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

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 commentspage 3

frabonacci 12/12/2025|

Same here. I even blamed it on switching between Italian and Spanish all the time and thought my brain was short-circuiting. But when you see the right key light up and a different letter shows up, something’s clearly off. Also: with battery saver on it’s basically unusable - the lag makes typing way worse. The video was oddly comforting. Turns out I’m not losing it.

WhyOhWhyQ 12/11/2025||

iPhone miscorrects apostrophes between "its" and "it's", and its driving me insane.

sent from my iPhone

apparent 12/11/2025|

^sent from my iPhone, right?

WhyOhWhyQ 12/11/2025||

Sorry I had to steal that part from you because it's too good!

kouru225 12/12/2025||

The first iterations of the apple keyboard were perfect. They literally did everything perfectly without any notes.

Then it seems like they’re started teaching to the bottoms of the class and added a bunch of terrible decisions: Substituting touch to select instead of touch to move cursor was a genuinely awful decision that now makes typing a constant chore, and it seems like their autocorrect is overcompensating so hard that it prevents me from writing perfectly good words simply because they’re not common ones.

Side note: anyone else have moments where you can’t press delete once predictive text has shown up?

wycy 12/12/2025|

> Side note: anyone else have moments where you can’t press delete once predictive text has shown up?

Chiming in just to say: yes

porsager 12/12/2025||

Shameless plug, but back in 2014 trying to play with swift I made Type Nine, and I'm still using it to this day[1]

I also did a few other experiments that I unfortunately haven't had time to explore further[2]

[1] https://www.typenineapp.com

[2] https://medium.com/porsager/a-better-iphone-typing-experienc...

dbmnt 12/12/2025|

I just installed it and it seems really promising. Glad you shared it here.

I’ve spent more time than I care to admit searching for a good keyboard app in the App Store, and I’ve tried a lot of them. This one never surfaced for me in any of my usual searches, which is a shame (likely more on Apple’s search than on you).

I really like the T9-style approach, and I appreciate the clean App Privacy section and straightforward privacy policy.

porsager 12/12/2025||

Thanks a lot! I haven't done much on the marketing side, but I always felt it had great potential.

It needs a little tlc to align with the latest iOS update changes, but my time is too limited at the moment.

Yizahi 12/11/2025||

iPhone keyboard is probably one of the several biggest factors I consider when once again I think "hmm, maybe this time I should upgrade to iPhone?". And then I'm confronted with this, ummm... thing, and immediately remember why I ditched iPhones years ago :) . How do you deal with it daily? I'm at a loss really. PS: I've owned 3GS and 4S and a few iPads, so I'm not just baseless here.

Xiol 12/11/2025|

Exactly the same here. I've considered switching from Android multiple times and the two things that always stop me are notifications and the keyboard.

No long-press punctuation, no switch.

I also can't trust Apple to let 3rd party keyboards work smoothly everywhere, so that's not really an option I'm willing to take the risk on.

Doesn't solve the notifications either.

array_key_first 12/12/2025||

I switched from iOS to Android and it's actually kind of insane how much higher quality a lot of parts of the OS are. I wasn't expecting this, I was expecting customization and the associated jank. But no, it's been pleasantly surprising.

There's still some jank. Sometimes searching for something in setting takes upwards of 5 seconds. I can only assume it's downloading a bitcoin miner or something.

Ensorceled 12/11/2025||

Yeah, something happened a few months ago where by iOS I'm now "hitting" the wrong key a lot, words like we'll and we're are constantly being automatically "corrected" to well and were and, most frustrating, it will auto"correct" the last word in a sentence from what is on the screen when you hit send. It went from almost always helpful to often frustrating.

twoodfin 12/12/2025|

My “favorite” version of the last issue is trying to acknowledge with “K” which inevitably becomes “I”.

ndr_ 12/12/2025||

Is there a trustworthy third-party "Retro" keyboard app - none of the shenanigans that made the default keyboard bad, and also no typing exfiltration to third-party servers?

I imagine the problem could be severe enough to some that they would pay the price of the Apple Developer program just so they may install such a Retro keyboard app from Github - if one exists?

PsylentKnight 12/11/2025||

I haven't been getting notifications from any messaging apps for a few months. I've checked all the relevant settings (do not disturb etc.). I also get random keyboard issues such as this one. This is my first iPhone. I have no idea why I paid premium prices for a premium phone if they can't even get notifications and typing right

pjerem 12/11/2025|

That's a really strange issue you have here. Never heard of anything like this. Could it be possible that some aggressive filtering exists on your network that would disallow your iphone to connect to Apple's push servers ?

PsylentKnight 12/11/2025||

I get notifications from most applications, just not messaging apps (slack, telegram, whatsapp)

array_key_first 12/12/2025||

It's definitely a setting issue, the problem is Apple has multiple settings which all interfere with notifications. My mom gets this problem a lot and it takes entirely to long to track down which setting is overriding what.

chatmasta 12/11/2025||

The most infuriating “feature” of autocorrect is that it includes all your contact names in your dictionary, with no way to opt out of this aside from disabling autocorrect entirely. This can lead to some awkward texts when your innocent typo (or even correctly spelled technical term) turns into a mention of someone’s name who should not be in your phone…

I wonder if this is related to the fact that every Apple app shows up as “recently accessing” contacts in App Privacy Report. And I don’t mean only photos (face recognition), but: Safari, Camera, Shortcuts, Mail, Health… why? I’ve never even configured a Mailbox. Why are these apps all accessing my Contacts?

crazygringo 12/11/2025||

This drives me nuts because I put things like "(Alexander)" after someone's name to indicate who I met them through, who they're friends of, where I met them, etc.

Then whenever I dictate "Alexander" it shows up as "(Alexander)" in parentheses. Drives me mad.

RGamma 12/11/2025||

I'm astonished people on this site use autocorrect at all. IMO it's a mind-bogglingy insane antifeature, even more insane than that weird "replace arithmetic expressions with their result" thing Apple once did.

chatmasta 12/11/2025||

I tried turning it off once, and the alternative was way worse.

RGamma 12/11/2025||

It's worse because it keeps the text you intentionally entered? To be sure: I'm not talking about next word suggestions, only about it changing words after you already wrote them.

scotty79 12/11/2025||

It's worse because touching the right spot on tiny screen with fat fingers is astonishingly hard.

RGamma 12/11/2025||

Holding spacebar for corrections works fine though. Maybe my error rate is too low...

chatmasta 12/12/2025||

See, I just learned this was a feature when I read your comment a few seconds ago. I’ve had an iPhone since the iPhone 4.

DonHopkins 12/11/2025|

Love the sick burn at the end:

>Who knows? Maybe they're just trying to simulate the butterfly keyboard in software.

Apple truly has some incredibly incompetent people working for it, obsessively focused on cosmetic style instead of substance and usability.

Alan Dye voluntarily leaving certainly won't solve the root problem that they didn't fire him years ago.

Bad Dye Job:

https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job

Gruber: Apple employees ‘giddy’ about Alan Dye’s departure:

https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/04/gruber-apple-employees-giddy-...

neilv 12/11/2025|

This is far from specific to Apple.

When I first saw your name, a few decades ago, it was because I was interested in HCI and human factors engineering.

Today, my impression is that the field of HCI has mostly disappeared. Most people who might have been interested in HCI are now studying and practicing UX instead.

In UX, the designer/engineer in practice is usually directed by the goals of the party who decides how the thing will work, rather than the goals of the party using the thing.

There are some intellectual elements to UX practice (e.g., aesthetics, fashions, A/B testing, and dark patterns). But I wonder whether the transition from HCI to UX means that the field is not only perversely anti-user, but also losing the intellectual and/or institutional capacity to be user-oriented on occasions that they want to be?

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