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.)
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.
In addition to the other problems (the keyboard being too prone catching extremely subtle slides below UI response time), there certainly is the problem of when you crowd source enough data you crowd source all of their collective mistakes, too. In a lot of that raw data mistakes are going to be as common or more common than corrections and/or originally correct spellings.
We do have a great filter for this called a "dictionary", but as the above commenter laments companies have given up on "just autocorrect to dictionary words" for much more complex "learning" models and filtering them back to just dictionary words is antithetical to the (sunken cost) expense that went into training these models, and/or the KPIs and promotion incentives that keep prioritizing "AI" and giant crowd sourced data vats over simpler mechanics and local user specifics.
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.
The voiceover is deceptive (unintentionally?)...
They touch the [u] which shows the popover U but you can see them slide their thumb down off the [u] key onto the [j] key.
I guessed that was the issue, repeated it on my phone (SE) and only then looked at video and it's obvious when you see him do it in slo-mo. Edit: I have most prediction turned off (I mostly find slyde typing to be fastest, and I hate automiscorrect on uncommon words).
iPhones are very very sensitive to tap-slides which causes many UI gremlins (a variety of terrible side effects that you can't avoid if you're designing a UI).
Over time, most people seem to intuitively learn not to slide when tapping.
I'm unsure how many designers/developers even notice the effects of slide since they have learnt to avoid sliding? When I watched beginners on iPhones you see them get frustrated by things not tapping and other subtle effects (HTML event interactions, scrollable areas, buttons, inputs).
Same thing can happen on Android. One menu button repeatably failed if I used my left hand - took me a while to work out the issue (and a bit of work to increase the tappable area so a bit of slide was accepted and worked better for neophyte users).
If I ever meet the person that invented lookbehind correction, I’m not sure I’ll be able to restrain myself. This person has robbed me of my peace of mind as I now have to be on guard every time I type anything on a mobile keyboard
your comment reminds me of this comic from the 2000s that became a bit of a meme back in the day
swap out "comic sans" with "aggressive lookbehind correction" and it'd fit perfectly ;-)
It's real frustrating that Apple has decided to put just about everything under only a single Settings switch and won't break it out into individual things.
It's also frustrating that for about half an iOS version Apple seemed to have caught on that the update behind was catching people off guard and implemented an extra, more obvious change animation. The whole word flashed in a bright blue or yellow when it changed and had a visible undo button. That was useful. But then the button didn't survive the next point release and the animation kept getting subtler again until it disappeared.
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.
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.
> pick adyacent keys
The big reason after years of SwiftKey use I finally uninstalled it is because it became too much of an ad vector for "you should use Mobile Edge and have you tried our new Bing Mobile app yet". I also haven't used it in a couple of years, but I'd be surprised if it doesn't have some Copilot button or buttons somewhere now.
The industry really does forget all the lessons it learned...
But there is a way for your keyboard to simply show the real size/position of buttons so that in hunt and peck mode you'll be correct
Yes, but the tradeoff in that case is that for most casual typing it will be less forgiving and you'll make more (uncorrected) mistakes
My understanding is it's not just about including or not including some extra fixed clickable padding around each square (in which case it indeed wouldn't harm to show the whole area), but about dynamically adapting the area, based on frequent off-target clicks, probabilities, etc.
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!
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!
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'd be giving the keyboard a try!
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.
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.
This is a patent case where IA made a function worse instead of better, yet companies clinged to it for some reason.
The swiping keyboard from Apple simply refuses to do "and" for me. I get "abs" (I'm not a gym rat; I don't talk about that) or "Abbas" (the only one I know is the Palestinian president, and I don't talk about him either) almost every time. I hate the autocorrect-something-five-words-back problem, but not being able to recognize one of the most common words in the language is unacceptable crap.
I'll give Swiftkey another try.
Troll answer: A-Z label maker keyboard
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.
Absolute perfect typing experience, better responsiveness and almost entirely free of mistakes. It's mind-boggling.
Frustrating if you are a 13 mini user
Guess they’ll want us to carry iPads in our pockets for these UIs to actually work :)
Perhaps they wanted to sell more Smart Keyboards.
By contrast, the typing experience on a 2.5” Unihertz Atom screen is shockingly acceptable…
> The Unihertz Atom's 2.45-inch screen (240x432 resolution) is "shockingly acceptable" for its niche.
Though of course Google's Gemini-whatever does manage to subtly miss the mark even there: I said (and think) that the typing experience is acceptable, I said nothing about the screen. If I remember correctly, the last one I handled, the screen was resistive rather than capacitive, and it felt weird and squishy. Still not bad for the price, and it's a minor miracle how much Android software can still draw a coherent layout with that kind of resolution, but...
I'd never come anywhere close to trusting it with anything important, but then again maybe that's not such a bad relationship to have to a smartphone...
My first iPhone was a 4S and i was astonished how correctly i'm typing. At least in English.
I even managed to bully the spell checker into reasonably accepting both English and Romanian, back when they didn't have multiple languages at the same time on the keyboard.
I'm not sure when it started to go downhill, but I was using an XS and it was at at least one more version after whatever XS shipped with.
* I type a word, it shows up correctly
* I type a second word, my phone CHANGES THE PREVIOUS WORD
* A silent tiny rage removes several seconds from my life
One can find many iPhone sourced typos in my HN history which I leave, usually, as a method to preserve sanity.
Is this some sort of psyop to get me to use siri to send texts?
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.
Maybe your comment means it's got back to being usable.
Edit: https://apps.apple.com/pt/app/gboard-the-google-keyboard/id1...
No updates in 3 years? And search results complaining about gboard on iOS 26? Doesn't sound promising.
Not my experience at all. Do you only write English?
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 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.
That said, it got bought by Microsoft and now they try to cram in some AI nonsense :(
I can't stand keyboards that do this - especially those that don't let you turn it off. If you write in another language that doesn't use the Latin alphabet, you end up with nonsense suggestions - common English words like "the" or "and" will get replaced with obscure words in another language that just happen to sound vaguely phonetically similar. I almost never switch languages mid-sentence when typing, and yet the keyboard can't seem to grasp that.
Yes, I loved it, but it crashed in too many apps and I had to switch to the Apple one :(
I wish Apple would get over itself and expose settings for all-the-things, like how you can write default finder settings on macOS using the terminal.
now i just Lettuce my iPhone sden whatever it wants with no punctuation its not real good
Unfortunately, MacOS doesn't have settings (which I am told it had) for animation scales, like Androids have. The interface is sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow.
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.
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.
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".
Options also exist to pre-populate the predictive wordlists with our own terms, and to turn off predictive text altogether.
Predictive text replacements are very bad, but they mitigate the worse issue of the fact that the keyboard is incessantly shifting with every single keypress.
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
Kill males kill males kill muddled kill mussels (hilarious)
Treat myself tear myself try myself tell myself
It won’t do it.
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.
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.
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.
No android phone needed a trademarked name to have that feature. If modern iPhones no longer allow you to easily move the cursor around for editing, that's a software engineering decision. Android's implementation was not as nifty, you could only move "linearly" along the text input, rather than freely in two directions, but the intent is you just place the cursor roughly at the place you want and drag the space key for exact placement, though IMO it's too sensitive. Constraining axis in that context is a good thing.
Meanwhile, my Mac's "3D touch" keyboard functionality only results in it insisting to show a dictionary definition for most of the words I click and making it so "drag this file onto an app to input it" doesn't work half the time because dragging a file from Finder just doesn't work sometimes!
"Mac touchpads are so much better than everything else" people tell me as I yet again cannot do the one interaction that is the killer app for multi-window graphical workstations and that we figured out in the 80s on computers that couldn't even do color.
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
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.
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 think this used to be true on Android as well.
the iphone keyboard has gone to shot.
and auto-correct has lost me data. I've typed in something important to remember and later when I go look at it ("call spaghetti before 5pm!"), I can't figure what I typed in.
In the end, I learned to disable auto-capitalization, auto-correction and smart punctuation.
and editing is a nightmare. Getting the cursor in the middle of a word is just about impossible, like highlighting just the characters you want to cut or copy.
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.)
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?
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.
It's also infuriatingly difficult to type "and" (I get "ABs" all the time)
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
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.
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.
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.
I don't have an issue with typing on iPhone, but I just disabled it to see what happens.
About two years ago, my phone typing suddenly gets extremely bad. Like, from occasional error to about one typo every second sentence. No matter how carefully I type. Hardware didn't change, so it must be me, right?
Let me play with that setting, I hope you are right.
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.
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.
Lol. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button!
I suspect this last iteration broke it just enough for it to impact more people and make some of the problems I’ve been experiencing mainstream.
But yeah things like deleting when I meant to space, putting an “I” instead of “K” and a bunch of other little things like “thinks” instead of “things”, unintended periods; complete failure of spelling just generating gibberish “x” instead of “c” leading to un-autocorrectable failures; and if you want to reference the name of something that doesn’t fit the grammatical structure of the sentence but isn’t a mainstream item, forget about it.
Also “od” instead of “of”.
Seeing this video is super validating. Emotionally, it does a lot to make me feel vindicated.
Someone was telling me you can install 3P keyboards, does anyone have any recommendations?
also, the damn period next to n in the address bar. no i didnt mean to type every word in a sentence with a period delimiting between words.
Having never implemented something like this, I wonder if the algorithm could take into account how long the cursor lingered on each position before being let go. If it spent significantly longer in a position before the word, and your finger happens to move a little bit when you let go, that slight movement shouldn't affect the cursor position.
Apple is usually pretty good about this stuff but they've really been slipping on the keyboard.
I intended to tie experience where it says short use
I intended to tour type where it says tie
I intended to type type where it says your
I intended to type tour where it says your
jesus…it might be time to consider android
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.
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.
instead, it just pretends everything is working great lol.
Apple is unintentionally pranking the world.
I would never want to leave my computer open within 300 meters of you
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.
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.
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
Ownership is a critical and fading concept for software. And it makes me really sad and frustrated.
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.
And, you know, FSD 14.2. :)
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.
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.
I doubt those were particularly profitable, but there was a lot of innovation back then.
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?
And unless the app gets acquired by the big companies, it will eventually turn into malware.
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
I'd pay for an actually good keyboard. I find the default keyboard (GBoard) atrocious for languages other than English.
It will be designed by the same idiot who decided Safari should auto login you to everything without asking.
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.
The features were the ugliest icons I've ever seen and notification summaries that may be wrong.
Great.
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 know at work I get work around windows taskbar jank at least a few dozens times a day. Granted, I can't do anything about it.
Instead, seemingly trivial bugs exist in huge software products for years. It somehow feels like the people in charge actively avoid dog fooding their own products.
Fixing broken UX is not a priority at Apple any more. They stopped enforcing HIGs for 3rd party apps a long time ago, and their own apps violate many principles that used to matter. Music app on iOS is a great example of slop UI.
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.
Once they added the suggestion bar above the keyboard things got noticeably worse. Every time they try to fix it they make it even worse than before.
With the current version, it’s not just the issue in the video I see as an issue. The two big problems I have are 1) repeated words, where I will type a word once, but auto-completion will inject another one. 2) The autocorrect will seemingly look at the whole paragraph I’m typing and change random words I typed several lines up and deemed correct. I will catch it doing this in real time, and sometimes it will flip a word back and forth repeatedly. I find I don’t just need to proofread while I’m typing, but also need to go through and re-read everything. It wasn’t always like this.
Maybe it’s my rose colored glasses, but I often think the iPhone peaked with the 4S.
If I ever lose my marbles I know I'm going to accuse iOS of being in on it.
Not only Alan Dye, Eddy Cue, Craig Federighi also need to go. Bring back Scot Forstall.
I installed SwiftKey on iPhone too but even it seems sluggish.
I went to apple keyboard and had to disable autocorrect because it would uncorrect it to the wrong word until five words down and decides which word makes more sense.
I've stuck with Samsung's keyboard and it has mostly been fine, though it's less aggressive about adding punctuation for contractions etc.
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'm overall happy with the decision and would recommend others try it.
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.
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.
Come to think of it, maybe that's not a dream...
you're welcome :)
Then it seems like they’re started teaching to the bottoms of the class and added a bunch of terrible decisions: Substituting touch to select instead of touch to move cursor was a genuinely awful decision that now makes typing a constant chore, and it seems like their autocorrect is overcompensating so hard that it prevents me from writing perfectly good words simply because they’re not common ones.
Side note: anyone else have moments where you can’t press delete once predictive text has shown up?
Chiming in just to say: yes
I also did a few other experiments that I unfortunately haven't had time to explore further[2]
[1] https://www.typenineapp.com
[2] https://medium.com/porsager/a-better-iphone-typing-experienc...
I’ve spent more time than I care to admit searching for a good keyboard app in the App Store, and I’ve tried a lot of them. This one never surfaced for me in any of my usual searches, which is a shame (likely more on Apple’s search than on you).
I really like the T9-style approach, and I appreciate the clean App Privacy section and straightforward privacy policy.
It needs a little tlc to align with the latest iOS update changes, but my time is too limited at the moment.
My recent experiment has been very disappointing. Mostly post upgrading to iOS 26? I’ve had to painfully change my behaviour to two-handed typing by default.
My suspicion— they’ve changed the ML system that inferred words based on swipes, and the new one isn’t as good in real world use.
I imagine the problem could be severe enough to some that they would pay the price of the Apple Developer program just so they may install such a Retro keyboard app from Github - if one exists?
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.
There's still some jank. Sometimes searching for something in setting takes upwards of 5 seconds. I can only assume it's downloading a bitcoin miner or something.
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?
Then whenever I dictate "Alexander" it shows up as "(Alexander)" in parentheses. Drives me mad.
>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-...
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?
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)
You can also swipe right or left on the URL bar to switch tabs.
Alternatively hold the URL bar and press close.
I paid for 120hz but it can’t even hit 60 on the Home Screen :(
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.
When i hit send, i want to send the message that is on my screen, not the message iOS thinks i meant to send.
(And that you cant just click into the middle of a word to edit one letter)
I havent found a root cause yet, tentatively chalked it up to advancing age.
I may have inadvertently selected a different keyboard (Samsung vs Google ) or wrong layout/settings when switching to newer phone.
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.
I've also had trouble getting rid of pop up menus (copy, etc). If I want to click on text, but it has decided to pop up a menu, it can be a real pain to get rid of it. (I had no problem on previous versions of IOS).
There's a fundamental law of features: Every feature you add may may make it better for people who use it, but it makes it worse for everyone else.
If you keep adding features, anything will eventually become unusable.
I have Auto-Correction enabled, and Predictive Text disabled. I can switch it around the other way too.
- 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
And it takes so long to keep backspacing to delete it, or move the cursor to make a surgical edit. The WORST.
I don’t know wtf it thinks I’m doing because it doesn’t do any other action.
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 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 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...
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"?
Seeing this video has convinced me it’s a feature. I can’t see iOS development practices that shit and to read comments here about similar Android issues.
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
Someone just has to look really hard at the code and find the bug. Surely the relevant code can't be that long?
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.
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.
I want an iPhone but without a touch screen. Give me a damn real physical keyboard.
LLM HUD displays can annotate ads, marketing copy and shopping carts with customer usability feedback.
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.
1. For typing actual web addresses
2. More importantly, for typing “site:reddit.com”
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.
but it's nice to hear it's no better for the apples. misery enjoys company :)
This is a ChatGPT written post
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)
Tim Apple really needs to let go the clowns who managed to regress the keyboard input functionality.
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.
The autocorrect does help sometimes. But it fucks things up that were previously fine just as much as it helps so overall it’s probably worse than it used to be. Now You need to constantly monitor every key pressed to make sure it hasn’t screed it up later.
Why would it go from what felt like a predictable error to what feels like someone moving the keys around? I am guessing someone presented aggregate research that showed higher accuracy overall, but ignored the case that the errors feel like the voices are getting louder :D.
Hopefully they come up with a setting to change this, but knowing apple it probably won't happen. Is it time for custom keyboards to come back?
Does no engineer at Apple use iOS or they never face this problem ?
And liquid glass is still ugly and buggy. Apple has become enshitified.
- Random invisible touches and phone calls - BUggy Glass UI - Stupid battery management ..to say the least.
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.
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'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.
Now? All gone. - You can make a call from the text app, but only after you open the conversation, and it's a tiny button in the corner next to the menu. You haven't texted them? Sorry. - You can send a text from the dialer: switch to recent calls view, tap a recent call (the name, not the icon) and you can text that person. You haven't called them recently? Sorry. - Edit a contact from the dialer? Tap a recent call (the icon, not the name) to see their info, then click edit contact. Haven't called them recently? Sorry. - Want to call someone from your starred/favorite contacts? Tap the favorites section to expand it, you get 5 contacts on screen at a time with tiny hard-to-read names - Want to call a frequent contact that doesn't appear in the recent list because of a bunch of incoming calls? Tap the search button, if you're lucky you'll get a nice big target to tap, but more likely they won't show up (this is suggested contacts, not recent or favorite contacts) or they'll be underneath the keyboard. - the view contacts button opens your contacts manager that also doesn't have a view for favorite contacts. - The contacts app can initiate calls and text messages, but the only sort method it has is alphabetical, and it shows every contact you have, including those without phone numbers (you can filter them by tags/groups/account by opening the menu, but not by frequency or information). You also have to open the contact to see the buttons (which include video call; I have no idea what this does, as I have no video calling apps installed) - start a new conversation in messages, there's a prominently placed Gemini button at the top, despite Gemini being disabled in settings.
I would switch to the Samsung dialer and messenger app, but my phone is now a Motorola. Oops. Favorite contacts screen was removed from the dialer a while back for some unknown reason, but the useless voicemail screen remains (this screen doesn't work with either T-Mobile or with Google Voice)
Bonus: I sent pictures from Google voice weekly for the past few years, recently they never get received. (These are jpg screenshots of my work schedule, not giant photos; Google voice is convenient for viewing them myself on my desktop, phone, tablet. And Google voice still can't deal with webp or heic despite such images showing up in the image picker; in these cases the message can't even be sent)
Typing? I'm lucky. I have a nice big tablet, I only use my phone calls for text messages and calls, and for texting, swipe input has far less issues than tapping on the keyboard. Almost everything else goes through my 10" tablet. But yes, autocorrect on Android was also better when it was pure word lists without ML; sure, it was annoying to have to build a user dictionary, but you still have to do that anyways or else rarely used words will eventually get forgotten and names of contacts will eventually never be suggested if your swipe is the least bit off.
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.)
(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.
- As mentioned, keyboard input is offensively broken. Whiffed inputs, the entire text selection/cursor manipulation model sucks (not being able to select in the middle of a word is inexcusable unless you have Stockholm syndrome for the bandaids), the cursor manipulation is broken, keyboard gets stuck open or closed, etc. etc. I'm convinced the input design for this phone is a CIA psyop designed to drive you to madness so they can recruit you as a sleeper cell.
- Passcode inputs are also broken. Trying to enter your passcode at easily achievable speeds results in dropped inputs.
- Above point wouldn't be a big deal if it weren't for fingerprint scanning being given up for Face ID, which is complete dogshit that constantly fails-to-passcode trying and failing to scan my ceiling, or my face when it's against a pillow in the morning. It's also completely worthless when I'm unable to fully point my face at the phone (working on vehicles or in some other enclosed area) or am trying to use the phone completely off of muscle memory.
- The gesture navigation system is a fundamentally bad idea. I'm an average-sized man and reaching over to the left hand side of the screen to make back inputs requires me to shift my fingers on the back of the phone just to make the reach for the input. This is on a base-model iPhone 16, which is already a touch too large for many hands to deal with this input system. The hitboxes for navigation inputs are too small and many of the inputs are often shared with actions in apps, resulting in taking all sorts of actions you didn't want to. Android style 3-button navigation at the bottom of the screen solved this many years ago. As an aside, the 60 FPS screen on an $800 phone as a "fuck you" push to upgrade to an even fatter pig of a phone that suffers even more from the bad navigation is funny.
- The GPS is fucked up, at least on the iPhone 16. It takes forever to find its bearing, after which it usually holds onto it until losing its mind again at the most inconvenient time. The only phone I've seen with a worse GPS is a Unihertz Jelly. Being in the same league as a $150 niche night market special is shameful.
- I have a frustrating number of calls get dropped. I don't know exactly where this issue comes from but it's noticeable, I run into it a couple times a week. My previous S24 on the same carrier never dropped calls under the same circumstances, so I know not having this issue is possible.
- The flashlight implementation sucks. Being able to tap it off with screen input is incredibly frustrating when I'm fumbling around trying to do something in the dark. And of course, it turns the screen on so you can make this accidental input every time you turn the flashlight on with the assignable side button. Being able to adjust the brightness is something I've never found any use for and mostly just serves to annoy me when I accidentally turn it down with another unintended input, but maybe somebody somewhere gives a shit about this, I guess.
- The split notification/settings menu is incredibly annoying. The settings menu is already a reach on the smallest mainline models, the notifications menu basically requires whole-hand movement. 20% of the space in the notifications menu is taken up by a fuckoff huge clock that you can't configure the size of. The lack of notification icons results in me having to actually unlock the phone and check things instead of just being able to know at a glance (I know they wanted to distance themselves from the roached Android notification tray look but I don't care).
- Liquid Glass looks like shit. So does a lot of the rest of the phone but I don't really hold some moron designer's bad visual taste against a product unless it affects the usability of the product. And of course, it affects the usability of the product. I actually laughed out loud having a literally unreadable lockscreen clock after the iOS 26 update, with the factory-provided moon background to add a little more salt to the wound. It reads poorly and is tacky to boot.
- This is pretty minor but the constant nags about iCloud are very funny. These assholes just couldn't resist hounding you for 99 cents more after you bought their $800 fuckup. It's like getting nagged about a Sirius XM subscription in a Lamborghini.
Individual points may be taken care of, but the disease is terminal. The iPhone's success at this point is driven by network effects, marketing, and its posturing as a premium product. Grown adults have an emotional attachment to the brand and the lifestyle statement. Android vendors are aping this stuff now. The memories of quality software and the ability to recognize it is being actively erased from the collective memory. Hoping that any of this is going to change at this point is just pissing in the wind.
I've been using it for years- much better at recognizing and more performant.
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.