Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android

As for the underlying issue, I have experienced similar typing issues on my iPhone in recent months. It feels like someone changed the keyboard to optimize for some typing behavior that doesn't match my own, so the "optimizations" work against me. It's reminiscent of when the US Air Force redesigned their cockpits to match pilots' average measurements, only to discover that using averages just made the cockpits bad for everybody.[1]

[1] https://noblestatman.com/uploads/6/6/7/3/66731677/cockpit.fl...

Imagine your an exec or manager on the team for keyboard development. You read this, get to the end to discover the user is gonna switch devices for... 2 whole calander years?

What's that amount to? Maybe 2 device upgrades on If your a die hard gotta have the newest latest model phone each year. Then what? you'll be back?

The threat doesnt even carry the weight losing a user for a 2 year blip, registers more as a dropped ping request then a drop in revenue.

If meant to be whimsical sure nailed it. To be fair I mean any boycot with a large scale mfg carries about the same weight. just thought it fell flat as much as anything.

Eventually found two simple but effective ways to improve autocorrect/typing performance. First build a personalized and adaptive touch model trained on the device itself, mainly to fix simple typos. Second to fix low end screen limitations, use simple heuristics based on touchstart, touchmove and touchend [1].

Anyways, I'm no iPhone user but interesting to read. It would drive me nuts.

[0]: https://www.brianweet.com/2015/03/24/implement-touch-model.h... [1]: https://www.brianweet.com/2015/04/08/low-end-touchscreen-lim...

Recently I said "I ran into this too earlier on the project" and it wrote "I run into this tube earlier on the project." So now I'm running into a tube... because this makes more sense than "too"? And it can never write the names of immediately family members I text about every single day, and it has 5th grade vocabulary so if I said I demurred or that something was germane or any other word beyond the 500 most common words it butchers it.

What I want: 1. let me handle the punctuation manually 2. assume a broader vocabulary 3. let me specify how people's names are pronounced!! How are we this many years in and it still misinterprets my wife's name on a daily basis?

Just like Windows 11, I get ads whether I want them or not - just got a push notification for a new financial product (!!!) despite going out of my way to opt out.

iOS 26 made my 16 Pro, practically brand new, feel slow. I upgraded because my 13 mini was slow, and I chose Apple in the first place because they had some of the best performing phones (especially cpu/gpu; they always had less ram but before llm it didn’t matter).

The keyboard is horrible, but I don’t trust Google or Microsoft keyboards either; I think my next phone will be graphene; just waiting to see who their new hardware partner is.

I loved Apple TV because it was fast; under 26 it is slow.

I chose Mac for best in class hardware. That is unfortunately unchanged; really hoping snapdragon X 2 elite has good Linux support.

My Apple Watch, despite doing nothing new it didn’t used to do, has also become slow and annoying, and its battery was never as good as it should have been. When I jump to Android I think garmin is probably the best choice, but maybe there are good wearables now. Unfortunately Android doesn’t have its act together re:built in health data database.

Replacing Athlytic and keeping my history will be one of the biggest challenges in the transition.

Competitors unfortunately still have huge blind spots even if some of the core experiences are better.

Does anyone have an explanation for how something like this passes QC at a company with the resources of Apple? Is this video misrepresenting something?

So the keyboard has been broken since iOS 17 (>2 years [1]), and to show your displeasure, you bought an iPhone Pro?

Your threat of leaving in 3 months rings hollow. All Apple has to do is verbally say things will get better and, if they can't even do that, you only commit to leaving for two years.

If you want to leave, just leave. I am confident that blue bubble pressure will exist in 3 months. I am also confident that the iPhone 18 Pro will be pretty. If a nice color and blue bubbles are enough to keep you in the iOS ecosystem today, why should anyone believe you will leave tomorrow?

[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/06/ios-17-makes-iphone-m...

It's ironic because my first iphone i used was a 4s and i was pleasantly surprised how nice it was to type on after using samsung phones. Now it's like the tables have turned. Im constantly fighting the ios keyboard. Sometimes when i tap and get the wrong character i will move my thumb to where i would have had to type to get that wrong character and i know for sure i did not move my thumb that far away from the character i actually wanted and thought i tapped on. Im honestly shocked how bad typing on ios has become. i got a pixel 8a just to amuse myself and i was again totally surprised how fast and easy the typing was. something is going rotten inside apple.

even controlling when the keyboard appears and when you want it to go away is frustrating on ios. i find the little universal down arrow on the pixel phones much better.

This means in the modern mode of using the address bar as search, and not to type a domain manually (which is what I believe most people are also doing) I just end up with a search string separated by dots which Google can evidently deal with but is just very annoying.

I see threads on the internet going back years complaining about this issue and yet there's no configuration to change it. It would be such a simple and easy fix (like, just give me the regular keyboard, nothing special). It's a bit baffling since it seems such a glaring everyday UX problem.

I guess this is really important to people.

One time I broke an Android, which happened to be white, and spoke to the insurer for a replacement. The agent insisted she find me another white phone, not another Android, and though an iPhone was suitable. She couldn't grok how the OS and phone specs were more important than the color.

Someone needs to help me with the ethics here; is it okay to post hit-pieces or...?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559

Do however note that it is possible to install another keyboard on iOS, which may alleviate your suffering before you switch to Android in about 120 days.

Personally I rely on Gboard [0] every day for the simple reason that it auto-detects several (more than two) languages, and of course it has the added benefit of not having this crazy bug. Gboard is google software however, so it does come with huge privacy issues, and others will hopefully point out better alternatives.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gboard

This had me simultaneously chuckling and sad, because it feels very true.

In safari browser, if you want to go to the menu where you can favorite/bookmark a page, the tiles on the menu are literally different and in different order every time. Sometimes you might need to press an additional button to find what you're looking for, sometimes it's there, sometimes clicking "favorite" will just go "ok, favorited" message, other times it asks for an extra prompt. Like, why? Just be consistent, I can adjust to all the "PM trying to save their role by reinventing something that isn't needed" like liquid glass, but the usability itself suffers all over the place in the latest ios releases. It's very difficult to understand, because up until a little while ago it had been consistently very good.

Ha! I feel this. I was a long time Android user since the original G1 (aka HTC Dream). Was a strictly Pixel phone user for my last 4 phones. Recently jumped over to iPhone. For the most part I’m enjoying it.

There are minor things, like the keyboard being annoying to type with. For instance, when I’m typing something into the URL bar of Safari, for some reason, I’m constantly hitting the period key next to the space bar, and I feel like I’m not anywhere close to it.

I also find it confusing how to dismiss the keyboard. Android had a very clear icon for this, on iOS it’s just a checkmark which is a little misleading in my opinion.

On iOS, speech to text is pretty good, but I have to annunciate clearly, where I felt that android was a little bit more forgiving.

Another issue I’ve noticed is that I don’t think the GPS (or maybe it’s just Google maps) is as accurate as it is on android. On iOS, if I’m on a highway it sometimes thinks I’m on the shoulder road next to the highway. So I’m constantly being rerouted to get back on the highway. I felt like I didn’t have that on android.

Back to the blue bubble thing though. Being the one and only android user amongst my friends and even my wife, I was always hearing about how I ruined the chat. I didn’t realize until switching over to iOS just how integrated everything is and what you can do in the chat when everybody else is on iOS, like editing previous messages, being able to answer messages via your Messages app on your laptop, and of course, not having images and videos getting compressed terribly. Although RCS chat improved that more recently.

One thing I do love is that automation and shortcuts is something that’s natively part of the system and that I don’t to install some app like Tasker or whatever the more modern version of that is.

At this point, I really like both of the OSes. What made me actually finally switch over was that everyone I knew who had an iPhone would have it for like five or more years and I was going through pixel phones every two years. I got tired of spending all that money.

Apple: Father knows best (but Father is getting old and sometimes forgets things)

Windows: If only we understood what the ancestors knew

The fact that this is a real thing is ridiculous. Say no and move on with life. This is the type of freedom that is actually freeing.

Most of those problems aren't solved by software. You are using your phone as a fashion item.

And then it was all removed in a software update.

I love how diverse humans are, this is literally an alien sentence to me, it's actually impossible for me to conceptualize. I'm here with my Pixel 7 mourning my Pixel 4a, which was exactly the same to me as every other phone but had the fingerprint unlock sensor on the back which is the only meaningfully differentiating feature. I guess can imagine a non-boring phone like one of those gamer phones, but I can't imaging wanting one, and I can't imagine a phone that's exciting in a way I care about. The idea of finding a phone boring enough to want to switch from it though is just crazy to me. Is scrolling instagram and texting people and googling directions somehow different and exciting on iOS?

(save i guess i'd probably be pretty excited if a company was giving me root by default and not having banking apps break because of it)

Other comments here say Predictive Text is the culprit, but I already had that off. I also turned off Slide to Type. Same result.

> Around iOS 17 (Sept. 2023) Apple updated their autocorrect to use a transformer model which should've been awesome and brought it closer to Gboard (Gboard is a privacy terror but honestly, worth it).

> What it actually did/failed to improve is make your phone keyboard:

> Suck at suggesting accurate corrections to misspelled words

> "Correct" misspelled words with an even worse misspelling

> "Correct" your correctly spelled word with an incorrectly spelled word

Which makes me wonder: is Transformer model good with manipulating short texts and texts with errors at all ? It's kind of known that open weight LLMs don't perform well for CJK conversion tasks[2], and I've also been disappointed by their general lack of typo tolerances myself as well. They're BAD for translating ultrashort sentences and singled out words as well[3]. They're great for vibecoding, though.

Which makes me think, are they usable for anything under <100 bytes at all? Does it seem like they have a minimum usable input entropy or something?

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006171

1: https://thismightnotmatter.com/a-little-website-i-made-for-a...

2: The process of yielding "㍑" from "rittoru"

3: No human can translate, e.g. "translate left" in isolation correctly as "move left arm", but LLMs seem to be more all over the place than humans

If your decision-making is this poor, you cannot say for sure that you're leaving iPhone.

Anyway, they know things we don’t, for both good (real constraints that users don’t see) and bad (fake constraints from bad internal decisions).

But dear Apple employee reading this: if you have fought the good fight, I appreciate your attempt, please keep it up. If you didn’t, we’re having a keyboard experience that you shouldn’t be proud of, no matter what the internal corporate logic maze you are caught up in.

Where someone (traditionally in a FOSS project's support / bug report / feature request pages) posts some angrygram of "Fix my pet peeve OR ELSE YOUR PROJECT IS DEAD TO ME!!11!!one!11!!!"

The only thing that's coming to mind is "emotional blackmail" but that's not it...

Every now and then, I feel like I simply cannot tap the correct keys. Things I do from muscle memory are jumping to the next letter over. This isn't just a temporary problem. It lasts for days/weeks.

Then suddenly, it's fine again.

The project is abandoned but it still works well. I hope someone sees this and gets inspired to build something to replace it. If you do you can have my money!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nintype/id796959534

Id honestly prefer never to update than get these bogus “security updates, features and fixes”

I do hope Apple’s iOS 27 will be focused on fixes and optimizations. Apple Intelligence isn’t useful if the basic experience is mediocre

—— Sent from my iPhone sorry for the autocorrect

As an Android user, I truly don't understand this "pressure". I exchange SMS/MMS with various users, some Android, some iPhone. I am in group chats with both Android and iPhone users. I feel there is no major issue. It's interoperable. We all see each other's emojis/photos/videos/etc. There are only minor technical rough edges: for example an iPhone's user emoji reaction sometimes (not always?) shows up as separate text instead of the emoji appended at the bottom of the text bubble... And I am pretty sure videos are sent in a lower quality. But is any of this really enough to cause a "blue bubble pressure"?

I asked ChatGPT to explain but only got this vague answer: "Group chats with a mix of iPhone and non-iPhone users can be less seamless (e.g., lower video quality, no read receipts, or issues with group chat features)."

I had to open my texts to check: I indeed have read receipts when texting Android users, but not iPhone users. And this is funny but up to this very second, I had never noticed this difference... because, at least to me, read receipts is such a minor feature that I rely on very infrequently.

This leaves me still as perplex: why the "blue bubble pressure"?

Agree about many of the other bugs / issues.

He sure showed them. The people I know using super old iphones are doing more than their public commitment to buy more apple products as often as they can -- after a brief tolerance break, of course.

The keyboard animation happens on the touchdown event, whereas the letter is entered into the text box on the touchup event.

Between the two, more information might emerge about the touch - for example the exact shape of the touched area, and movement during the touch, etc.

I would guess the keyboard sees a down in one spot, and an up in a slightly different spot which falls into another letter.

wow, such a commitment. Not only it's as said only one customer but it is a customer who thinks "for good" is just skipping one phone. Which means she/he usually buys phone every single year.

What a bold and committed move. It's astonishing...

That means that all of the polish work is shoved to the bottom of the stack until it reaches sufficient critical mass that someone finally makes time for engineers to pick some of it back out.

That, I think, is the critical failure of modern Apple. The company used to understand that polish could be more important than something new and flashy, and they've forgotten that in favor of marketing and Liquid Glass.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjpcLplkMUs&t=2s

If Apple is getting occasional feedback about a mysterious bug, but it's near impossible to reproduce, what can they do?

It makes me want to create a similar landing page for Apple to fix Spotlight Search. I remember when I used to be able to just find and launch apps on my Mac.

Over the course of each year-long iOS version life, I've become used to it sucking for a bit, either at the beginning (with bug fixes improving things) or towards the end (where, I assume, accumulated learning diverges from clean slate behavior.)

I suspect that the keyboard team is pegged with using new features on the silicon (Neural processing in earlier processors, then Neural Engine with newer processors) and they're doing what they can when tasked with new code.

But man, iOS4 didn't have all that and the keyboard was GREAT.

My Pixel 10 is in a pretty orange case. Furthermore, if I get sick of it, it's not too big of a deal to change. Maybe I'll even figure out how to 3d print one!

FWIW: Pretty much everyone keeps their phone in a case today. Seems to make a lot more sense to focus on the case instead of the aesthetics of the phone.

Yeah he's right - my Pixel 10 is not as sexy as an iPhone but not only is the keyboard great but the AI integration is first class citizen.

iOS will never have first class citizen AI even if Apple finally develop their own model because Apple doesn't control the user's data.

A lot, I mean, about 80% of my ”não” (I speak Portuguese) are becoming just ”na”. And about 50% of my ”mais” are becoming ”mas”.

“o” and “i” are next to each other at the top row, so I wondered if the keyboard got smaller and my thumb automatic moviment became discalibrated.

But… I started to often see ”na” where it should be ”não” in other people’s texts.

Turns out it is a bigger issue it seems

Second most egregious issue is how every space becomes a period when typing in the Safari url/search bar. I’m using it for search 90% of the time, and directly entering URLs 10%, but Apple must think those proportions are flipped.

Free the space!

Finally - could we have a simple gesture that toggles words between lowercase, first letter capital, and all caps? Highlight a word and swipe up or something? So much needless input to make a word capitalized.

Nevertheless, I shouldn't have to disable this (and AutoCorrect, as that has definitely gotten worse) on iOS, especially when Google's GBoard is as good as it is.

Anyone else remember the days when you switched to iOS for its legendary keyboard? I want those days back!

But, if this post goes viral, it will affect the stock price and Tim Cook will pay attention. It makes me brainstorm other "stock manipulation" schemes with the sole goal of improving product quality.

I always wonder who makes these decisions and whether they fancy themselves a designer.

Being free to leave the iOS ecosystem is the biggest flex anyone can make to enforce beneficial change.

E.G. Signal is the iMessage killer.

What’s your answer around lockdown, security, updates, hardware, iCloud replacement, AirPods etc

the thing is, when you do make a typo… just double tap the word (to select) and it will usually highlight the previous spelling. undo that, around 3 or 4 times, and it will simply stop autocorrecting that.

i find people who experience the most trouble with the keyboard are the ones who aren’t very patient, and keep tapping around like crazy - it’s not a physical keyboard.

- To select all, if you don’t have any selections — just simply triple-tap a word, and it will select the entire paragraph text.

- If you have text selected and you want to de-select, just tap in any area outside of the selection. If you have any ‘word’ selected, and you want to select a different word, double tap another word.

- If you have the Copy | Paste | etc bubble, you have to de-select the text before you can do anything else. (De-select by tapping anywhere /outside/ the selection).

- If you want to select a phrase or longer string, you need to tap at the beginning of the word once and WAIT for the cursor to move and blink again. If you do it too quickly, you might end up selecting more than you intended. If you did it right, it should just land right under your tap. Then double tap the cursor and drag up or down to select your longer text.

It works very reliably for me, and I’ve learned to type long prose on my phone quite well.

I’ve been noticing a slow decline in my iPhones ability to autocorrect or hit the key I wanted to hit (it’s already made two mistakes just typing this out).

I thought it was a “me” thing, and “there’s no way a feature like autocorrect or key sensing would regress”.

I was apparently wrong.

The autocomplete has a preference for proper nouns, even when they make zero sense .

The next suggested word is, at best, naive. Using the previous word, it would be clear that the subsequent suggestion would not be reasonable.

And it wouldn't be so bad if moving the cursor at the end of a word or selecting a few letters in a word or even selecting an entire word wasn't nearly impossible on iOS (and I have relatively small fingers… I have no idea how people with big hands can do that stuff). Writing a 10 words messages can take me like 2 minutes sometimes because of all the errors made by iOS that I need to manually fix, and having to retry like 5 times to position the cursor successfully at the end of every word I need to rewrite in the correct language…

Been an issue for two years or so. Resetting, all that doesn’t help.

edit: another apple issue i have been hearing about recently is that the apple watch alarm just doesn't work some days. i have no idea why.

i don't have silent mode on when it happens. i have tried so many different settings to fix it. ended up buying the hatch alarm.

I know this is somewhat a joke site, but I think admitting this really proves Apple's dominance and doesn't really help in making your case. So long as the walled garden / "platform" approach still works, enshittification will continue

Here's a more substantive reason to prefer iPhone to Android: Android phones, mine anyway, have no option to suppress audible notification of incoming texts or calls from numbers not found in Contacts.

There are a lot of broken things in iOS, just try any apps in landscape and you'll wonder if QA even realizes the iPhone has landscape.

I totally understand why people want to buy the same phone as their friends and have a blue bubble and whatever; iPhone is not for me, but I get it. If it's meeting your wants and needs, then I'm genuinely happy for you. But I will never understand what binds someone to a product/company that's no longer meeting expectations. It's a product, a means to an end and nothing more.

The text entry experience on iOS 26 really is frustratingly bad. Almost unusable (I’ve been going to the laptop for anything more than a few words).

It’s not just the keyboard (display glitches too), but the keyboard UX is particularly awful.

In the past, it seemed like Apple paid very careful attention to the minute details of timing size, etc. All that seems to have gone out the window with this liquid gas BS.

I’ve definitely noticed more typing errors

It starts as annoyance, progresses to frustration, then overt anger at a lack of action from Apple. I'm at that last level now.

They pulled their head out of their ass when the MBP evolved into a frustrating pile of crap, and I think my 14" M2 Max MBP is my favorite laptop ever. So they DO sometimes listen to their users. Now is the time to listen again.

So let's vote with our wallet.

Yeah well...

But I doubt Apple gives a fuck. They're too busy making promos about how much cardboard they're saving per year shipping their dogshit products, or sending their C suite guys to do WSJ interviews about how much they care about privacy and are a premium brand while at the same time working overtime to implement 3rd party ads into their own ecosystem. They just simply aren't at all aligned with the company that existed when Jobs was still around.

Think about how much slower the output of the entire human race is because of one software issue.

HOWEVER, the bug is interesting.

I can't reproduce this bug, but I have a suspicion as to what it is. As pointed out in the linked video the hitbox for buttons changes size based on predicted next letters.

The hitboxes are dynamic based on the most likley next letter. But that changes depends on your typing style. For example my real name is similar but not the same to a common english name. however both auto correct and the dynmaic hitbox allows me to reliably type my name, now.

This took time, but when I recently got a new work phone, I had to train it to accept my name.

TLDR: I don't think its a bug, I think its a learnt behaviour based on your most common words.

Apple is beholden to its stockholders, not its customers.

Let's take an exaggerated example. Surely, a touchscreen keyboard the size of a flatscreen TV is too large. Maybe even the size of a regular computer monitor. So where is the happy spot, and why? I think it's because of our manual error-correction and the software error-correction. On the smaller iPhone keyboard, if I make a mistake, it's obvious and I click the backspace key. There's much less software error-correction on a smaller screen because of a smaller room for error per key. On larger screens, I find that if I touch a key at a certain angle, it will register an adjacent key through the software. I also find that my fingers have to travel farther, and that increases the rate of errors. Not only that, the obsession with decreasing bezel size requires me to hold the phone in weird ways so it doesn't register a swipe from the sides.

Personally, the iPhone 6 was peak iPhone. I find that the obsession with decreasing bezel size is also compulsive because it significantly increases miss-swipes and introduces weird work-arounds like the "notch", "island", or hidden sensors. The flat screen also made the keyboard desirable. It was also slow enough so that the surveillance from the autocorrect wasn't useful but fast enough for everything else.

It means literally nothing. The people working at Apple now are just there for the paycheck. They push some prompts into an LLM, pick through the output, push something to production that satisfies the acceptance criteria, and move on.

There is no one staying up late doing extensive testing and refinement to get things perfect. There is no one taking pride in the work they’ve done when they push keys on the iOS keyboard. All that has been cut up and distributed through a system of tickets, teams, and managers so that the amount of pride that finally trickles down to engineers is barely more than the pride of taking a big shit.

Had me until then. Zero respect for this, frankly.

iPhone Typos? It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken [video]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46232528

News at 11?

>I caved to the blue bubble pressure

This is basically how I view iphone users. They buy an inferior product because Apple exploited their lack of status. From moms, to teens, to low-middle income people... Heck, its even infected some perpetually single techies who are so insecure they buy the inferior Apple product.

These companies that exploit such psychology is disgusting. From Apple to Nintendo to Disney, there is something that feels immoral about how they market to their customers.

And you bet they have contracted out some marketing team to patrol every social media to downvote/upvote/comment as 'reputation management'...But hey they contracted them, plausible deniability.

I don’t understand how it works internally anymore. I mean I can program it, but none of the way linear logic used to apply.

I’m concerned that it’s internally very overcomplicated, because that’s how software is supposed to be designed now, but the “simplicity” is like a second system effect. A whole layer that makes clicking a button appear to work, when really there is no code flow that resembles the process.

Either this user is faking everything about the keyboard, or Apple is.

None is testing (the keyboard) at Apple? Possible, but unlikely.

None is checking test results at Apple, possible and much less unlikely.

They want you to forget about the keyboard and go all vocal because "it's easier"? Sure.

That user wants his/her 15 minutes og glory? Possible, but unlikely.

You could try installing Gboard (https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/gboard-the-google-keyboard/id1...), or SwiftKey (https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/microsoft-swiftkey-ai-keyboard...)...and there are probably other options.

It may be even more obvious, but there are settings in general/keyboard that you can toggle.

I noticed a bit of a shift in the stock typing experience, but I adapted and it's fine.