Hacker News

@ozzyphantom: You might consider being more specific about your grievances in the text of your countdown page. As it stands, it's a bit vague, describing the keyboard as "broken" and autocorrect as "nearly useless". Sure, the video you link to is more descriptive, but it's a lot to ask of a visitor to click through and watch a separate video.

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...

I love the fervor with which this is written, but the threat is so weak I literally chuckled.

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.

Reminds me of some research I once did in order to reduce typos on low-end Firefox OS devices. The capacitive touchscreen had horrible limitations, especially for typing. It had bands across the screen where it could only detect one finger at a time. Once you picked up typing speed it ended up in similar misses you see in the YouTube video, albeit even worse (you end up with a letter between your two fingers).

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...

As a lifelong Android user (in the EU, where Apple hegemony is not as strong) I always saw Apple as the "pay more for more polished ecosystem UX" option. So it always surprises me when things that are trivial on Android/Linux are sticking points on iOS/macOS. Worse, it seems that proprietary means you can't do anything to fix them yourself.

I have a lot of issues with dictation as well which I feel has gotten much worse as it gets "smarter." It used to take literal dictation & I could say "comma" "period" etc. to insert punctuation. Now it tries to guess when commas or full stops should be added and it's horrible. If I pause to take a breath it puts a comma or period, sometimes entirely changing the meaning of the sentence.

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?

It will be hard, but I’m transitioning out of Apple ecosystem regardless of whether they improve.

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.

+1. From the original post, I found this video to be particularly damning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo

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?

On the same week that an AI's PR was rejected and it turned around and published a hit-piece in order to pressure an open-source community to accept it's change [1]...on the same week...we are watching a human publish a hit-piece (more or less) in order to pressure a closed-sourced project to accept their change.

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

I almost switched to pixel before getting my new 17 pro max. I feel like im just constantly fighting the ios keyboard or having to type so slowly and carefully but it still is screwing up. I have a pixel 8a and Im shocked how quickly I can type on it while constantly tip toeing and fighting the ios keyboard.

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.

> The iOS keyboard has been broken since at least iOS 17...But I came crawling back to iOS because I'm weak and the orange iPhone was pretty

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...

The most frustrating one for me is how in safari in the address bar the keyboard changes and drops '.' to the right of the spacebar in the exact spot I usually hit the spacebar with my thumb (because I'm just tapping the edge, not stretching to the middle of the screen).

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.

> orange iPhone was pretty and the Pixel 10 was boring

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.

I agree that this behavior is insane and should be fixed.

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

> You were the "it just works" company. Now you're just a fruit that I used to know.

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

It's so many things other than the keyboard I notice are just like, "wtf, who and why decided this was a good idea?"

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.

> and I caved to the blue bubble pressure

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.

In later iOs versions i started making much more mistakes. Felt i got old or something. But whenever i type on my Android phone, its like nothing has changed. I swear that the iOs keyboard is trolling, I HIT O NOT I! O AM CERTAIN!

Android: Here's the phone; knock yourself out

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

Windows: If only we understood what the ancestors knew

"I caved to the blue bubble pressure"

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.

> I randomly tried Android again for a few months last spring. Using a functioning keyboard was revelatory. But I came crawling back to iOS because I'm weak and the orange iPhone was pretty and the Pixel 10 was boring and I caved to the blue bubble pressure. But the keyboard on this beautiful phone is worse than ever.

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

I really wish someone could start a legitimate competitor to Apple. They are so bloated and just squeezing service revenue out of us. The M chips are great but the software is so buggy.

I was once blown away by iPhone 8 editing capabilities. The keyboard seemed to work OK (minus swipe-to-type, but that wasn't great on Android either), and using 3D Touch to move cursor and select text was the most pleasant text editing experience, even better than on the desktop (arrow keys and vim hjkl).

And then it was all removed in a software update.

> But I came crawling back to iOS because I'm weak and the orange iPhone was pretty and the Pixel 10 was boring and I caved to the blue bubble pressure.

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)

There’s one specific thing driving me insane: it corrects “we’re” to “were” and “we’ll” to “well” EVERY TIME. It even did it while writing this comment. If I go into the symbols menu and find an apostrophe and type it in IT MEANS I MEANT TO PUT IT THERE

I watched the video and immediately tested it on my iphone. It's true?? About 50% of the time, typing "Thumb" resulted in "Thimb" or "Thjmb", while the visual feedback on the keyboard showed u being pressed instead!

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

Yeah, text editing on iOS has gotten progressively worse and worse. It's astonishing how much it has degraded in usability compared to the earlier versions of iOS. "It just works" is no longer a phrase I would ever consider saying about iPhones or Apple products in general. Pretty disappointing as they used to be quite an inspiration for quality software design.

I’d love to see (it won’t ever happen) what the bug fix for this is. I tried doing what the video said and just typing thumbs up over and over again and I didn’t actually have any trouble.

The actually issue according to another comment [0] is this[1]:

> 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

Arg. What's the quippy internet adage for this?

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...

I always imagine employees from the vendor (in this case Apple) reading the blog or this thread. They’re here, lurking. I see you! I see you in the shadows!

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.

I've been staying on iOS 17 and macOS 15 because I just don't see iOS/macOS 26 as an upgrade in any way. This is the first time I haven't been running a beta or getting a day one upgrade for Apple operating systems. I can't imagine moving away from iPhone or a MacBook, however if they want to avoid OS fragmentation and security issues caused by users like me refusing to upgrade, 27 better address these UX and stability issues.

> But I came crawling back to iOS because I'm weak and the orange iPhone was pretty and the Pixel 10 was boring and I caved to the blue bubble pressure.

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

I thought this was just me!

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.

I emphasize with the author: switching from Android to iOS was an abysmal change in terms of keyboard quality. I installed GBoard which is way better but the experience is not the same as with a default keyboard.

IOS 26 has been a massive dissapointment. I was strong-armed into updating this week with the vulnerability they refused to patch in 18.x, and it's what I would describe as "Gen Z's Vista"

It's not so bad over here in android world. If you don't like the keyboard you can just pick a different keyboard.

"caved to the blue bubble pressure"

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"?

Im convinced its all planned to force users to upgrade. The “7 years of updates” selling point is just a trojan horse to install a newer iOS that makes the product run like garbage.

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

Reading everyone’s comments it looks like there is a lot of rant with current iPhone state. I’m also feeling last releases introduced huge regressions. I bought an iPhone 16 seen many issues including keyboard ones.

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

Highly recommend Nintype third party keyboard. Such a breath of fresh air to have a keyboard made for power users.

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

For what it’s worth, swipe to type works just fine on the native keyboard, for those who didn’t know.

Agree about many of the other bugs / issues.

Just use Type Nine! https://www.typenineapp.com Write a comment if you want some free promo codes.

Not sure if it's gotten worse in the last release for English-only users, but for us writing in and often mixing multiple languages in the same message, the spelling correction has gotten way better in the last releases.

Keep autocorrect on and turn off predictive text. Makes the experience way better.

Funny thing is theres probably some Apple employees reading this right now kidding themselves into thinking this is an end user problem. It's not - your keyboard is bloody awful now, you made it worse.

My guess is that the 'wrong letter entered' bug is by design.

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.

> I caved to peer pressure. If you don't fix this thing within four months I will switch to your competitor for one maybe even two product cycles.

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.

> I'm switching to Android for good. (Good = at least 2 calendar years)

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...

Apple has become beholden to announcements. Work that someone can shove into a feature that someone else decides is flashy enough to maybe get mentioned on stage gets resourcing and support. Work that isn't going to show up in a Keynote deck gets ignored.

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.

I tried to call Tim Apple to complain about the shitty keyboard on my phone — here's what happened:

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

Fix your website before the day ends or I'm not upvoting

I thought it was just me… like maybe my hand eye coordination was failing as I aged or maybe my dexterity was decreasing. Its been driving me absolutely nuts since i upgraded my phone a few months ago.

The keyboard stuff is really embarrassing. I’ve definitely been making more mistakes in the last few years.

This is a brilliant, Love that timer, not sure why the exact time frame was picked though.

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.

I think it's hard for Apple to reproduce because maybe none of them are experiencing the issue? I have never seen issues with the keyboard, and I'm pretty pedantic about it.

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

I'm still on iOS 16 (I don't use a smartphone anymore and my old iPhone 8 works fine for the handful of times I need one) and even I notice it, I'm constantly pressing one letter and it gives me another

My keyboard is currently behaving. For once. It's been useless roughly three times since the last major update.

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.

I'm thinking of switching to iPhone after always having and Android. All these negative posts are really making me reconsider though.

We both know you're staying regardless

I'm one of the developers of Mister Keyboard. If you want, you can give it a try! Everything essential is completely free, maybe it works out for you.

Just use Android (Google stock not Samsung). Come over, the water is great.

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.

> But I came crawling back to iOS because I'm weak and the orange iPhone was pretty and the Pixel 10 was boring and I caved to the blue bubble pressure.

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.

It’s also reading your inner thoughts via neurallink

I've never figured out how to type a sentence into the Safari search without.every.word.ending.up.like.this

Oh, that is happening a lot to me and I wasn’t sure if it was only me!

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

maybe it’s just some quirk of how my fingers work, but when typing with two hands, I constantly get the letter “n” where I want a space. Itngetsnquitenfrustrating and it’s really annoying to go back and correct, because none of the intermediate words got autocorrected either. It seems like a) such an easy thing to prevent, and b) such an easy thing to detect and fix after the fact.

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.

I have a personal Android but spend a lot of time on a work iPhone. I was not expecting the keyboard (and voice-to-text) to be such a poor experience on iOS. Selecting text and autocorrections are both a nightmare.

120 days and 2 years? Lame.. You might as well just use your iphone in the meantime.. Stupid to get a phone for 2 years just to buy an iphone again later on..

My wife, an archetypal normie iPhone user of 15 years, has recently switched to Pixel for this and many other small reasons. It's just crap software.

Several Redditors have observed that turning off swipe-to-type has improved keyboard accuracy. I tried this and confirmed that it makes a small difference.

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!

I am not having that much problem with it — it’s been relatively easy to ‘train’ it to make the correct corrections, and I rarely have any problems with autocorrect. it usually does the right thing.

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'm entertain by the potential meta in these kinds of posts. Apple does not care at all about the contents of the post (presently).

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.

Bitdefender flagged that website for me, but it does not give me any useful details as to what the reason might be...

We all yearn for the BlackBerry. I wish we got a modern one with support for the popular messaging apps (WhatsApp, Slack, etc). I know there are some smartphones out there with physical keyboards that run Android, but they feel more like a prototype than a full product.

Didn’t you mean “Apple, fix my keyboard before the timer ends or I’m leaving g iPhone”

Autocorrect just cuts out for me pretty often, usually when I’m a couple sentences into a longer text entry. This is particularly annoying when using the Claude app or similar. The suggestion bar above the keyboard goes blank and I just stop getting any corrections.

It used to be better? I use android daily and was given an iPhone for work, and using it is incredibly painful because of the keyboard. I was wondering how people have been putting up with it for so long. When I've asked other long time iPhone users about it they just nodded along so I though it was a long running issue.

On the Apple TV interface on my Roku, I can't tell which movie thumbnail I'm on because their UI just slightly enlarges the image which I can't really make out from my couch.

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

Why don’t third party keyboards take advantage of this situation? Why hasn’t Google updated Gboard on the App store in years?

i cannot upvote this enough, the keyboard is a DAILY annoyance, especially selecting words

Post viable alternatives here and your thinking around why.

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

I used to think the android keyboard(s) were terrible when I switched over to iOS, but now after switching back to a android, it feels leagues ahead of iOS 26's kb

And no Colemak support. I bought an in iPad to try as a home assistant kiosk and found the keyboard layouts don't have colemak as an option.

Android is the same. Grass isn't any greener over here. I miss T9.

I have recently switched from 7 Plus to 16e. Now I make typos all the time. I still do not know who I should blame primarily, my muscle memory or Apple.

The lag in the latest update on my 13 mini is almost unbearable too. I'm typing, it lags out, it then adds a lot of letters at once and, as expected, they're incorrect. Getting very, very frustrating.

For the people who wonder what this is about. You might want to take a look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo

We live in time when instead of booking a ticket you have to create a landing page to draw developer’s attention to a quite irritating bug.

I for one enjoy the plausible deniability afforded by the iOS keyboard. On occasion I may make intemperate remarks online or curse at someone I shouldn’t. With an iPhone, I can just follow up with “sorry, iOS keyboard!” or “oops spellcheck” and nobody gives it a second thought.

I was skeptical. I then recorded the screen of myself typing, using the iPhone's screen recorder itself, and it is happening with me. I thought I was the issue. Wow.

As an Android user of SwiftKey with swipe typing, can someone explain the whole iOS broken keyboard situation? I guess I literally don't understand what the issue is, is it not allowing people to type in the letters they press?

I wasn't aware it does it insidious. I always assumed I miss typed something, not that the phone itself was messing things up.

I saw the video and understand the problem but I cannot simulate it. The keyboard always works great for me. Could it be that this bug is related to AI? Or some language settings?

The issue is that the letter that pops may be replaced, if it later changes its mind. Eg if you hit U, get a U popup, and sofly release while moving into the target area for J. You get a J.

WOW I've spent years thinking that I suck at typing on phone screens, I never even considered that it might be the keyboard software is just shitty....

I’m glad this just isn’t me.

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.

Why the drama? If you do not like native keyboard, install 3rd party one like Gboard.

I thought it was only me.

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.

I feel like I’m the only one without major issues here. The autocorrect works, the keys I tap are right. Going to Android with the Android Keyboard drives me nuts.

Very related for those not familiar: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo (2min 24sec)

iOS keyboard is such garbage. Almost a daily pain point for me. But I suffer for the amazing battery life and hardware. Like all Apple kit the software is crap.

I thought i learned to forget how to type. knew i wasn't going crazy.

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.

Yep! I can’t type on this thjng

What infuriates me the most is iOS being absolutely unable to detect which language I'm currently writing in and automatically replacing words in one language to another. I write in 3 languages on a daily basis and it's making iOS totally lose its mind. For instance I'm 5 words deep into a message in French with a person I'm only speaking French with, and somehow iOS still thinks I'm making typos every other word and automatically replaces them with English or Spanish words.

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…

> I randomly tried Android again for a few months last spring. Using a functioning keyboard was revelatory. But I came crawling back to iOS because I'm weak and the orange iPhone was pretty and the Pixel 10 was boring and I caved to the blue bubble pressure.

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

I thought they fixed the bug where autocorrect would add text but repeat one word in the middle so it would look like: “I’m trytrying to”

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

I prefer the iOS keyboard than over the Android ones. Why does my autocorrect work fine and my keys and swipe typing work, but not yours?

The problem with Linux phone is app support. I dont know how it can compete with Apple or Android.

i believe a lot of us are tired of this mess and will switch. can you enable an option where i could too join on this deadline/timer? this way we can all quit all at once.

You send an email to customer service to complain. I build a whole ass website to complain. We are not the same.

> I randomly tried Android again for a few months last spring. Using a functioning keyboard was revelatory. But I came crawling back to iOS because I'm weak and the orange iPhone was pretty and the Pixel 10 was boring and I caved to the blue bubble pressure.

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.

The amount of typos in this comment section is pure gold.

I like it, bookmarked, let's see how this extortion fares

"I'm leaving iPhone" is the new "I'm quitting Twitter". Nobody ever does it.

I don’t think the keyboard is any more broken than it has ever been. It works pretty well for me aside from its awful, awful repeated "corrections" it applies, I delete and it reapplies. This is not new at all.

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.

This is my number 1 complaint with iphone, even above battery life with their new crappy 3d effects. I bet these issues have actually cost a bunch of lives, given that people type while driving, and this nonsense makes it far harder. It can't be that hard to do this.

This isn't just you

I’d love a fix for that and I’d love to see nano-texture on the iPhone. I have a test device S25 Ultra and I always enjoy looking at that screen so much more than an iPhone. The most recent iPhone says it has stronger anti-glare, but it’s really quite poor still. Samsung’s display is way ahead in my book.

hilariously, this will happen on or about when dictation is Wispr quality or better and you won't need your keyboard as much. I do second the Select All item, it's beyond frustrating.

It's so bad. I think it has to do with touch targets because the slide to type is great in my opinion.

What the hell is this?? If the product has terrible issues, just leave! Why are you grovelling before a corporation, begging for fixes, when you have other options?

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.

oh all this time I thought it was me...

I don’t have an issue at all.. I have swipe turned off..

You can use gboard on iOS and it's a bit better. But still not as good as Android.

I really hope someone at Apple is paying attention.

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.

Wow I thought it was just me

I’ve definitely noticed more typing errors

im not sure why you need to be so dramatic with the timer. just switch already if you don't like it

With a couple brief exceptions, I've been an iPhone user since 2007. I'm not far from switching to Android myself. I'm not under any illusions that Google doesn't have some serious flaws, in some ways definitely worse than Apple, but from a usability standpoint I do find the keyboard and autocorrect behavior just atrocious on my iPhone.

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.

Yes, it's badly broken. Try building an app, it's so inconsistent, I have no idea what the heck is going on. It seems like every place my app uses a keyboard it has a different look, different feel, different way to dismiss it, etc. What the AF.

On a capitalist society your power is how you use your wallet (arguably more important than even the vote you do every 4 years).

So let's vote with our wallet.

"Now you're just a fruit that I used to know." Sounds like the title for a FANTASTIC song parody idea.

"the orange iPhone was pretty"

Yeah well...

"Now you're just a fruit that I used to know." Sounds like a fantastic song parody idea.

I am not sure what I just read.

Actively hostile is a good way of putting in. Absolute dogshit is another no less accurate description.

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.

This explains why my typing has basically turned to shit on my iPhone meanwhile on PC it's been fine. Frustrating!

Android keyboards will make you return to iOS in less than a week

If only there were a viable third option besides Apple and the world's largest advertising company.

APPLE, this is real, stop ignoring it, I even looked at Samsung phones last week because of this. The amount of time I waste trying to correct or select mid-words is insane.

I swear the current IOS keyboard is gaslighting me for some reason every time I use it. It's like a low-key torture.

Anyone else feel like they're doing this on purpose because they want people contributing less words to the Internet, kind of like a throttle on training data, social media and communications?

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

The website sucks because I had to do work to understand the problem.

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.

I keep an iPhone SE 1st gen as a secondary phone. It still has the last best keyboard iOS had. Almost zero mistakes. Probably because no AI and other overoptimizitation BS. Every time I go back to my primary 13 I want to cry.

Maybe try this? I have great results on the ios keyboard by simply making two changes to the keyboard settings. I turn off auto-correct, and turn off slide to type. I made this transition when they first introduced slide to type, as that setting changes the touch algorithm to prefer where you lift from vs where you tap initially, or at least that’s how it felt. I also have turned off predictive text because I never use it, it’s faster for me to just type out the words than it for me to watch the predictive text.

"We want to surprise and delight our customers" turned into fuck with and frustrate.

don't panic, he's bluffing

They broke text selection and autocorrected things they don’t need it. Completely broken.

What’s really disappointing is that Apple is making money hand over fist, and yet they seemingly make so little effort. Please Apple, for the love of all that is holy, fix cmd-tab, Ctrl-tab, and desktops on the Mac.

Imagine being so full of oneself that you set up a webpage to tell a Trillion-dollar company you might not buy their stuff anymore.

Ain't gonna change nothing as long as the phones sell themselves.

Apple is beholden to its stockholders, not its customers.

Apple: "you're holding it wrong"

I stand by this pledge. I even have a Clicks keyboard to avoid the iPhone one. I have an interesting hypothesis as to why, and it's counterintuitive. The larger the screen gets, the less accurate a touchscreen keyboard is. I picked up an original iPhone and started typing and it was outstanding how accurately and quickly I did.

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.

> But I'd like to think it should mean something to the engineers, UX designers, product people, and whoever else had a hand in building this thing.

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.

Just use SwiftKey

You would think someone had undergone a lobotomy or is having a stroke until you realise they have an iPhone. The autocorrect is so funny.

Google keyboard, anyone?

> I caved to the blue bubble pressure

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

It’s honestly embarrassing that no leader at apple has enough juice to get this done.

"now you're just a fruit that I used to know"

Apple's keyboard sucks on my iphone too. Everytime the autocorrect fucks up, I swear at tim cook in my head.

If iOS/macOS 27 isn't a snow leopard I'm gone too, I've been a user for nearly 30 decades... fuck this, it's all so sloppy, too many grievances to even begin enumerating.

Uhm yeah, a touch screen is not a keyboard. It will never be one.

HN, fix this stupid top navigation bar, or I'm leaving HN. Timer's started.

Ah yes, previously, the much-submitted, but took 2 months to get any traction, video:

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

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

agreed, found an old android phone from 10 years ago it was better at typing than the latest (dogshit) iphone keyboard

Impotent rage if I ever saw it. Where is the capacity of feeling shame or embarrassment?

What's the point of this web page?

This seem like an odd take. Android has bugs too, you just haven’t used it long enough to notice.

Random whiner is whining.

News at 11?

Bro just leave, and switch to Linux phone.. Android is also totally shit.

just switch bro

"Oh no. Anyways"

it's so infuriating how bad I am at typing now.

>i'm weak

>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 did a lot of classic Mac programming in its day. I knew how to react to the events, and how to use a Color QuickDraw window’s RefCon, and how to mark parts of a window for redraw.

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.

There's clearly something wrong here.

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.

Terrorizing Apple with a countdown threat is probably not going to accomplish much.

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.

It's a bit strange because why purchase from Apple but then complain? If the quality is below the expectation; and/or the price too high, people can choose with their money to purchase something else. Viewed more objectively most people probably don't consider this to be a main impetus for people abandoning iPhone. I have not purchased any apple-specific hardware, but to me it is strange to e. g. make Apple big (by purchasing their stuff) and then assume there would be many people who are angry at Apple. That does not appear to make a whole lot of sense.