Posted by walterbell 3 days ago
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.
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).
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.
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 ;-)
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
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
*you're
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!
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 :(
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.
Pixel user here. That depends on the language you're typing. Autocorrect and spellcheck, not just on Android but other Google products, will change correct danish to incorrect danish. It's infuriating. The issue I encounter most often happens because Google apparently assumes english grammar is universal, and insists on splitting compound words, which is never done in danish.
Danish is already being heavily eroded by foreign influence, and this isn't helping.
I 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
And unless the app gets acquired by the big companies, it will eventually turn into malware.
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.