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Posted by walterbell 12/11/2025

iPhone Typos? It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken [video](www.youtube.com)
709 points | 436 comments
celeritascelery 12/11/2025|
I have had this conversation with several people. I feel like I used to be able to type with a fairly low error rate on a smaller screen with old iPhones. Now I feel that it is constant exercise in frustration as I will hit a letter and the keyboard will decide to pick the letter next to it. It is evolving backwards.
jorvi 12/11/2025||
There are two very simple causes to point to why touch keyboards turned to shit:

1. Crowdsourced word weighting: your keyboard's stochastic predictions are no longer mostly based on your typing, but rather on what 'everyone' is typing as their next word. This makes the word replacements it does often suboptimal to downright nonsensical.

2. Aggressive lookbehind correction: these days you have to be seriously on your guard for your keyboard to not sneak-edit something you typed 5 words back, because autocorrect suddenly decided that the probability is high you meant to say something else there (which it clearly isn't, as your eyes and brain exist)

The problem your encountering is downstream from point 1. Basically your keyboard thinks due to the way most people construct a particular sentence, you're gonna want to type "bold" next, despite "hold" clearly clearly making more sense. So it'll force "b" on you 4 times in a row until it realizes you really want to type "h".

Going back to the old style of doing keyboards (mostly user-learned dictionaries and probability weighting, and little lookbehind autocorrrect) could be done, but within Google and Apple there are probably people who got promoted by switching to the current shitty system. They'll block off any attempt at someone messing with their pride.

(There is a third 'problem' where your visual keys do not correspond to the touchmap at all. Swiftkey has a feature where it can show you what your touchmap and heatmap look like versus the actual layout and it its often staggeringly different, with many keys vastly tilted. When you try to desperately type "h" after 4 misses, you're doing that with your index finger in "hunt and peck" mode, which does correspond to the visual layout but not with your usual typing on the touchmap layout. There is no way for your keyboard to know you're in "hunt and peck" accuracy mode.)

danudey 12/11/2025|||
> The problem your encountering is downstream from point 1. Basically your keyboard thinks due to the way most people construct a particular sentence, you're gonna want to type "bold" next, despite "hold" clearly clearly making more sense. So it'll force "b" on you 4 times in a row until it realizes you really want to type "h".

In the video, the user is typing 'Thumbs up', and when they get to the first 'u' the keyboard shows a 'u' being pressed but a 'j' is inserted instead. Are you suggesting that, due to the way most people construct sentences, the OS thinks that 'thjmbs' is the most likely word? And then the next time the OS thinks that 'thhmbs' is the most likely word?

Both of the issues you've mentioned are common, and irritating, but if you watch the video you can see that that's not what's happening here. Before any autocorrection or adjustment is being done, the keyboard is registering a 'U' and the OS is inputting a J or H or I or some other nearby letter.

The video also debunks the touchmap discontinuity issues as well, because you can clearly see which key the keyboard is registering; it's not assuming that you meant to press J or it would highlight the J; it's registering a U, highlighting U, and inputting J.

It sounds to me as though you didn't watch the video and just assumed what issue was being discussed; please do watch it, because this is another, relatively new, issue that lots of people have seen and which is far worse and more frustrating than the other legitimate issues you mentioned.

mrguyorama 12/11/2025|||
The above commenter is talking about why touchscreen keyboards have become worse over time in general

Apple additionally may have just bugged up their implementation as well, but the above mentioned issues exist even on Android, and didn't a decade ago.

I still contend that the single best touchscreen keyboard and autocorrect implementation was the onscreen keyboard on the Microsoft Zune HD. A tiny tiny screen, and you could still type without looking and nearly always end up with the right text. It was magical, and creepy in retrospect.

But nobody bought it so we had less good keyboards for a decade. Then companies insisted that they could throw "Algorithms" at the problem (which is what we had been doing for a decade but whatever) and make it magically better and now everyone gets worthless autocorrect because of the everpresent "Nobody is actually average so tuning your system to the average makes it bad for everybody" problem that has infected literally all "Data driven" product decisions.

We literally had better text prediction using boring methods. We literally had working voice control on flip phones from the 90s. All on device too.

walterbell 12/11/2025||
We need a github repo with a list of past tech with good taste and poor market timing, for revaluation in newer markets.
WorldMaker 12/12/2025||||
> 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?

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.

iknowstuff 12/12/2025||
No dude it's just a bug. Watch the video.
robocat 12/12/2025|||
> it's registering a U, highlighting U, and inputting J

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).

trymas 12/12/2025||
Could it be slide to type issue as pointed in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46233219 ? Disabling it might help?
takinola 12/11/2025||||
> 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

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

firefax 12/11/2025|||
>If I ever meet the person that invented lookbehind correction, I’m not sure I’ll be able to restrain myself.

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 ;-)

https://www.achewood.com/2007/07/05/title.html

foobarian 12/12/2025|||
See this is why I turn off absolutely all autocorrection on iOS. I still make mistakes but now they are my mistakes. And I can type whatever I want without interference
vintermann 12/12/2025|||
The importance of letting people make their own mistakes rather than yours, is what our culture is missing in all sorts of areas.
egorfine 12/12/2025||
This is a hugely underrated comment.
walterbell 12/12/2025||||
Can be disabled on multiple devices by Apple Configurator MDM XML plist file.
BeFlatXIII 12/12/2025||||
I type like a drunkard from the autocorrection on modern phones.
WorldMaker 12/12/2025||||
I keep switching it back on after having it off for a while. I want some autocorrect. I often like the type ahead suggestions. I just really hate the "update behind" mechanic.

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.

SoftTalker 12/12/2025||||
Wow I didn't realize that was possible. I just turned off all auto correction and predictive text. Working much better already.
ethbr1 12/12/2025||
Apple’s settings are an absolute dumpster fire from a discoverability perspective.
moi2388 12/12/2025||||
I didn't even know this was possible. Thats great.
happymellon 12/12/2025|||
Except that if you watched the video, you would see that this is not true.
nneonneo 12/11/2025||||
3. I stopped caring and learned to love the algorithm in 95% of normal typing. The result is that my typing speed is up but my accuracy has plummeted, yet my typing output is generally correct because of autocorrect.

Unfortunately this falls apart when I try to type anything that isn’t common English words: names, code, rare words, etc.

I also think that the keyboard could learn the different “rhythms” of typing - my normal typing which is fast and practically blind, and the careful hunt and peck which is much slower and intended for those out-of-distribution inputs. I bet the profile of the touch contacts (e.g. contact area and shape of the touches) for those two modes looks different too.

ASalazarMX 12/11/2025||
My strategy for a time was disabling autocorrect and perfect my accuracy, but this was stumped because indeed, it's harder to type these days than when the screens were smaller and less precise, it seems to pick adyacent keys on a whim.

So I realized I had exchanged correcting the same word four times in a row to correcting the same letter four times in a row.

dotancohen 12/11/2025||

  > pick adyacent keys
Point made.
teaearlgraycold 12/12/2025||||
Sometimes I think about how much harm has been done to the world just so a few people can get a vacation home on Lake Tahoe. Every increase in YouTube ads leading to millions of hours wasted - but hey that L7 got a sweet new lake house!
eviks 12/11/2025||||
> There is no way for your keyboard to know you're in "hunt and peck" accuracy mode

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

coldtea 12/13/2025||
>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

eviks 12/13/2025||
Why would showing real button sizes make casual typing less forgiving?
coldtea 12/13/2025||
Because that would correspond 1 to 1 with the actual visible letter boxes, and the whole system of catching events outside the "real button sizes" was developed to be more forgiving than "you have to click precisely in the box".

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.

Mattified 12/12/2025||||
This! I switched to SwiftKey some 8 years ago and no matter how many phones I change, logging into my SwiftKey account ensures my typing experience doesn't change almost at all.
coldtea 12/13/2025|||
I wouldn't send all my typing across all apps on a third party company. Even worrying they get to the mobile OS company it's already stretching it...
gausswho 12/12/2025|||
I was a SwiftKey fan over a decade ago, but wait... you have to log onto an account for it now? Sigh, phones need a 'dotfiles' revolution.
WorldMaker 12/12/2025|||
It's extra fun because the account it needs is a Microsoft Account because Microsoft acquihired SwiftKey for the lovely Windows Soft Keyboard in Windows Phone 7/8/10 and still accessible in Windows 11 even as form factors that make good use of it continue to disappear and people also don't learn that you can still switch it to "phone mode" for one hand swipe-typing because they don't have a device where they regularly need to type on a soft keyboard.

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.

ethbr1 12/12/2025|||
It’s sad how we’re pining for a 1960s usability solution in 2025.

The industry really does forget all the lessons it learned...

HumblyTossed 12/12/2025||||
I feel like when they introduced the neurological engine, they got away from the previous algorithm and it's just gone to shit since then. Apple being Apple, they John Force their way to victory by keeping their foot on the gas even when the wheels are spinning and the engine is smoking.
anyfoo 12/12/2025|||
> The problem your encountering is downstream from point 1.

*you're

coldtea 12/13/2025||
At this point we should make "your" serve dual duty as an official alt spelling of you're and be done with it... let context determine which "your" it is
neogodless 12/11/2025|||
I feel this way with Android's keyboards, too.

I still feel the pinnacle was ~2011 Windows Phone. It was some kind of swipe-to-type, but maybe not Swype specifically? At any rate, it seemed to use "how humans actually talk" as a guideline, because it was do a great job of predicting what words I would actually mean to use in a row.

Modern keyboards are like, I know you just said "I want" but instead of predicting "to" I predict "rip". I mean the letters are close. And "I want rip" makes way more sense than "I want to." You're welcome!

dweekly 12/11/2025|||
The absolute zenith of mobile keyboards was the Blackberry, which included F & J nubs. I could type without looking at my phone at full speed and not get a character wrong.

The fact that Apple will as often as not autocorrect grammar from actually-correct to wrong -- and systematically screw up spelling -- in not just transcribed Siri but also in typing is just inexcusable at this point. It will even Randomly capitalize Certain words!

wooger 12/12/2025||
Nokia E61 perfectly aped the blackberry form factor and also had a great keyboard (with f & j nubs). I still fondly remember mine.
xboxnolifes 12/11/2025||||
I swear the android autocorrect got so much worse at some point. Somewhere between 5 and 15 years ago. I used to be able to type vaguely coherent sentences and all of the typos would magically become the words I meant, even if they didn't look right. Now I frequently type completely correct sentences and the correctly spelled words get changed into other words that make no sense in context.

And i used to be able to backspace the wrong word and fix it and it would learn thats what I meant. Now if I try that, it'll frequently keep trying to edit to the word I didn't mean unless I press the little checkmark in the autocorrect panel. Just annoying UX.

yipbub 12/11/2025|||
I remember when I could blindly type because autocorrect was so good. I've been enjoying FUTO keyboard a bit, but I dont yet know if it's the same experience.
Naracion 12/12/2025||
Bit of an aside, but I just checked them out and TIL that Immich (which I use as my primary photos solution) is also a FUTO product (the website says "powered by FUTO").

I'd be giving the keyboard a try!

Izkata 12/12/2025|||
SwiftKey has this one where you can erase the wrong word and try to correct it, and it instead adds two words: the one you erased and the second attempt after it.
noisem4ker 12/11/2025||||
Google's Gboard completes "i want t" with "to" and "the" for me.
CrimsonRain 12/11/2025||
Which is the better option now. But the one he's talking about is the OG windows phone swipe keyboard which would predict next word almost like from a LLM these days. For that reason, you can swipe like a maniac but it'd still type the correct thing.

Apple keyboard is shit. Swype (the one Microsoft bought) is better but still shit. Gboard is ok. But none of them are close to that windows phone keyboard. I still miss it.

homebrewer 12/11/2025|||
Google's keyboard is okay for English. It's a complete tire fire for two other languages I use (both popular and with a very large training data set).

Suggests words that make no sense, preferring rare words to much more widely used and obvious matching picks. Has the vocabulary of a poorly educated five year old idiot savant — fails to complete many words you use fifty times a day, but sometimes surprises you by suggesting something you'd hear a couple times per decade. Doesn't know other forms of the same word, forcing you to correct it manually over and over again, often failing to remember the word until you type it in four or five times.

Yes, I've downloaded all the dictionaries, tried it on many phones, and my friends are of the same opinion: it really is just bad.

ASalazarMX 12/11/2025||
I write in English and Spanish on it, and it seems the shittiness gets multiplied when you use a bilingual instead on monolingual layout. I've tried switching languages manually, but that sucks even more when writing Spanish with English technical terms sprinkled.

This is a patent case where IA made a function worse instead of better, yet companies clinged to it for some reason.

devilbunny 12/12/2025|||
Never used the Windows Phone keyboard but after Swype fixed its worst error ("me" was very often rendered as "nee", as in the term for a maiden name) it was fantastic. The last time I was able to use it was ca. 2016 when my Nexus 6P suffered the dreaded battery-goes-to-worthless-one-night-and-never-recovers problem. The editing keyboard allowing precise cursor placement, the Swype-X/C/V shortcuts, Swyping above the keyboard to indicate capitalization - WHY WHY WHY were they dropped?

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.

The_President 12/11/2025||||
The keyboard I know is best, is the slide out hardware keyboard from the olden days. I pine for the days of old when me greasy fingers could write a book on a phone in a rainstorm.

Troll answer: A-Z label maker keyboard

amluto 12/12/2025||
My old Windows phone had a slide out keyboard that was conceptually nice but had a bizarre ortholinear layout and particularly poor switches.
soco 12/11/2025||||
Okay but are there any other Android keyboards to swipe better? And for even nicer, to _actually handle_ multilingual input? I'm fed up of garbage concepts where you can only have ALL languages at once (who the heck wants that), or suggesting random words (I don't even know from where) and definitely unable to learn anything - not even my own name...
voidUpdate 12/12/2025||||
My phone constantly autocorrects "the" to "Tue" (short for tuesday), even when that makes no sense in the sentence. I presume I'm accidentally typing "tue" but why it always corrects it that was is baffling
yonaguska 12/11/2025||||
Android got really annoying recently, I think in the past few months, almost 30 percent of the time some random menu will pop up. They added a new top layer menu and I keep fat fingering it.
benchly 12/11/2025||
I have the same experience, and my hands are pretty small. Some paranoid bell rang in my head about it being an intentional annoyance to start getting us to use voice-to-text more,

Even switching to the Hacker's Keyboard and tweaking some settings still has me smacking the "tab" key or whatever when hitting space.

Just out of curiosity, who here is a one-handed texter, like me? I just assumed my constant need for error correction was because I only use one hand (and thus, one thumb) to type, but this thread has me wondering.

WorldMaker 12/12/2025|||
Microsoft acquihired SwiftKey to help make that pinnacle Windows Phone keyboard. It's too bad SwiftKey itself became mostly a vector for ads for Microsoft.
ricardobeat 12/11/2025|||
Not long ago I turned on my original iPod touch (2007), to see how the keyboard felt and if I was romanticising the past, and guess what?

Absolute perfect typing experience, better responsiveness and almost entirely free of mistakes. It's mind-boggling.

xangel 12/12/2025||
This!
layer8 12/11/2025|||
It wouldn’t be so bad if suggested corrections would take into account sibling-letter-on-keyboard typos, and if the spellchecker would recognize when words don’t make sense in context. We had better spellcheckers 25 years ago in word processors.
soco 12/11/2025|||
Now we must have AI everywhere, damn that quality of life those lefties keep on expecting.
jmkni 12/11/2025|||
I guess as iPhones have gotten bigger Apple has put less resources into optimising newer iOS versions for smaller phones

Frustrating if you are a 13 mini user

eptcyka 12/11/2025|||
Even the larger ones suck for typing. It is the keyboard. It works a lot better if you are using a language they don’t have autocorrect for.
loloquwowndueo 12/11/2025|||
Dunno man, I’m on a 17 and there are a ton of context menus that were clearly not tested properly on a screen this size (6.1” or something) - the “delete” option is nowhere to be seen for example, you have to scroll down to find it.

Guess they’ll want us to carry iPads in our pockets for these UIs to actually work :)

jerlam 12/11/2025||
Regarding typing on the iPad - Apple has removed the landscape split keyboard on the iPad, making it even more awkward to use, but not on the iPad Mini.

Perhaps they wanted to sell more Smart Keyboards.

colechristensen 12/12/2025|||
Here's what happens:

* 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.

wkjagt 12/12/2025||
A decade ago this would have been a bug. Today it's a "feature".
citrin_ru 12/11/2025|||
iPhone SE user here - it feels that even if Apple is not making small screen experience intentionally worse at least they optimize iOS for large screen sizes as a result with most updates UX on SE becoming worse. Using keyboard on this phone is a frustration but guess it's generally hard to make it work well on a small screen (and given that Apple wants to sell large phones unlikely they invest into small screen optimizations).
alwa 12/11/2025|||
Except that it always used to work well on the SE / 13 mini form factor. That was part of the original iPhone-vs-BlackBerry magic, wasn’t it? It’s phenomenally hard to make typing work on a soft keyboard, especially at that size, and yet they did. And now un-did.

By contrast, the typing experience on a 2.5” Unihertz Atom screen is shockingly acceptable…

dotancohen 12/11/2025|||
I just googled Unihertz Atom and the AI section has this:

  > The Unihertz Atom's 2.45-inch screen (240x432 resolution) is "shockingly acceptable" for its niche.
Your comment shows as having been written four hours ago. I cannot help but draw conclusions.
alwa 12/12/2025||
Ha!! That may be the first time I've been cited in a search result! I'm flattered :)

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...

crossroadsguy 12/12/2025|||
They have a Jelly Max https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-max and this looks too good to be true. I am sure one catch would be that it's not sold in my geography but still. Does it have at least few years of OS update support and more than few years of security updates?
alwa 12/12/2025||
My impression was that their update cadence is ~never and that the Jelly Max is rather closer to iPhone-SE-sized. The last one I handled was for ephemeral use on a trip abroad. It was durable, functional, and it worked wonders as far as breaking the phone-checking dopamine cycle.

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...

reactordev 12/11/2025|||
confirmed, their glass ux has added padding to everything, reducing screen real estate.
n8cpdx 12/11/2025|||
I moved from 13 mini this year to 16 Pro, the keyboard is just as bad either way, not a noticeable difference. Maybe slightly worse on the 16 because the ergonomics are so bad.
nottorp 12/11/2025|||
> with old iPhones

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.

fuckinpuppers 12/14/2025|||
SAME. There’s weird glitches that happen way too often. Used to feel like magic.
baseballdork 12/11/2025||
Switched from pixels to iphone in the last year or two and the keyboard is the biggest pain point by far. I tend to use swipe, so this particular issue isn't something I've come across. What I do run into is weird censorship issues where I'm trying to type "kill myself" or something similar and the phone will do anything to not provide that as an option. Then, when I try to manually change it, editing is a nightmare. Inevitably trying to change the ending of a word results in the entire word being deleted. It inserts spaces where I don't want them.

Is this some sort of psyop to get me to use siri to send texts?

jjice 12/11/2025||
Similar switching story. I'm very happy with an iPhone overall, but god damn they keyboard took some adjusting. The default keyboard on Pixels (GBoard?) is excellent. The autocorrect is also unimaginably better on the Pixel. It's embarrassing how bad the iPhone's autocorrect is. Not just missing obvious cases, but actively sabotaging correct cases.
encom 12/11/2025|||
>autocorrect is also unimaginably better on the Pixel

Pixel user here. That depends on the language you're typing. Autocorrect and spellcheck, not just on Android but other Google products, will change correct danish to incorrect danish. It's infuriating. The issue I encounter most often happens because Google apparently assumes english grammar is universal, and insists on splitting compound words, which is never done in danish.

Danish is already being heavily eroded by foreign influence, and this isn't helping.

tasuki 12/11/2025||||
> The default keyboard on Pixels (GBoard?) is excellent.

Not my experience at all. Do you only write English?

mavamaarten 12/11/2025|||
I personally haven't found any keyboard that works better than gboard. And exactly because it's the only keyboard that just lets me type in two languages without having to "switch", and it does that well. Right now my spacebar just says "NL - EN" and it lets me combine Dutch and English just fine.
kergonath 12/11/2025|||
From my experience it is much worse than it used to be 5 years ago. I have been writing English, French, and to a lesser extent German on an iPhone since ~2008. Initially, the dumb autocorrect would just correct to the closer word in the dictionary corresponding to the current keyboard, but over time it would pick up more and more words I used regularly. At some point around 2018 or so, it was nearly flawless. I think it changed the dictionary depending on the language or the sentence, because I had different suggestions for the same mistyped word in the same document. Also, I assume that by then my personal dictionary was quite extensive.

And then they bragged about a new machine-learning improved keyboard and it went downhill. First, all keyboards became monolingual, which was a 10-years regression. And even in that language, it was very flakey. They added multi-language keyboards somewhat recently and it got slightly better, except that for some reason it changes the keyboard back to the English-only one regularly for no reason I can see.

It is maddening. For a couple of years it was fantastic.

noname120 12/11/2025|||
And that’s not the worst. On the Apple Watch not only is the multilingual keyboard completely broken, but worse than that: if you change the language of the keyboard by long pressing the space button it shows the new language, but the autocorrect proceeds to just ignore it completely and autocorrects everything as if I were typing in the system language rather than the one I selected.

And contrary to the iPhone you can’t even disable autocorrect! This + the super-aggressive autocorrect of watchOS (the screen is small after all so you are likely to make a mistake and we better fix it automatically!) makes it an absolute NIGHTMARE to type on an Apple Watch in multiple languages. Your only option is to use speech to type because that one for some reason works when you change the language whereas the keyboard doesn’t care.

Edit: the language switch bug on watchOS seems to have finally been fixed on watchOS 26.1. The bug was already long present on watchOS 11, so not something that watchOS 26 introduced.

whycome 12/12/2025||||
This scarily aligns with my experience. 2018 was the golden age for keyboards for whatever reason.
rockinghigh 12/12/2025|||
Completely agreed. Apple seriously regressed the multi-lingual experience. They probably have a model per language. If you have to mix languages in a sentence, well, good luck!
cyberrock 12/12/2025||||
I just want to talk to the folks who made the language switching logic so complicated instead of just a constant rotation like desktop IMEs. It seems like they expect the user to remember the previous language or prioritize languages in a clear order, but did it not occur to them that I might switch languages chaotically (A->C->D->B), keep it there, then hours later when I forgot what $previousLanguage was and press switch, I might as well be spinning a roulette?
chimeracoder 12/12/2025||||
> And exactly because it's the only keyboard that just lets me type in two languages without having to "switch", and it does that well. Right now my spacebar just says "NL - EN" and it lets me combine Dutch and English just fine.

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.

batrat 12/11/2025|||
This. I use romanian, english and turkish at the same time. Sometimes goes sideways because we mix a lot of words in english and romaninan in the same sentence, but it's ok. No other keyboard comes close.
parliament32 12/11/2025|||
Multilingual typing is a godsend. I did have to tweak settings though, like disabling the "suggestion strip" (because sometimes I'd be typing fast and accidently click the GIF button, then an image, which in many apps sends it immediately without a draft which was extremely annoying).
Mashimo 12/12/2025|||
I use 3 languages with SwiftKey and it works really well.

That said, it got bought by Microsoft and now they try to cram in some AI nonsense :(

jjice 12/11/2025|||
Yeah I only write English so I have no idea of the quality of other languages.
gatnoodle 12/12/2025||||
I've switched to GBoard on the iphone. I don't like the fact that I need to use a third-party software for something that's so crucial. But GBoard is so much better than the default iphone keybaord.
rkomorn 12/12/2025||
I was a gboard user on iOS for years but it progressively got so inexplicably unusably slow I gave up.

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.

chanux 12/12/2025||||
Have you noticed any degradation of experience on mobile Safari with new glass interface?
glitchcrab 12/11/2025|||
You can install gboard on iOS - I haven't used the default keyboard in years
socalgal2 12/11/2025|||
It's abandoned and buggy. I'm surprised google hasn't just removed it from the store. I suspect as soon as it actually requires an update because of a change in the OS it will disappear.

Yes, I loved it, but it crashed in too many apps and I had to switch to the Apple one :(

lynndotpy 12/11/2025||||
Unfortunately, it's simply not as good. I miss long-press punctuation so much.
SJMG 12/11/2025||
This 1000x over! On Android you have this and you can tune how long a long-press is. It's amazing and should be an advanced feature on iOS.

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.

lynndotpy 12/12/2025||
Yes! I miss it very much. When I was on Android, I used to have it set to 100ms. I used to very quickly send well-punctuated text. On iPhones, it seems like the digitizer has 100ms of hysteresis built in.

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.

jjice 12/11/2025||||
Yeah I tried it and it doesn't stand up to it on Android in my experience. I figured I'd rather not give Google any data if the experience isn't going to be the same.
PieUser 12/11/2025|||
That buggy abandonware that hasn't been updated in 3 years?
renlo 12/11/2025|||
The key is to work around the text input. If you want to say "kill myself", you input "kill my" then complete the "self" portion by pressing delete (remove space), then s-e-l-f. I feel like most of my typing time is spent making these corrections, as it's very quick to swipe but corrections are almost always necessary and they are an order of magnitude slower. Yesterday for example I tried to swipe "succession" but it really wanted to output "secession", so I change my strategy to "success" (it really liked this word), then delete (remove space), i-o-n.

I think every time I swipe I need to do at least one correction like this, where I type one similarly spelled word with as minimum an edit distance as I can think of in the moment, then do a manual correction.

haarolean 12/11/2025|||
it's kinda bleak realizing I've been running the same cursed workflow for way too long. brb gonna disable that autocomplete
0cf8612b2e1e 12/11/2025||||
Except sometimes the autocorrection will “helpfully” replace the prior word to jive with its model of the universe. Incredibly frustrating.
engineer_22 12/11/2025|||
Horrifying.
rconti 12/11/2025|||
I've never noticed the "censorship issue", but once it gets a word wrong once, it's game over. Editing is awful. If I'm trying to replace the word entirely, I inevitably do the "wrong thing" and fall victim to the editing again, or tap something wrong, or.. I don't know, but I either have an undiagnosed brain injury, or the "correct" thing to do to get the phone to just take the damn word you typed changes every day.
pureagave 12/11/2025|||
Duck me, I notice it all the time!
baseballdork 12/11/2025|||
> I've never noticed the "censorship issue"

Really? If you swipe "kill" and then try "yourself" or "myself" does it ever get it right or provide it as one of the options? Doing it right now myself and I can't get it to do either. I have manually entered those words and hit the "myself" in the suggestion box to try and convince it that that's an acceptable correction to no avail.

> I inevitably do the "wrong thing" and fall victim to the editing again, or tap something wrong, or.. I don't know

Every. Time. I like to think that I'm not an idiot and can generally pattern recognize, but it just feels so inconsistent that I'm always doing the wrong thing.

lynndotpy 12/11/2025|||
Further, iPhones are so bad if you exist anywhere outside the mainstream and language orthodoxy.

Their voice recognition stubbornly refuses to acknowledge Linux, instead transcribing Linux.

Typing "tboy" or "transfem", common terms in the trans community, gets changed to "toby" or "transfer". I can understand "toby", but the latter is especially bad, as the "r" and "m" keys are nowhere near each other. I'll type these words several times a day, every day, and it'll never get recorded. But one typo of the form "unbeleivalbe" gets permanently etched into the autocorrection.

Any intentionally unorthodox english gets invisibly censored and editorialized. You can say "here come dat boi" nowadays (which is good if you're a fan of 2016 memes) but not "wrasslin". Phrases like "what you doin today" has its tone and informality stripped when it's changed to "what are you doing today".

leptons 12/11/2025|||
I would at some point throw my phone out the window if it worked like this. Instead I choose to have zero help correcting anything I type on my phone. I proofread, and fix any errors before I hit "send". I'm also on a folding android phone with a large screen and a 3rd-party keyboard app with adjustable size keys, so it's very easy to type.
m-s-y 12/11/2025|||
…and when I type standard, but clique-centric, abbreviations and slang among my own groups, the iPhone messes those up, too.

Options also exist to pre-populate the predictive wordlists with our own terms, and to turn off predictive text altogether.

lynndotpy 12/11/2025||
But you can not disable predictive button resizing.

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.

markisus 12/11/2025|||
I’ve confirmed this on my iphone as well.

Using swipe, no space bar after kill: Kill maps Jill myself Jill myself

Using swipe, manually pressing space bar after kill: Kill mussels Kill mussels Kill mussels

mock-possum 12/11/2025||
Yeah same -

Kill males kill males kill muddled kill mussels (hilarious)

Treat myself tear myself try myself tell myself

It won’t do it.

nothercastle 12/11/2025||
Kill mussels confirmed
zemo 12/11/2025|||
I switched from Android to iOS like five or six years ago and still think about this almost every day, how much I miss the Android keyboard because the iOS keyboard is so, so, so terrible. Years later I still find it a frustrating, type-inducing mess.
whatsupdog 12/12/2025||
You can always switch back.
prennert 12/11/2025|||
Same for me. My Pixel magically fixed scrambled words (and was very fast doing it). iOS is terrible, even without described bug.

I am now much faster typing with the speech-to-text feature. Maybe that is what they are pushing. Maybe Apple wants to remove the keyboard and it is slowly increasing the friction so people use it less and less? Similarly how Chrome degrades browser performance until it gets restarted to force an update.

wongogue 12/13/2025||
Do you have any proof about Chrome? It gets slower nonetheless.
jmye 12/11/2025|||
> Then, when I try to manually change it, editing is a nightmare.

It feels like the editing and cursor process has gotten exponentially worse over the last few iOS versions. I do not understand what anyone is doing on the Apple side with this, but every change they make, makes it significantly worse.

loloquwowndueo 12/11/2025|||
Haha sometimes I want to type f*ck and it gets auto corrected to duck. But once I was trying to type “pura” (pure in Spanish, I do have Spanish enabled for auto correct) and it auto corrected it to “puta” (look it up). Shrug.
sammy2255 12/11/2025|||
I'm in the same boat. This is bewildering to me, because I recall Apple making a joke about (it being fixed) in this in the 2023 developer conference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD0u0aNyzz8

rootusrootus 12/12/2025|||
The workaround is to add fuck as a shortcut for fuck. They intended the translation for doing things like translating omw to "On my way" but it works as a hack to let you use profanity without autocorrect killing it.
loloquwowndueo 12/12/2025||
Fun you should mention this - I do have a few shortcuts but I find I don’t use them anymore because it tends to not recognize/expand them. It’s faster to just type the whole thing than to type the shortcut, realize it didn’t expand, curse at the thing, backspace over it, and have to retype it all anyway.
obvi8 12/11/2025|||
In spite of the manufacturing drama it introduced, 3D Touch was an insanely great feature for editing alone. Push a little harder on the keyboard and have a cursor to easily place where you need it.

I was real grumpy when they took it away. Editing had only become even worse since. I’d love to know what they’re trying to achieve.

mrguyorama 12/11/2025|||
"3D touch" was always marketing wankery. Every capacitive touchscreen and touchpad can sense pressure.

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.

embedding-shape 12/11/2025||||
I'm not just grumpy, I'm baffled. Suddenly, when there is an URL or number input, when the hold-on-spacebar UX doesn't work because there is no spacebar, how could you even move the cursor left or right? Tapping in-between tiny letters is borderline impossible, and it isn't always in the right place to do the hold-and-slowly-move thing either, because the magnifying glass doesn't show up, so you can't see where you end up... It seems to me like for the last 5-6 years, the people who do decisions at Apple doesn't actually use the products themselves, or actually understand functional UX. Jobs would be ashamed.
majjam 12/11/2025|||
Mine still does that, I just press and hold on the spacebar and can move the cursor around, are you sure its no longer available on your phone?
snailmailman 12/11/2025|||
This was changed, and it is pretty easy to think the feature got removed.

When it was pressure-sensitive, you could push harder anywhere on the keyboard. But now that it’s tap-and-hold, it only works on the space bar. Most other pressure-sensitive actions just got replaced with tap-and-hold with no changes. But doing that on any other key brings up letter-specific accents, so they moved it down to spacebar.

It also used to be faster. Now you have to wait, but before it was pressure sensitive. You could trigger it instantly with more pressure. Edits were so fast and convenient, but now it’s a slight pause each time

9dev 12/11/2025||
You can still tap and hold in the text itself to bring up the magnifying glass gizmo, but yeah the experience is awful
n8cpdx 12/11/2025|||
Doesn’t work If the keyboard doesn’t have a spacebar - happens with numeric input. IIRC the old 3D Touch version worked on any key.
DamnInteresting 12/11/2025|||
The iPhone keyboard is a living he'll.
organsnyder 12/11/2025|||
I don't think it's "censorship" so much as it's defaulting to less-problematic phrases to avoid the opposite happening (you meaning to say "fill myself" or something). That could be jarring and lead to embarrassing situations.

Maybe 99 times out of 100 someone means to type "fuck" instead of "duck", but it's a completely legitimate UX decision to optimize preventing that 1% case, even if it's annoying the other 99% of the time.

IshKebab 12/11/2025|||
> 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.

mrguyorama 12/11/2025|||
IIRC, there was once a setting somewhere you could toggle to allow autocorrect to do "naughty" words.

I think this used to be true on Android as well.

cg5280 12/11/2025|||
I didn’t pick up on the censorship issue. I just spent a few minutes trying to swipe type “kill myself” and found myself completely unable. I wonder if this is intentional. If so it feels like an embarrassing waste of time.
m463 12/11/2025|||
it's not just you.

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.

nothercastle 12/11/2025|||
My phone loves to tell people they V are fat instead of ask them about their day. Also loves adding random v s everywhere
butlike 12/11/2025|||
Similar story here as well. Why is editing only a nightmare when it's something salacious or off-beat?
jaffa2 12/11/2025|||
theres a setting to turn off whole word delete. So if it does the wrong word when you press delete it will only delete the letter by letter not the whole word. It helps but iphone keyboard is still horrendous.
beeflet 12/11/2025|||
just turn autocorrect off. You can learn to type pretty quickly without it, and you aren't subject to mind control.
bitwize 12/11/2025|||
I recently learned of the early 20th century cult called the Royal Fraternity of Master Metaphysicians. Their best known stunt was attempting to raise a baby to become immortal by never exposing her to the concepts of death or disease—our ability to contemplate death being the thing that dooms us to die, in their worldview.

Big Tech's attempts to shape us by conforming our capability to express ourselves to "algospeak" seems similarly misguided... though not out of character for Big Tech. (AI can be seen as a form of hermetic magick: an attempt to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth by first constructing a machine-god.)

tasuki 12/11/2025|||
Does Pixel somehow have a good keyboard? I use GBoard and find it atrocious: for English it's ok, but it doesn't know basic declensions in Czech nor Polish and autocorrects them to something nonsensical. This happens every time I try to type something, so I avoid writing on the phone.

It's the age of LLMs! Language has been solved! LLMs are great at both Czech and Polish. This problem is orders of magnitude easier. Why doesn't my keyboard even know these words exist?? Is there an Android keyboard that actually... knows basic forms of basic words?

Mashimo 12/12/2025|||
If you are multilingual, you can also try SwiftKey (now owned by Microsoft) or the open source FUTO keyboard (bad for swipe typing)
parliament32 12/11/2025||||
Do you have an example? I type in Polish in GBoard regularly and haven't noticed too many anomalies (although I do have the right language pack installed, and the keyboard is set to it, and I "add to dictionary" occasionally).
baseballdork 12/11/2025||||
Please, for the love of god, do not pull LLMs into the mix. I just want the keyboard to display what I'm typing.
tasuki 12/11/2025||
Yea, it'd also be cool if they, like, just included a basic dictionary?
socalgal2 12/11/2025||
what do you mean by this specifically? iOS (and I'm guessing Android) both have dictionaries. I can select a word I've entered and look it up in nearly any text area.
thaumasiotes 12/11/2025|||
> Does Pixel somehow have a good keyboard? I use GBoard and find it atrocious

I use Google Pinyin Input. Since it was discontinued in favor of (the much worse) GBoard, I have to keep a backup of the apk and sideload it onto new phones.

Google does not appear to think of input methods as something that should be convenient for the user to use. Not sure why.

neutronicus 12/12/2025|||
It refuses to type "white people"!

It's also infuriatingly difficult to type "and" (I get "ABs" all the time)

throwaway29473 12/11/2025|||
[dead]
Aachen 12/11/2025||
You're on Android. If the keyboard is censoring you and you don't want that, install a different keyboard from any store/repository you like

I've also got a Pixel from work and the keyboard doesn't even support swiping. It's a nightmare. I don't really want to install another one due to paranoia related to the work I do, but on my personal android phone, replacing the OS keyboard with Swiftkey (for which I have a data folder with over a decade of training in it) and denying it internet access is the first thing I do after rooting. I'm amazed that so few people seem to even realise that software is replaceable (also the launcher, which is an even-more-commonly-heard complaint after changing/upgrading phones)

Edit: wait I misread which way around you switched. Nvm and good luck

ramity 12/11/2025||
35m ago edit: Apple uses many predictive systems for typing. My sentiment in pointing out just slide to type might be misguided as it does not exist in a vacuum. I'd love to see these tests redone with slide to type disabled. I'm leaving the original comment below for reference.

Slide to type. This "issue" is at most 6 years old for iOS users.

Turn off slide to type if you do not use it. Slide to type does key resizing logic. This is the direct cause of this issue. Please upvote this comment for visibility.

Please reply if you think I'm wrong. I see this get posted frequently enough I'm actually losing it.

Please refer to https://youtu.be/hksVvXONrIo?si=XD7AKa8gTl85_rJ6&t=72 (timestamp 1:12) to see that slide to type is enabled.

iamacyborg 12/11/2025||
I have that feature off and I am making noticeably more typing errors since the glass update.
embedding-shape 12/11/2025||
I'm on an iPhone 12 Mini and always thought this issue was because it's kind of old. But I've seen this issue for at least 3 major iOS generations now, and I'm currently on 26.X
iamacyborg 12/11/2025||
13 mini here and it’s definitely just since the glass update for me.
spike021 12/11/2025|||
I don't use the slide feature and typing quality has gone downhill ever since iOS 17 or thereabouts IMO.
brookst 12/11/2025|||
Doesn’t.helpmme At.all
rconti 12/11/2025|||
I'll give this a try. My typing is better when I use slide to type but I'm still super uncomfortable with it (I feel anxious trying to think of the letters "fast enough" even though I know it doesn't matter).

FWIW I've felt my phone typing accuracy has gotten worse every single year for, whatever, almost 20 years now. That's not the case on the computer.

nkrisc 12/11/2025||
I almost exclusively use slide to type and what I do is not think about the letters, but about the motions I would have done if I was typing with my hands on a regular keyboard, sort of letting muscle memory take over and create the correct “shape” of the word without thinking too hard about it.
ghostpepper 12/11/2025|||
Peak swipe-to-text was on my HTC Desire circa 2010 using the third-party keyboard Swype. Everything since then has been a downgrade.
embedding-shape 12/11/2025|||
I remember when Swiftkey first launched on Android, the swipe-to-text was extremely good and the built-in "learning by itself" dictionary worked well too. Of course, it seems like Microsoft at one point bought it, so I don't even have to try it again to understand the current state of it.
mckn1ght 12/11/2025|||
I still refer to doing it on iPhone as swyping. The portmanteau has permanently genericized in my brain. Those were the days!
Y-bar 12/11/2025|||
I have this disabled and the problem clearly exists anyway.
hshdhdhj4444 12/11/2025|||
Key resizing has been in the iPhone since day 1. It has nothing to do with slide to type, even if slide to type may affect key sizing.

But the video clearly shows this isn’t key sizing given that they show U is selected in the keyboard UI, but j is input into the text.

koakuma-chan 12/11/2025|||
General -> Keyboard -> Slide to Type

I don't have an issue with typing on iPhone, but I just disabled it to see what happens.

lynndotpy 12/11/2025|||
> Slide to type does key resizing logic.

It might be different with slide-to-type enabled, but the iPhone always invisibly resizes keys hitboxes using predictions about what key you want to use next. This can't be disabled, and has been part of the iPhone since the very first. It's a really abysmal experience for something that's so crucial to a smartphone, Apple seems to be completely disconnected with how people use these.

Apple even used to advertise this on their own site. That video definitely exists somewhere on YouTube.

Y-bar 12/11/2025||
> the iPhone always invisibly resizes keys hitboxes using predictions about what key you want to use next. This can't be disabled, and has been part of the iPhone since the very first.

Yes. True.

> It's a really abysmal experience for something that's so crucial to a smartphone

Full disagreement here. I expect and enjoy the predictive hitboxes, and this issue I am experiencing is not about those. It is when I type for example the letter "T" and I am certain I touched correctly and I am certain I _actually saw_ the letter "T" appear as pressed from the UI, yet when I look at the word I just typed something else which was obviously not the "T" appeared.

112233 12/12/2025|||
I thought I had a neurological disorder. (My iphone has auto-everything off. I'm not enabling slide type for fun, but I do not exclude the probability ios auto-enabled it when I changed brightness or something, as they are used to do.)

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.

tehwebguy 12/11/2025|||
I feeeeeel like this helped me but didn’t solve the problem fully. Changed it like 2-3 weeks ago.
comradesmith 12/11/2025|||
Thanks, I’ll try this :)
moralestapia 12/11/2025||
>Please upvote this comment for visibility.

Lol. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button!

jiggawatts 12/11/2025||
If YouTube ever renames or even just moves that button, millions of videos will suddenly be “broken”.
sentientslug 12/11/2025|||
This already happened when they got rid of the 5-star rating in favor of the like button. "Rate 5 stars and subscribe" became "Like and subscribe". People will adapt.
sunaookami 12/12/2025||
Still funny in old videos or when they point to the right-hand side when the video info was there.
pvtmert 12/11/2025|||
No worries, they will also introduce an AI "rephrase" (no way to opt-out) which will "translate" these in real-time!
neverkn0wsb357 12/12/2025||
I’ve been complaining about the iOS Keyboard for years, and the people I’ve been complaining to would act like I’m insane.

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?

dawnerd 12/12/2025||
What gets me is if it autocorrects the wrong wrong the first time, I can deal with that. It's when I backspace, re-type it the exact same and it autocorrects again - that's a huge UX problem. Then there's the lack of autocorrect where it makes sense, like you're "od" example. I know they probably do need to do a little tap point correction, but whatever they did with this last version is way off. Maybe they're trying to determine viewing angle since that could affect the perceived place you're tapping?
basch 12/12/2025|||
not just the keyboard either, but the text editor box (or address bar /search) in general. i cant count the number of times i try and put the cursor before a word, i see it is before the word, i let go, and the cursor moves to the end of the word. if i wanted it at the end of the word i would have put it there before letting go.

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.

ashdksnndck 12/12/2025|||
If you long press on the space bar and drag left and right, it moves the cursor around. Obscure UX but useful.
ruszki 12/12/2025||
It has the exact same bug as mentioned above. I solely use the spacebar for cursor movement, and the cursor returns to the end of the line/word at random times. I couldn’t find a pattern when it happens. It’s especially annoying when it happens with something long like a long path in a URL bar.
bschwindHN 12/12/2025|||
> i see it is before the word, i let go, and the cursor moves to the end of the word. if i wanted it at the end of the word i would have put it there before letting go.

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.

basch 12/12/2025||
I dont think it is a last second twitch. It's some kind of autocorrection that has decided I meant to do something differently than I meant to.
SoftTalker 12/12/2025|||
Yeah it’s the worst phone keyboard I’ve used, hands down. Every android keyboard has been far superior.
captainregex 12/12/2025|||
the third party ones seem to be suffering in similar ways in my short use

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

willis936 12/12/2025||
Just as a sanity check: 3rd party keyboards are an absolutely terrible idea.
nomel 12/11/2025||
I think the Apple software UI team has cultural problem in adhering to "one source of truth", and that's where most of the problems come from. I've seen this many many times throughout the years, from toggles, to actions, account creation (I have dupes from tapping a button too fast), etc: the UI doesn't match the internal state.

Another example is most any toggle that's linked to Apple cloud stuffs, like settings in your iCloud account or parental controls. You see it toggle immediately, but that's unrelated to the actual state. You can't know the actual state until you exit the page and go back. Meta gets this right with their apps: you toggle, the toggle turns disabled, then the toggle is re-enabled when the state is confirmed remote side.

kace91 12/11/2025|
Part of apple’s language design is to not show failure whenever possible.

It’s everywhere once you’re told. at most a loading icon remains loading or a setting resets itself when you don’t look, but those “there was an error -accept” popups that are a constant in windows are rarely seen this side of the fence.

It tends to become stupid when the network is involved, where lack of coverage, interrupted downloads and the like are common. They have to show it just works I guess.

beeflet 12/11/2025|||
It is at odds with the unix standard for programs to succeed silently but fail loudly.
delifue 12/12/2025||||
It's probably KPI-driven. Devs are punished by any visible error. So dev hides errors.
lurking_swe 12/11/2025|||
and you know what, that actually might be reasonable if the iPhone was smart enough to retry a few times - either with exponential backoff or when network connectivity is restored.

instead, it just pretends everything is working great lol.

skygazer 12/11/2025||
I pranked a friend in college by tricking him into installing a “utility” on his Amiga 1200 that swapped adjacent keys into the key stream as he typed, but only above a certain speed. He called and woke me the next morning in a panic about losing the ability to type. He would type slowly and it would work fine. Then at normal speed and he’d get constant errors. He’d quickly pull his hands up to see what keys they were over. Did he have a brain tumor? How could he be a journalist if he couldn’t type! Did he need to change majors?

Apple is unintentionally pranking the world.

nullderef 12/12/2025||
Oh my god that’s insanely evil

I would never want to leave my computer open within 300 meters of you

skygazer 12/12/2025||
Today he's an electrician.
masfuerte 12/12/2025||
And delighted that he has a stable career that isn't threatened by the coming AI apocalypse.
dmm 12/11/2025||
Is software just going to get worse from now on? Was the level of quality and feature improvement we've come to expect an artifact of high levels of investment based on expectations of growth that are no longer seen a valid?
nixpulvis 12/11/2025||
We've built stacks so high we're afraid to jump off.

Nobody is really competing because nobody can build a complete product. So there's less pressure to fix the little irritations. Users are mostly satisfied, and problems get worse slowly enough that for the average user they don't notice right away how bad it's getting. So they stay because it's too hard or completely impossible to leave.

anonymars 12/11/2025||
I think the bigger issue is the update model. In the past, if a new version sucked, people wouldn't upgrade. Now with subscriptions / continuous delivery, there's less ability to vote with one's wallet/feet
nixpulvis 12/11/2025|||
That's related.

If you're dependent on updating your OS for security fixes and basic compatibility, you are also forced to update the things you may not want to. It's all bundled together.

anonymars 12/11/2025|||
But it's not just the OS, but apps too, to say nothing of web SaaS products.

How many times have you launched something only to find the UI had been redone, some feature was now gone or changed, something that worked was now broken, etc.

But it's fine, you see, because we have telemetry and observability and robust CI/CD.

Users and their work are nothing more than ephemeral numbers on a metrics dashboard

nixpulvis 12/11/2025||
100%

Ownership is a critical and fading concept for software. And it makes me really sad and frustrated.

fsflover 12/11/2025|||
Except if you use OS that respects you, e.g., Debian. In the latter, security updates can be installed independently. On phones, there is Mobian.
zzo38computer 12/11/2025||
This does not always work for specific programs which do not do that, and even then, there are updates that you might want other than security updates without updating other parts of the same program. Separate programs can usually be updated individually, but if they are all in one program then it can make it more difficult (sometimes configuration can be done but not always; sometimes they change things that make this not work either).
ipython 12/11/2025|||
100% this. And cars are following down this road as well. For example, my Tesla 3 radio will go bonkers every so often and will refuse to change the channel, no matter what I do. Tapping a new channel icon changes the "currently playing" view, but the audio from the original channel continues to play. This happens until you restart the entire UI (by turning off the car or rebooting the display).

But, hey, they managed to add a Tron cross-over tie-in feature, and maybe some new fart noises!

Undoubtedly when they fix that radio bug, something else will fail. Like the SRS (supplemental restraint system, aka airbag) error message that was introduced at some point in the past six months, then silently got fixed with a more recent firmware update.

iknowstuff 12/11/2025||
> But, hey, they managed to add a Tron cross-over tie-in feature, and maybe some new fart noises!

And, you know, FSD 14.2. :)

kibwen 12/11/2025|||
Incentives Rule Everything Around Me. What incentive does Apple have not to be shit? People aren't going to switch to anything else, they'll just suck it up and shove it in their enormous sack of learned helplessness.
seabird 12/12/2025|||
Yup, it's time to let go. The forces that eat away at quality software are running an indoctrination campaign with budgets in the billions of dollars to ensure that people don't remember what quality software is. You can do right in your own work and with your own people but most peoples' experiences are going to suck for the foreseeable future.
brokencode 12/11/2025|||
There have been bugs and regressions since forever. It’s easy to look back with rose colored glasses, but I don’t think software has actually gotten worse.

Just look back at the Snow Leopard release of OS X. It was specifically marketed at having no new features and just being a fix and optimization release because Leopard was such a mess. And people were happy about this.

hshdhdhj4444 12/11/2025|||
> Just look back at the Snow Leopard release of OS X. It was specifically marketed at having no new features and just being a fix and optimization release because Leopard was such a mess.

This is wrong. Leopard wasn’t “such a mess”. No one was saying Leopard was more buggy than Tiger.

Further Snow Leopard wasn’t a bug fixing release. It had a lot of new features. The difference is the features were not user facing but geared towards the underlying tech.

From Wikipedia:

> The goals of Snow Leopard were improved performance, greater efficiency and the reduction of its overall memory footprint, unlike previous versions of Mac OS X which focused more on new features.

> Much of the software in Mac OS X was extensively rewritten for this release in order to take full advantage of modern Macintosh hardware and software technologies (64-bit, Cocoa, etc.). New programming frameworks, such as OpenCL, were created, allowing software developers to use graphics cards in their applications.

lotsofpulp 12/11/2025|||
And I’d be happy with a couple more years of that.
_ea1k 12/11/2025|||
I suspect that people not really paying for certain things has had an impact. Remember when there were a lot of high quality, paid keyboards for Android?

I doubt those were particularly profitable, but there was a lot of innovation back then.

crote 12/11/2025||
Why pay for a keyboard app when the default keyboard is already good enough?

Moreover, why risk installing a 3rd-party keyboard app when the App Store is filled with adware and malware? All those handy flashlight and camera apps are a Trojan's Horse, why should one assume that the various keyboard apps in the App Store aren't keyloggers trying to steal my login info?

In 2025 I can do mostly error-free blind typing on the Pixel 7 keyboard, with all autocorrect and predictive spelling intentionally turned off. Why would I need innovation?

dpoloncsak 12/11/2025|||
>why should one assume that the various keyboard apps in the App Store aren't keyloggers trying to steal my login info?

Honestly, you shouldn't.

Theoretically, Apple + Google take a % of all payments that go through their store, with the expressed reason being to "monitor and police the safety of the apps on the app store". You really should be able to trust apps on the official app stores, but I don't trust Apple or Google, so the whole system is moot I guess

lotsofpulp 12/11/2025||||
>Moreover, why risk installing a 3rd-party keyboard app when the App Store is filled with adware and malware? All those handy flashlight and camera apps are a Trojan's Horse, why should one assume that the various keyboard apps in the App Store aren't keyloggers trying to steal my login info?

And unless the app gets acquired by the big companies, it will eventually turn into malware.

_ea1k 12/14/2025||||
> Why pay for a keyboard app when the default keyboard is already good enough?

That's probably what people would have said before Swype was invented too. But lots of people use that in their default keyboards thanks to the people that _did_ pay for keyboards back then.

Who knows what innovations we are missing out on today just because we've consolidated things down to 2-3 suppliers?

tasuki 12/11/2025|||
> Why pay for a keyboard app when the default keyboard is already good enough?

I'd pay for an actually good keyboard. I find the default keyboard (GBoard) atrocious for languages other than English.

nottorp 12/11/2025|||
I fully expect Apple to "AI" correct your typing in the future without allowing you to change anything because they know better.

It will be designed by the same idiot who decided Safari should auto login you to everything without asking.

marcosdumay 12/11/2025|||
As long as the monopolies are going strong, yes, software will get worse and worse.
layer8 12/11/2025|||
Improving quality (or degrading, for that matter) of existing features doesn’t figure into career promotions anymore. Only new features count. Or changing the visual design.
ryandrake 12/11/2025|||
> Is software just going to get worse from now on?

I mean, yes? I think, as a pretty universal rule, you can expect commercial software to (on average) get worse every time it is changed. Companies spend little or no time fixing bugs and spend most of their time cramming (wanted or unwanted) features. Of course software is just going to get worse and worse over time.

codyb 12/11/2025||
I mean look at Mac OS 26...

The features were the ugliest icons I've ever seen and notification summaries that may be wrong.

Great.

thinkling 12/11/2025||
The #1 problem I have typing on my iPhone is that I hit letter keys (mostly 'n') instead of the space bar and the phone just doesn't anticipate this as a possible typo and doesn't offer the right corrections. (I have AutoCorrect off.) It doesn't seem able to learn that this is a common typo, either.
____tom____ 12/11/2025||
Hah! I have exactly the opposite problem, I hit the space bar, instead of N, and the iPhone doesn't understand this a possible typo, so all the suggestions and auto-corrects are wrong.
rezonant 12/11/2025||
Interesting. Just tried this out on Pixel's gboard and it does seem to correct this sort of issue
0cf8612b2e1e 12/11/2025||
It’s problems like this that make me wonder what high level leaders do anymore. Do they not use technology? Infinite tolerance for bugs? How is it someone with authority does not make it a mandate to file down some of these regular annoyances in everyday software.
lamontcg 12/11/2025||
It is risk aversion in low level managers, and profit margins in high level managers, and since they're the market leader in the US and smartphones are pretty mature there's little risk of anyone jumping ship (go to android, start over, lose all your apps, get differently frustrating issues).

They don't have a Steve Jobs anymore to sit down with the product, get frustrated beyond belief with it, and start sticking boots up asses on general principle.

Nobody is going to step up to do that because all the other executives would hate them for it and knife them in the back, and it would be seen as a waste of effort. And nobody could ever tie fixing those bugs to making a financial number go up, and would argue instead that it was pure cost for no benefit.

array_key_first 12/12/2025|||
Everyone has gotten so used to software being extremely shitty and hostile that they just think this is how it is. People work around the jank sometimes hundreds of times a day and don't look at the big picture.

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.

0cf8612b2e1e 12/12/2025||
That’s the thing, if you are in charge of Teams, YouTube, Spotify, the Windows taskbar, whatever - you have the power! Surely you must be encountering the same annoyances that enrage the rest of us. Why not tell the team to fix the things that bother you? Set the agenda and improve your own life!

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.

herbturbo 12/12/2025||
Because they are too busy coming up with new “features” that nobody needs or wants so they can talk about delivering value in a yearly review.

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.

jijijijij 12/12/2025||
Honestly, it's stuff like the horrible typing experience, which makes me wonder, if I am somehow missing something fundamental when people are praising Apple for the UX. How on Earth can they possibly fuck up a basic phone feature like typing? I've been using iOS for a few years now and it's such a mess, absolutely not growing on me. Hardware doesn't matter, if you're locked in software hell.
davidczech 12/11/2025|
The key that is punched into the input field is based on where your finger lifted up. So if you have slide-to-type on, the pop-up paddle that showed up on key-down won't change to where your finger slid to for key-up. That's why when typing fast with slide-to-type on you can get confusing UI hints like this.

It kind of seems like the grace period for the paddle hiding with slide-to-type needs adjustment. I just leave slide-to-type off.

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