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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

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.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
jmkni 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago
    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.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
neogodless 10mo ago
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!
- yonaguska 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago
    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.
- noisem4ker 10mo ago
  Google's Gboard completes "i want t" with "to" and "the" for me.
  - CrimsonRain 10mo ago
    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.
citrin_ru 10mo ago
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).
- reactordev 10mo ago
  confirmed, their glass ux has added padding to everything, reducing screen real estate.
- alwa 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago
    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 10mo ago
      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...
n8cpdx 10mo ago
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.
jorvi 10mo ago
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.)
- nneonneo 10mo ago
  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.
layer8 10mo ago
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.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- soco 10mo ago
  Now we must have AI everywhere, damn that quality of life those lefties keep on expecting.
ricardobeat 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  This!
nottorp 10mo ago
> 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.
colechristensen 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  A decade ago this would have been a bug. Today it's a "feature".
fuckinpuppers 10mo ago
SAME. There’s weird glitches that happen way too often. Used to feel like magic.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

jmkni 10mo ago

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 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  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.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

neogodless 10mo ago

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!

yonaguska 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  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.
noisem4ker 10mo ago
Google's Gboard completes "i want t" with "to" and "the" for me.
- CrimsonRain 10mo ago
  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.

citrin_ru 10mo ago

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).

reactordev 10mo ago
confirmed, their glass ux has added padding to everything, reducing screen real estate.
alwa 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago
    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...

n8cpdx 10mo ago

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.

jorvi 10mo ago

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.)

nneonneo 10mo ago
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.

layer8 10mo ago

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.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
soco 10mo ago
Now we must have AI everywhere, damn that quality of life those lefties keep on expecting.

ricardobeat 10mo ago

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 10mo ago
This!

nottorp 10mo ago

> 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.

colechristensen 10mo ago

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 10mo ago
A decade ago this would have been a bug. Today it's a "feature".

fuckinpuppers 10mo ago

SAME. There’s weird glitches that happen way too often. Used to feel like magic.