions at Apple doesn't actually use the products themselves, or actually understand functional UX. Jobs would be ashamed.
Mine still does that, I just press and hold on the spacebar and can move the cursor around, are you sure its no longer available on your phone?
This was changed, and it is pretty easy to think the feature got removed.
When it was pressure-sensitive, you could push harder anywhere on the keyboard. But now that it’s tap-and-hold, it only works on the space bar. Most other pressure-sensitive actions just got replaced with tap-and-hold with no changes. But doing that on any other key brings up letter-specific accents, so they moved it down to spacebar.
It also used to be faster. Now you have to wait, but before it was pressure sensitive. You could trigger it instantly with more pressure. Edits were so fast and convenient, but now it’s a slight pause each time
Doesn’t work If the keyboard doesn’t have a spacebar - happens with numeric input. IIRC the old 3D Touch version worked on any key.
Haha sometimes I want to type f*ck and it gets auto corrected to duck. But once I was trying to type “pura” (pure in Spanish, I do have Spanish enabled for auto correct) and it auto corrected it to “puta” (look it up). Shrug.
I'm in the same boat. This is bewildering to me, because I recall Apple making a joke about (it being fixed) in this in the 2023 developer conference:
I didn’t pick up on the censorship issue. I just spent a few minutes trying to swipe type “kill myself” and found myself completely unable. I wonder if this is intentional. If so it feels like an embarrassing waste of time.
My phone loves to tell people they V are fat instead of ask them about their day. Also loves adding random v s everywhere
Similar story here as well. Why is editing only a nightmare when it's something salacious or off-beat?
> Then, when I try to manually change it, editing is a nightmare.
It feels like the editing and cursor process has gotten exponentially worse over the last few iOS versions. I do not understand what anyone is doing on the Apple side with this, but every change they make, makes it significantly worse.
Does Pixel somehow have a good keyboard? I use GBoard and find it atrocious: for English it's ok, but it doesn't know basic declensions in Czech nor Polish and autocorrects them to something nonsensical. This happens every time I try to type something, so I avoid writing on the phone.
It's the age of LLMs! Language has been solved! LLMs are great at both Czech and Polish. This problem is orders of magnitude easier. Why doesn't my keyboard even know these words exist?? Is there an Android keyboard that actually... knows basic forms of basic words?
Do you have an example? I type in Polish in GBoard regularly and haven't noticed too many anomalies (although I do have the right language pack installed, and the keyboard is set to it, and I "add to dictionary" occasionally).
Please, for the love of god, do not pull LLMs into the mix. I just want the keyboard to display what I'm typing.
Yea, it'd also be cool if they, like, just included a basic dictionary?
what do you mean by this specifically? iOS (and I'm guessing Android) both have dictionaries. I can select a word I've entered and look it up in nearly any text area.
> Does Pixel somehow have a good keyboard? I use GBoard and find it atrocious
I use Google Pinyin Input. Since it was discontinued in favor of (the much worse) GBoard, I have to keep a backup of the apk and sideload it onto new phones.
Google does not appear to think of input methods as something that should be convenient for the user to use. Not sure why.
theres a setting to turn off whole word delete. So if it does the wrong word when you press delete it will only delete the letter by letter not the whole word. It helps but iphone keyboard is still horrendous.
I recently learned of the early 20th century cult called the Royal Fraternity of Master Metaphysicians. Their best known stunt was attempting to raise a baby to become immortal by never exposing her to the concepts of death or disease—our ability to contemplate death being the thing that dooms us to die, in their worldview.
Big Tech's attempts to shape us by conforming our capability to express ourselves to "algospeak" seems similarly misguided... though not out of character for Big Tech. (AI can be seen as a form of hermetic magick: an attempt to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth by first constructing a machine-god.)
You're on Android. If the keyboard is censoring you and you don't want that, install a different keyboard from any store/repository you like
I've also got a Pixel from work and the keyboard doesn't even support swiping. It's a nightmare. I don't really want to install another one due to paranoia related to the work I do, but on my personal android phone, replacing the OS keyboard with Swiftkey (for which I have a data folder with over a decade of training in it) and denying it internet access is the first thing I do after rooting. I'm amazed that so few people seem to even realise that software is replaceable (also the launcher, which is an even-more-commonly-heard complaint after changing/upgrading phones)
Edit: wait I misread which way around you switched. Nvm and good luck
I think the Apple software UI team has cultural problem in adhering to "one source of truth", and that's where most of the problems come from. I've seen this many many times throughout the years, from toggles, to actions, account creation (I have dupes from tapping a button too fast), etc: the UI doesn't match the internal state.
Another example is most any toggle that's linked to Apple cloud stuffs, like settings in your iCloud account or parental controls. You see it toggle immediately, but that's unrelated to the actual state. You can't know the actual state until you exit the page and go back. Meta gets this right with their apps: you toggle, the toggle turns disabled, then the toggle is re-enabled when the state is confirmed remote side.
Part of apple’s language design is to not show failure whenever possible.
It’s everywhere once you’re told. at most a loading icon remains loading or a setting resets itself when you don’t look, but those “there was an error -accept” popups that are a constant in windows are rarely seen this side of the fence.
It tends to become stupid when the network is involved, where lack of coverage, interrupted downloads and the like are common. They have to show it just works I guess.
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.
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
I don't use the slide feature and typing quality has gone downhill ever since iOS 17 or thereabouts IMO.
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 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 still refer to doing it on iPhone as swyping. The portmanteau has permanently genericized in my brain. Those were the days!
General -> Keyboard -> Slide to Type
I don't have an issue with typing on iPhone, but I just disabled it to see what happens.
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.
> 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 feeeeeel like this helped me but didn’t solve the problem fully. Changed it like 2-3 weeks ago.
>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.
I pranked a friend in college by tricking him into installing a “utility” on his Amiga 1200 that swapped adjacent keys into the key stream as he typed, but only above a certain speed. He called and woke me the next morning in a panic about losing the ability to type. He would type slowly and it would work fine. Then at normal speed and he’d get constant errors. He’d quickly pull his hands up to see what keys they were over. Did he have a brain tumor? How could he be a journalist if he couldn’t type! Did he need to change majors?
Apple is unintentionally pranking the world.
Is software just going to get worse from now on? Was the level of quality and feature improvement we've come to expect an artifact of high levels of investment based on expectations of growth that are no longer seen a valid?
We've built stacks so high we're afraid to jump off.
Nobody is really competing because nobody can build a complete product. So there's less pressure to fix the little irritations. Users are mostly satisfied, and problems get worse slowly enough that for the average user they don't notice right away how bad it's getting. So they stay because it's too hard or completely impossible to leave.
I think the bigger issue is the update model. In the past, if a new version sucked, people wouldn't upgrade. Now with subscriptions / continuous delivery, there's less ability to vote with one's wallet/feet
That's related.
If you're dependent on updating your OS for security fixes and basic compatibility, you are also forced to update the things you may not want to. It's all bundled together.
But it's not just the OS, but apps too, to say nothing of web SaaS products.
How many times have you launched something only to find the UI had been redone, some feature was now gone or changed, something that worked was now broken, etc.
But it's fine, you see, because we have telemetry and observability and robust CI/CD.
Users and their work are nothing more than ephemeral numbers on a metrics dashboard
100%
Ownership is a critical and fading concept for software. And it makes me really sad and frustrated.
Except if you use OS that respects you, e.g., Debian. In the latter, security updates can be installed independently. On phones, there is Mobian.
This does not always work for specific programs which do not do that, and even then, there are updates that you might want other than security updates without updating other parts of the same program. Separate programs can usually be updated individually, but if they are all in one program then it can make it more difficult (sometimes configuration can be done but not always; sometimes they change things that make this not work either).
100% this. And cars are following down this road as well. For example, my Tesla 3 radio will go bonkers every so often and will refuse to change the channel, no matter what I do. Tapping a new channel icon changes the "currently playing" view, but the audio from the original channel continues to play. This happens until you restart the entire UI (by turning off the car or rebooting the display).
But, hey, they managed to add a Tron cross-over tie-in feature, and maybe some new fart noises!
Undoubtedly when they fix that radio bug, something else will fail. Like the SRS (supplemental restraint system, aka airbag) error message that was introduced at some point in the past six months, then silently got fixed with a more recent firmware update.
> But, hey, they managed to add a Tron cross-over tie-in feature, and maybe some new fart noises!
And, you know, FSD 14.2. :)
Improving quality (or degrading, for that matter) of existing features doesn’t figure into career promotions anymore. Only new features count. Or changing the visual design.
There have been bugs and regressions since forever. It’s easy to look back with rose colored glasses, but I don’t think software has actually gotten worse.
Just look back at the Snow Leopard release of OS X. It was specifically marketed at having no new features and just being a fix and optimization release because Leopard was such a mess. And people were happy about this.
> Just look back at the Snow Leopard release of OS X. It was specifically marketed at having no new features and just being a fix and optimization release because Leopard was such a mess.
This is wrong. Leopard wasn’t “such a mess”. No one was saying Leopard was more buggy than Tiger.
Further Snow Leopard wasn’t a bug fixing release. It had a lot of new features. The difference is the features were not user facing but geared towards the underlying tech.
From Wikipedia:
> The goals of Snow Leopard were improved performance, greater efficiency and the reduction of its overall memory footprint, unlike previous versions of Mac OS X which focused more on new features.
> Much of the software in Mac OS X was extensively rewritten for this release in order to take full advantage of modern Macintosh hardware and software technologies (64-bit, Cocoa, etc.). New programming frameworks, such as OpenCL, were created, allowing software developers to use graphics cards in their applications.
Incentives Rule Everything Around Me. What incentive does Apple have not to be shit? People aren't going to switch to anything else, they'll just suck it up and shove it in their enormous sack of learned helplessness.
I suspect that people not really paying for certain things has had an impact. Remember when there were a lot of high quality, paid keyboards for Android?
I doubt those were particularly profitable, but there was a lot of innovation back then.
Why pay for a keyboard app when the default keyboard is already good enough?
Moreover, why risk installing a 3rd-party keyboard app when the App Store is filled with adware and malware? All those handy flashlight and camera apps are a Trojan's Horse, why should one assume that the various keyboard apps in the App Store aren't keyloggers trying to steal my login info?
In 2025 I can do mostly error-free blind typing on the Pixel 7 keyboard, with all autocorrect and predictive spelling intentionally turned off. Why would I need innovation?
>why should one assume that the various keyboard apps in the App Store aren't keyloggers trying to steal my login info?
Honestly, you shouldn't.
Theoretically, Apple + Google take a % of all payments that go through their store, with the expressed reason being to "monitor and police the safety of the apps on the app store". You really should be able to trust apps on the official app stores, but I don't trust Apple or Google, so the whole system is moot I guess
> Why pay for a keyboard app when the default keyboard is already good enough?
I'd pay for an actually good keyboard. I find the default keyboard (GBoard) atrocious for languages other than English.
>Moreover, why risk installing a 3rd-party keyboard app when the App Store is filled with adware and malware? All those handy flashlight and camera apps are a Trojan's Horse, why should one assume that the various keyboard apps in the App Store aren't keyloggers trying to steal my login info?
And unless the app gets acquired by the big companies, it will eventually turn into malware.
As long as the monopolies are going strong, yes, software will get worse and worse.
> Is software just going to get worse from now on?
I mean, yes? I think, as a pretty universal rule, you can expect commercial software to (on average) get worse every time it is changed. Companies spend little or no time fixing bugs and spend most of their time cramming (wanted or unwanted) features. Of course software is just going to get worse and worse over time.
I mean look at Mac OS 26...
The features were the ugliest icons I've ever seen and notification summaries that may be wrong.
Great.
The #1 problem I have typing on my iPhone is that I hit letter keys (mostly 'n') instead of the space bar and the phone just doesn't anticipate this as a possible typo and doesn't offer the right corrections. (I have AutoCorrect off.) It doesn't seem able to learn that this is a common typo, either.
Interesting. Just tried this out on Pixel's gboard and it does seem to correct this sort of issue
It’s problems like this that make me wonder what high level leaders do anymore. Do they not use technology? Infinite tolerance for bugs? How is it someone with authority does not make it a mandate to file down some of these regular annoyances in everyday software.
It is risk aversion in low level managers, and profit margins in high level managers, and since they're the market leader in the US and smartphones are pretty mature there's little risk of anyone jumping ship (go to android, start over, lose all your apps, get differently frustrating issues).
They don't have a Steve Jobs anymore to sit down with the product, get frustrated beyond belief with it, and start sticking boots up asses on general principle.
Nobody is going to step up to do that because all the other executives would hate them for it and knife them in the back, and it would be seen as a waste of effort. And nobody could ever tie fixing those bugs to making a financial number go up, and would argue instead that it was pure cost for no benefit.
I have always used SwiftKey and Android. This year I switched to Apple because Android was being bloated by Samsung etc. I'm shocked by how horrible Apple keypad is. I also feel like the touch sensitivity of iphone is worse than Samsung phones.
I installed SwiftKey on iPhone too but even it seems sluggish.
I went the other way this year, from an iPhone to a Z Flip 7. It's generally been a pretty good experience - the bloat on Samsung devices seems significantly less bad than it used to be 7 or 8 years ago.
I've stuck with Samsung's keyboard and it has mostly been fine, though it's less aggressive about adding punctuation for contractions etc.
GBoard for me. Can't stand the Apple iOS keyboard for some reason.
+1 on GBoard - every time an app has that weird bug where it selects the native ios keyboard instead of GBoard it doesn't take long for me to notice, it's crazy how bad the Apple iOS keyboard is by comparison.
Well, I’m glad I’m not going crazy and the keyboard does actually suck since the glass update…
> The best thing we can do is just report it via the feedback app and wait for a bug fix
iOS supports third party keyboards. Surely anybody this bothered by it should investigate those and pick a better option?
There was an absolutely mind-blowing keyboard which supported multi-finger swiping called Nintype, but development on it has stopped.
Apple’s support for 3rd party keyboards is notoriously difficult to work with. It’s not surprising to me that we don’t see many high quality alternatives.
The third party keyboards are OK, but it depends on if you trust sending 100% of your typing content to a third party. The two big options are owned by Microsoft and Google. It’s bad enough I have to trust Apple. And Gboard still isn’t as good as the Android keyboard.
What does it matter that development has stopped? I haven't updated my software keyboard in a decade because I'm simply happy with the way it works. Why not use Nintype if you like it?
Mostly I'm worried about bit rot, i.e. breaking changes in subsequent iOS updates. But your point is valid, I'll try Nintype again. It's extremely quirky and opinionated in an entertaining way.
Thank You. Keep being told that it was not the new iOS fault.
Not only Alan Dye, Eddy Cue, Craig Federighi also need to go. Bring back Scot Forstall.
The key that is punched into the input field is based on where your finger lifted up. So if you have slide-to-type on, the pop-up paddle that showed up on key-down won't change to where your finger slid to for key-up. That's why when typing fast with slide-to-type on you can get confusing UI hints like this.
It kind of seems like the grace period for the paddle hiding with slide-to-type needs adjustment. I just leave slide-to-type off.
I always end up pressing the `.` instead of enter when trying to search somethin on Safari.
I guess I'm in an extreme minority here but... it's not broken if autocorrect is off.
I raw dog my typing everywhere. Zero autocorrect. The last time I did use typing assistance was on BB10 with the 'flick to complete' because it was out of my way enough that I could ignore it was there or use it to save a small amount of time. Otherwise I too have the fond memory of Windows Phone's keyboard (I ran it on the HTC HD2), I couldn't tell you why it was good other than it felt good to use, again without autocorrect.
However, I'm CERTAIN there's an ergonomics thing at play, the 'brain calibration' time for me to type accurately on a big screen takes longer. I ran the original iPhone SE's as long as I could and always carried a second android device that was huge by comparison. Today I have the 15 Pro and a OnePlus 11. If I spend a lot of time using the iPhone it takes a little time maybe 20 minutes or so to stop making easy errors on the OnePlus 11. However, going back to the smaller iPhone after being on the OnePlus for awhile, there's not really an adjustment, I can hit all the letters accurately.
I have large hands, I still want the smaller device. There is extra work to need to move your hand and eyes across a larger device. More space to misclick on.
Swipe to type is enabled on android/ios for me. I use it sometimes, if you are hesitant at all on iOS or have a tendency to drag fingers at all don't enable it or it will mess up your typing. It's of course enabled by default like autocorrect. Some people have issues with it.
Dictation is underrated on iOS at least. It just works better and faster than the shitty autocorrect for typing. Obviously not applicable to a lot of situations but when I don't feel like typing it works really well.
EDIT: And I really have to have it off, I switch between devices too much and even with them learning my style of writing, I write differently for different contexts and each OS does its own thing differently. I don't want to spend the extra mental bandwidth correcting the autocorrect or having to think of how that specific autocorrect will behave.
I detest Apple's, and Google's, and Amazon's, and nearly every tech company's feedback system.
Apple's is by far the worst. All feedback is private. There is no way to show or advertise support for feature. Like I want to go upvote the feedback from this video, but all I can do is file my own feedback, which is more work, and therefore more people will choose not to give any.
Both Apple and Google and Microsoft have "users help users". These are infuriating as there is no official answer or help. There's just some fan with an often completely wrong or irrelevant answer. There is zero indication that any of these companies look here to see what's broken.
You've reminded me of the hellscape of Microsoft's "help" forums filled with people asking specific questions and getting their question closed with a barely-relevant response followed by many others commenting, essentially, "me too! why won't anyone help us?"
I actually keep a bluetooth keyboard when I'm at my desk but am forced to use my phone. I really, really dislike touchscreens and touchscreen typing, and it's baffling to me that so many people seem to like it. The bluetooth keyboard is actually a little Logitech K380, and it's quite convenient as I also have it paired with my work laptop and my steam deck. I just push the button to seamlessly swap between pairings.
I know because I hqte iPhone keyboard so much, and the calculator app. I wish there’s an alternative timeline where we still have Palm keyboard with big screen
There's no alternative calculators or keyboards on iOS? (I don't have an Apple device to check on so I genuinely don't know)
If you're OK with a ridiculously tall phone: https://www.clicks.tech/
Unfortunately it turns the iPhone into a lever that is always trying to launch itself from your hand. The iPhone part is much heavier than the keyboard part. And the ergonomics of the camera control become impossible (unless you have enormous salad fingers or something).
I love the Panecal app, can recommend if you can handle looking geeky while using it
I literally just had a dream about this. Where I needed to urgently send a message, but I kept messing up the text. Weird. At least now, I know I'm not just fat fingering it.
I have a frequently reoccurring dream (nightmare scenario) that I'm somewhere unpleasant where I don't want to be, and need to leave right away, so I try to order an Uber on my iPhone, but the app is just so fucking hard to use and figure out, with all the important commands hidden so that the user interface is clean and sleek and beautiful and minimalistic without any visible scrollbars or labeled buttons or visual affordances, so much that I can't even use it, and I'm trapped in some horrible place in a nightmare I can't get away from, desperately fumbling with my iPhone.
I think it's a manifestation with my pain and disgust with Alan Dye's vain cosmetic approach to user interface design.
Now maybe my nightmares will shift to being trapped in the Facebook user interface, now that Alan Dye is at Meta. They totally deserve him, and I hope he destroys Facebook once and for all.
I have a similar dream: Every time I click anywhere on the Uber interface, it enrolls me into Uber One.
Come to think of it, maybe that's not a dream...
I have this exact same dream. Can’t type the correct address to save my life, and the app keeps “helpfully” steering me towards options I don’t want.
iPhone miscorrects apostrophes between "its" and "it's", and its driving me insane.
sent from my iPhone
Yeah, something happened a few months ago where by iOS I'm now "hitting" the wrong key a lot, words like we'll and we're are constantly being automatically "corrected" to well and were and, most frustrating, it will auto"correct" the last word in a sentence from what is on the screen when you hit send. It went from almost always helpful to often frustrating.
iPhone keyboard is probably one of the several biggest factors I consider when once again I think "hmm, maybe this time I should upgrade to iPhone?". And then I'm confronted with this, ummm... thing, and immediately remember why I ditched iPhones years ago :) . How do you deal with it daily? I'm at a loss really. PS: I've owned 3GS and 4S and a few iPads, so I'm not just baseless here.
Exactly the same here. I've considered switching from Android multiple times and the two things that always stop me are notifications and the keyboard.
No long-press punctuation, no switch.
I also can't trust Apple to let 3rd party keyboards work smoothly everywhere, so that's not really an option I'm willing to take the risk on.
Doesn't solve the notifications either.
Although I do not use it myself, I had seen that some other people do, and that apparently you cannot disable autocorrect while still having prediction enabled (at least, that is what they told me); I think it might be useful to enable prediction without autocorrect.
What are you talking about? Auto-Correction and Predictive Text are 2 separate toggles in the keyboard settings.
I have Auto-Correction enabled, and Predictive Text disabled. I can switch it around the other way too.
Maybe whoever told me that was wrong, or that was an older version that could not switch them separately, or I was confused and it is different for Android vs iPhone, etc.
The issue is that when you press down, the key you pressed down on first is not the registered character, it's where you release your finger at. When you type fast and you slide your fingers around, it misregisters.
As a bilingual/trilingual user (I have English, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, French and Chinese keyboards enabled, and use the first three on a daily basis), I have had surprisingly few issues with either swiping or pecking at the keyboard, perhaps because I automatically switch to pecking the instant I spot swiping going down the “wrong” decision tree.
But I also think having this many keyboards enabled makes iOS basically throw up its tiny virtual hands in frustration and nullifies most fancy predictions.
(This was mostly swiped in on an iPhone 15 Pro running iOS 26 with very minor hiccups)
I haven't been getting notifications from any messaging apps for a few months. I've checked all the relevant settings (do not disturb etc.). I also get random keyboard issues such as this one. This is my first iPhone. I have no idea why I paid premium prices for a premium phone if they can't even get notifications and typing right
That's a really strange issue you have here. Never heard of anything like this. Could it be possible that some aggressive filtering exists on your network that would disallow your iphone to connect to Apple's push servers ?
I get notifications from most applications, just not messaging apps (slack, telegram, whatsapp)
That learned helplessness at the 2-minute mark... Install a different program if you don't like this one. There are options beyond "submitting a bug report and hoping for the best". The video makes it sound like Apple is some kind of holy spirit to which you can only pray. If there's no good options, and you can't code, you can even get together and fund someone to fix an open source keyboard if it's bothersome enough. There's always more options, especially in software
Apple severely limits third-party keyboards, see https://old.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1l2gg3r/thirdparty_ios...
The most infuriating “feature” of autocorrect is that it includes all your contact names in your dictionary, with no way to opt out of this aside from disabling autocorrect entirely. This can lead to some awkward texts when your innocent typo (or even correctly spelled technical term) turns into a mention of someone’s name who should not be in your phone…
I wonder if this is related to the fact that every Apple app shows up as “recently accessing” contacts in App Privacy Report. And I don’t mean only photos (face recognition), but: Safari, Camera, Shortcuts, Mail, Health… why? I’ve never even configured a Mailbox. Why are these apps all accessing my Contacts?
This drives me nuts because I put things like "(Alexander)" after someone's name to indicate who I met them through, who they're friends of, where I met them, etc.
Then whenever I dictate "Alexander" it shows up as "(Alexander)" in parentheses. Drives me mad.
I'm astonished people on this site use autocorrect at all. IMO it's a mind-bogglingy insane antifeature, even more insane than that weird "replace arithmetic expressions with their result" thing Apple once did.
I have a lot of trouble texting, independent of the issues here. I'm just clumsy and can't seem to do it in any productive way.
I'm working on this keyboard substitute with larger keys and split up keyboards: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/icantext/id6748927092. Give it a try if you want.
Why is the first row oversized and sliding back and forth with keys sliding off screen. Hitting letters on this moving row is like a carnival game. Is that intentional or a bug on my Pro Max phone?
I’m using a 12 mini and I’m running into so many typos since the new iOS. Maybe the combination of buggy software with their smallest screen is making it even worse.
Wish it was only the keyboard enshittified. Literally everything became worse with the update, I had to google how to turn off the silly transparency (Accessibility Settings -> Display -> Reduce Transparency) so that the battery that used to happily last for the entire day on iOS 18 does not die in a matter of some 4 hours. And don't even get me started on now-always-lagging home screen swipes and the Safari overhaul madness! Wanna close the active tab? That will be three taps, thank you very much. Oh, you want them taps to register _every time_, too? This basic phone UX used to be Apple's major USP over Android, now fewer and fewer reasons to stick to this ecosystem.
For the power users: you can swipe up from the bottom URL bar and then swipe from rtl on a thumbnail to close. That’s two actions instead of three.
You can also swipe right or left on the URL bar to switch tabs.
Alternatively hold the URL bar and press close.
Is there anything in iOS 26 that makes it worth updating for an older iPhone? I am holding out for now, based on the bad reviews regarding battery impact.
Please, save yourself, stay away. It is a buggy, slow mess on a 16 Pro.
I paid for 120hz but it can’t even hit 60 on the Home Screen :(
Thank you! I was thinking of moving over at 26.1, but it sounds like maybe I'll have to stay away for even longer. Honestly there isn't a lot that I'm excited about, other than perhaps call screening. But I can do that by just sending callers to voicemail and seeing watching the transcript come in on iOS 18.
Any one know why the iPhone will put a random v or similar letter in the text by itself? It’s a really annoying bug.
My son has an Apple Watch SE 3 and it doesn't feature the keyboard and you literally cannot type a lower case 'n'. The only hack was putting in a space and then it will sometimes do an n (or multiple characters). It's bonkers bad.
I don't understand. How can you press spacebar on a device you say doesn't feature a keyboard?
The apple watch has a kind of small space for writing letters, and underneath, a long “space” key. The character recognition is somewhat not optimal.
I have found myself doing a lot more voice typing lately.
My biggest gripe is that when I say "want to" it replaces it with "wanna" unless I specifically enunciate "want to".
"Wanna" is NOT a word in english but there is no way to exclude it.
Frustrating.
I use voice typing for almost the same thing every day.
I run to/from daycare to drop off my son and I title the run "Daycare drop-off". It constantly types "Take care drop-off" which drives me nuts. Those words don't even make sense together. A simple Markov chain should do better.
Wanna is in a number of notable and respected English dictionaries including the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, and Collins. I don't know what else defines if a word is or is not in the language.
Its an informal word, and it does not belong in a device used for professional communications.
"Wanna is used in written English to represent the words `want to' when they are pronounced informally. I wanna be married to you. Do you wanna be married to me? "
Pronounced - not written.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/wann...
> Its an informal word
Ah, good then, great to see you've changed your mind and now we both agree it is most definitely a word commonly used in English for over a hundred years.
Its incredible the dictionary pronounced it to you instead of showing it to you in a written form. When I go to the link I definitely see it written!
I do agree with you that it is an unprofessional word and probably not the most charitable and professional dictation result. But in the end there's two different directions dictation software can go: what was more accurate to what the person actually said (or what it thinks the person actually said), or the more correct way of saying what was said. If someone was legitimately saying "wanna", should the dictation software always auto-correct it to "want to"? If you were to type "wanna", should the keyboard auto-correct to "want to"?
Swiftkey on Android does this also and it's a very nice feature. I sometimes see a key lighting up that I didn't mean to press. I was just barely on that key, and it figured out that I didn't mean to press it
Not sure how it works. Maybe it looks at touch surface area movements during the couple milliseconds that I'm pressing down for? Or dynamically adjusts hitboxes as this video says iOS does? Whatever the method, it works very well after like fifteen years of training (I copy the data folder between devices and never update it or let it access the internet, so I'm sure it's just me training it and not anything else, nor incompatible versions ever throwing data away)
Note that this is different from the context-based autocorrect since that only triggers on spacebar or suggestion selection
Also wth happened to the alarms page. Feels like they made the clickable area of the toggle 1/4 the size just to annoy me. Usually takes a couple tries to hit them when sleepy in morning
I assumed it was just me getting worse at typing but combined with aggressively wrong autocorrect and mysterious blue lines under everything I type they seem to have ruined yet another perfectly good UX.
Yeah, the blue lines under a random word in a perfectly correct sentence is such a waste of time ... did I mistype? Nope.
Another long running one is duplicateduplicate words: https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/mpo20r/iphone_will_occ... .. been happening for me for years and still does from time to time, but it's only once every few days so I just let it bebe.
OMG yes. Pretty sure that bug has been around for something like a decade. Insane they haven't prioritized it, or I wonder if they hide behind the fact there doesn't seem to be any way to reliably reproduce it?
Someone just has to look really hard at the code and find the bug. Surely the relevant code can't be that long?
The best part about this is it's not your phone so there's no way to fix it
My english keyboard is broken but the two international keyboards that I have installed are borderline unusable. The keyboard situation has been atrocious for the past couple of versions of iOS but OS26 send it over the cliff.
I've been suffering from de quervain tenosynovitis for the last 6 months or so. I thought it was the cause I can't type anymore.
There's another issue that's much more infuriating IMO:
- You're in the middle of writing a sentence.
- The phone is trying to guess how that sentence will eventually be constructed.
- It goes back 3 words and changes one to match its guess.
- Its guess is @)%(*%@ WRONG
Seriously. Drives me up the wall. Once I've written a word and seen it, I've confirmed that's the word I want. If it wasn't, I would have changed it then. I don't ever want it to "correct" a previous word based on a new one. Ever. Yet still, more than a decade later, there's no way to turn this off.
And it takes so long to keep backspacing to delete it, or move the cursor to make a surgical edit. The WORST.
If OS developers lack QA processes and resources, can they offer usability bounties?
LLM HUD displays can annotate ads, marketing copy and shopping carts with customer usability feedback.
Another problem I'm having is.. with the latest iOS public betas, when you swipe down to bring up Siri search, it takes 2-4 seconds for the keyboard to show up. Every time. Went to an Apple store and they said, "re-install from scratch". Which isn't really easy these days, given work MFA accounts etc.
It’s a beta, Apple Store isn’t going to help. File a bug, as Apple is famous for their timely bug feedback and fixes (that would be a strongly sarcastic statement, for those that have not dealt with Radar).
I'm aware of the beta trap.. and I'm waiting for the final release to come out to see what happens, but given that we're on the 2nd RC, I'm willing to bet all my money that the bug persists.
Did you file a beta report about the issue using Feedback Assistant? If not, include a screen recording.
Yes, and I'll file again after the final production release. Neither of the RCs resolved it.
that to me looks like a error in whatever logic is behind the positional error code. You'd think they would have transformer models based on different layouts but maybe some weighting issues going on.. ie I would have thought its a model that is altering based on likelihood weights and maybe something up with that..
I've wondered for a while whether it's a dark pattern where they're trying to optimize for more text to speech in this post-literate world.
The iOS keyboard "just not working" is something I gripe about pretty much every day as a symptom of the world getting quantifiably worse than even five if not ten years ago, alongside a whole laundry list of enshittification transgressions.
I remember back in the late 90s that, if you ignored the matter of hardware driver quality (and that is a big "if", no question) that open source software tended to be higher quality in general than a lot of commercial software. Not because of any moral characteristic per se, but just the "many eyes make bugs shallow" sort of thing. Since it was mostly only programmers using open source anyhow, if someone hit an annoyance, statistically speaking, there was a good chance that someone who could fix the problem had hit the same annoyance.
Then maybe in the 2010s commercial software at least caught up.
But it seems to be swinging back around to, if I want my software to effing work I want to be seeking out open source again. Statistically speaking, fewer of the users who may encounter problems can fix any problems they find, as the systems have gotten much larger, but it is still possible, and on the compensating side, no one on the emacs team is figuring out how to stuff AI where it doesn't belong [1] or how to monetize it via ads or any of the other exciting ways to arbitrage long-term software quality against short-term money.
It's an opinion, it is clearly highly path-dependent, and I won't deny this is just my impression... but it is something I've been noticing again lately. Especially as Windows seems to be heading down the catastrophe curve and this time I'm not sure they can stop it.
[1]: I'm not anti-AI at this point... but there are places where it belongs, and there are places it just doesn't, and stuffing it where it does not belong is not a win.
Highly recommend Gboard.
I've been using it for years- much better at recognizing and more performant.
Also sends everything you type to Google. Depends on whether you care about that or not.
IIUC this is only true if you "Allow full access"
From 3rd party keyboard agreement:
> If you do not enable Full Access, developers are not permitted to collect and transmit the data you type. Any unauthorized collection or transmission of this data without your permission would be a violation of their developer agreement. Furthermore, there are also technical limitations in effect to prevent unauthorized access.
Wanted to read more about this. Source of the text seems to be a pop-up in iOS if I understand it correctly: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8519296?sortBy=rank
Turn off its internet access? That's what I do for my keyboard (owned by Microsoft but I'd probably still do that if it was made by the pope himself)
I doubt it does. If it did, it'd have learned basic declensions of basic words in Czech and Polish, because I've corrected it a million times already.
Dude - crazy. When I saw this post I was like - finally someone said it. But it isn't just "iPhone". Why is spell check so bad EVERYWHERE..... still?. Like, how is it I am still even able to share texts, emails, etc that have mistakes at all? I feel like "spell check" is so old school. Intent, and matching intent, without typos is way over due. A bit meta: but, I am going to have to re-read this post - why? I still send texts that say "What re you doing?" - hwy?
Well, possibly unrelated to all of this, but in my experience, multilingual spell-checking has gotten noticeably worse on both iOS and Windows, to the point where I had to disable auto-correct wherever that's possible (and that's, unfortunately, pretty far from everywhere!).
This particular problem manifests as: you're conversing in one language (say, French) and then use a single English word, at which point the spell-check and auto-correct permanently switches to that language, mis-correcting pretty much everything from that point onward.
(Classic) Outlook on Windows is pretty much entirely broken for me these days (even if I repeatedly mark the entire message as being in the majority language), as is Safari on MacOS: even in a completely-Dutch conversation, it always insists on auto-completing 'lang' ('long' but can also be 'tall') to 'language' and it's absolutely infuriating, and with no apparent way to disable the madness... (and, interestingly, no mechanism to detect that I dismissed the auto-complete for the 100th consecutive time, and that it's possibly not a desirable substitution)
There's a slightly different (I think) bug which I've been hitting since the update with URLs. The URL keyboard allows long-pressing on the . to open various TLDs, speeding how long it takes to write a URL.
In prior versions, you could long press to open the choices, then letting go would insert the default (eg .com)
With iOS 26, the touch target seems to be slightly different for triggering the options vs selecting them. I now frequently long-press, see the TLD choices with the default selected, and then releasing incorrectly inserts a single . instead of the TLD. This is infuriating when typing fast.
My theory is that the keyboard team is composed of sadists that enjoy making us all ducking suffer.
What.are.you.talking.about.the.iOS.keyboard.is.just.fine
This isn't just double space = '.' either since you can just turn that off in options.
iOS also changes the keyboard layout depending on usage. So when you're in a browser like safari or Chrome and you tap the address bar which these days is 99% used as a search bar with no particular need for a prominent '.' you get a prominent '.' for no good reason.
A huge '.' right next to the space that's not even correctly recognizing the touch area in a context where you actually likely type '.' less often than any other form of writing. You cannot change this behavior.
Fwiw i made a mistake of switching to iOS from Android due to a lot of peer pressure. "iOS is better, you should switch" the wife said. Well I've switched. Now i have a terrible keyboard, i don't have any call screening and non existing text spam filtering. I'm yet to see any improvements.
There’s two great reasons to have a prominent . key in the search/address bar:
1. For typing actual web addresses
2. More importantly, for typing “site:reddit.com”
I remember when this first became an issue, then they tweaked something and I noticed it a lot less. Something changed again recently (last couple years) where this is happening a lot again.
I appreciate how Apple pioneered the touchscreen mobile device, largely due to the implementation of the keyboard, but it needs to be more stable than this.
Rhe Androidmkeyboard is jusr fine roo.
SwiftKey was actually good. I could pound out a solid 30WPM without even trying, no typos. But then they added a "Ask Bing" context menu item to all my selections after an update and after leaving it on principle I've been suffering ever since.
Yeah also I thinkc they rewrote it in some crappy way because app got so bad and laggy and irresponsible that I had to remove it.
try thumb-key [0] if you're willing to go for something unorthodox :-) the swipe-style keyboard cut my typos by ~90% (though i was particularly bad at using phone keyboards, lol).
this is what all of my texts from my pixel look like
but it's nice to hear it's no better for the apples. misery enjoys company :)
that's the most annoying to me, when they put a large "enter" key, or "@" or "." just next to the space, and you want to type with both hands, and you keep hitting that with the right thumb
Wow, I thought I was the only one. I too can confirm that my typing has gotten more error prone since the ios 26 update.
And liquid glass is still ugly and buggy. Apple has become enshitified.
THIS. I'm constantly sending typos in texts now even when typing slower on purpose. The software is clearly making choices for me that are wrong and I can't do anything about it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I swear I have felt like I have dealt with this for the last few years on iPhone. So frustrating. It has forced me to use the the dictation feature.
Using raycast for dictation has been pretty great for me (longer sentences ofc). I wish apple would just acquire and integrate, with local models one day this will be crazy fast.
It's Not Just You https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
This thread has more comments than all previous submissions combined.
Understood. Just highlighting the number of submissions of this thing for 2 months over and over with interest but little traction.
Love the sick burn at the end:
>Who knows? Maybe they're just trying to simulate the butterfly keyboard in software.
Apple truly has some incredibly incompetent people working for it, obsessively focused on cosmetic style instead of substance and usability.
Alan Dye voluntarily leaving certainly won't solve the root problem that they didn't fire him years ago.
Bad Dye Job:
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
Gruber: Apple employees ‘giddy’ about Alan Dye’s departure:
https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/04/gruber-apple-employees-giddy-...
This is far from specific to Apple.
When I first saw your name, a few decades ago, it was because I was interested in HCI and human factors engineering.
Today, my impression is that the field of HCI has mostly disappeared. Most people who might have been interested in HCI are now studying and practicing UX instead.
In UX, the designer/engineer in practice is usually directed by the goals of the party who decides how the thing will work, rather than the goals of the party using the thing.
There are some intellectual elements to UX practice (e.g., aesthetics, fashions, A/B testing, and dark patterns). But I wonder whether the transition from HCI to UX means that the field is not only perversely anti-user, but also losing the intellectual and/or institutional capacity to be user-oriented on occasions that they want to be?
Many things are broken on iOS. Apple, please get your shit together.
- Random invisible touches and phone calls - BUggy Glass UI - Stupid battery management ..to say the least.
No one's getting promoted for a bug fix.
I joke that Tim Cook doesn't type on his iPhone. There's no way he'd be happy with it if he did.
I've seen soooo many rendering errors in Safari. And bugged-out keyboard + inputs (input touch location offset from its visible location on the page after the keyboard opens—a real problem if you're trying to paste). Never ever seen it 1/10 this buggy after any prior release, and I've been on iOS since... 5, I think? And did some development work on the platform as early as version 3 or 4.
That's in addition to so many dropped frames in the animations that I disabled as many as I could because it was driving me crazy, and to a bunch of word-based buttons becoming confusing icons. I think this has topped 7 for my least-favorite iOS release, and the gap widens by the day. It's terrible.
[EDIT] What it most reminds me of (I was on early Android and have done even more development work on Android over the years than I have for iOS) is Android. The jank, the pile of little confusing UI choices that all add up into an overall off-putting experience. The uncertainty what kind of bad thing might happen when you touch anything. Feels like an above-average 3rd party Android skin, like from Samsung or someone (so, pretty bad). The stuttering animations. No other iOS release has ever felt like Android to me.
Normally I tend to wait before each major release, but I got lured by unknown caller screening. Then I noticed there's no unknown caller screening for me (just a useless setting to move unknown callers to a different list). They also removed blocking numbers directly from the recents list and the new phone layout is a complete mess.
For me it's been going downhill since the update that changed the settings app to show apps (even system ones) on a different page. Iwas seriosuly inpressed with the settings app when I first switched to Apple from Android, and now it's terrible.
Meanwhile you still can't freely set the search wngkne for Safari, contacts always forgets my custom labels, camera doesn't allow free control over the flashlight,...
P.S. Typos due to iOS26
I was recently gifted an Apple Watch and it forced an update on me, so I jumped straight to the x.1 patch, and I'd still call this beta-quality, even setting aside my strong disagreements with the design and UX direction.
I've seen other releases much complained-about online then found them to not bother me much, or even at all, when I upgraded, but this one's an exception. It really is very bad.
I bought an iPhone 4S way back when because I wanted a dead-simple UI for my mom.
Now she's on an iPhone SE (3rd gen), and the UI is a complete shitshow.
F you Apple.
(She also does not want a newer (aka larger) iPhone because they will not fit in her woman's jeans which notoriously have small pockets. Another "F you" from Apple to the consumers.)
If consumers cared about small phones Apple would still make the mini series. It's hardly Apple's fault the biggest phones are the most popular. In fact, they were late to the larger phone sizes, as the iPhone 6 shipped years after Android started going big.
Some consumers clearly do care, but mega-corporations aren't content with making a profit - they will kill profitable products because they're not profitable enough.
(Apparently the 12 and 13 mini had about 5% of iPhone market share in the year they were released [0]. Does that mean they were profitable for Apple? I don't know, but given how many phones Apple sells, I believe that even 5% iPhone market share would be profitable)
0. https://www.rickyspears.com/tech/the-rise-and-fall-of-apples...
Still using my 12 Mini on iOS 18 - I won't go without a fight.
"You are using it wrong"™
If the UI registers the characters, but the system inputs something else, how is this even possible?
The most annoying to me is how close they put "enter" or "@" to space on the right side, so when you type with both hands you keep hitting those when you want to type a space
the iphone keyboard words prediction is the dumbest in this era of AI tech. It very consistently and focused on predicting the wrong word i'm after.