The author almost saw the fix for this, but didn't. Here's how you fix this: Buttons. Modern phones are horrifying examples of UX, largely because they don't

The author almost saw the fix for this, but didn't. Here's how you fix this: Buttons. Modern phones are horrifying examples of UX, largely because they don't have buttons. You get two buttons for volume, even though volume accounts for probably 1/10,000th of the UX of the user. You get one button for power, because how else do you turn it on? And if you're lucky you get a button where the fingerprint reader is. You also increasingly get an "assistant" button, which can often only be used for activating a shitty voice assistant specific to the make of phone you have. Navigating text editing requires buttons. You can try to use touch tricks, but they're complicated, clunky and inaccurate. For ease of use you need buttons specific to editing. A mouse and keyboard have buttons and shortcuts for editing because a person needs specific functionality for specific use cases. So the phone needs more buttons to make this work. For physical buttons used for editing, nothing I've seen has ever surpassed the clickwheel. It worked for iPod, it worked for Blackberry. You can open menus, scroll with precision, and select items. And a flat layout allows use as arrow keys, compared to the side-mounted version that only has two dimensions. You can emulate this on-screen, though it'll be inferior as haptic feedback is one of the important aspects of the precision of a clickwheel. Arrow keys are another important button layout. They allow precise navigation within a text field so you can get to the place you want to make a specific change in, without the clumsy finger-tapping that never works right. On-screen these need to be dedicated buttons, as a virtual clickwheel can't easily differentiate between just clicking on the top of the clickwheel versus using the arrow functionality, and the UX suffers. Another important button is the delete key, as opposed to backspace. You should be able to delete things in front of the cursor as well as behind it. And then there's the "select characters" cursor modifier. You should be able to start selecting text where the cursor is, navigate using your arrow keys, and then stop the selection, and then click one of the modifiers for copy/cut/paste or just start writing to replace it. And of course we need an undo button, in addition to buttons for cut/copy/paste so we don't need to long-finger-press to show an editing menu. Basically all the buttons I've mentioned could easily fit within an editing box at the bottom of the screen, with the text in the top screen. Having the buttons right there for the entirety of the editing session is the right UX. It's actually faster than keyboard shortcuts, it's more intuitive, and more accurate, with less precision required for the user. Maybe one day these stupid hardware vendors will get off their obsession with chasing Apple and finally introduce some useful buttons on the device again. Until then, fake buttons in an editing modal is the best choice.