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@ozzyphantom: You might consider being more specific about your grievances in the text of your countdown page. As it stands, it's a bit vague, describing the ke

@ozzyphantom: You might consider being more specific about your grievances in the text of your countdown page. As it stands, it's a bit vague, describing the keyboard as "broken" and autocorrect as "nearly useless". Sure, the video you link to is more descriptive, but it's a lot to ask of a visitor to click through and watch a separate video. As for the underlying issue, I have experienced similar typing issues on my iPhone in recent months. It feels like someone changed the keyboard to optimize for some typing behavior that doesn't match my own, so the "optimizations" work against me. It's reminiscent of when the US Air Force redesigned their cockpits to match pilots' average measurements, only to discover that using averages just made the cockpits bad for everybody.[1] [1] https://noblestatman.com/uploads/6/6/7/3/66731677/cockpit.flaw.averages.pdf https://noblestatman.com/uploads/6/6/7/3/66731677/cockpit.fl...

srmatto 8mo ago
The recent changes to the iOS keyboard and text editing in general have been very counter productive for me as well. Tap to select doesn't really work the same way anymore and the logic of it isn't clear to me which makes it unpredictable. Typing accurately itself has gotten really difficult. I used to be a pretty quick typist on the iOS keyboard but now I find myself looking for my Mac to send a message from there or using voice to text more. Folks can thumb their noses at Reddit but the top comment in every post about iOS updates since 26.0 was released is some variation of "fix the keyboard." The problem seems very real for a lot of users.
- raylad 8mo ago
  Also why did they get rid of select all? Is there any excuse for that?
  - DamnInteresting 8mo ago
    It's still there, it's just difficult to know when it will appear. Sometimes it takes one more tap than expected, or sometimes one must deselect a word and tap again, or change focus away and back again. Very sloppy UI.
    - filoleg 8mo ago
      Yeah, it is still there, and there is a pretty clear cut logic for when it will appear. If you tap while a word is selected, it won’t appear. If you tap on the cursor while a word isn’t selected, it will appear.
      - DamnInteresting 8mo ago
        If by "clear cut logic" you mean a consistent process, then sure. But if you mean intuitive, I must disagree.
        microtonal 8mo ago
        Especially because it was working fine and understandable in older iOS versions. Also for some reason autocorrect seems to have gotten a lot worse. It has become nearly impossible to type a grocery list without all kinds of annoying wrong corrections.
        filoleg 8mo ago
        Yeah, good point. Your guess was right, I meant it in the sense of consistency, not in the sense of it being intuitive without knowing about it
  - bobbylarrybobby 8mo ago
    Select all always appears if you have no text selected and never appears if you have some text selected. Insane UI decision by apple but that's how it is.
    - thehappyfellow 8mo ago
      Which means you can't select all on text which isn't editable - insane!
      - leptons 8mo ago
        It honestly doesn't surprise me. Apple is not some bastion of good design. They are mediocre at best, always have been. It was pretty hilarious to me that for so many years the keyboard on iOS only had CAPITAL letters. No matter the state of the shift key, the letters on the keyboard just stayed the same. After many years they finally figured it out, but it's one example of many about how Apple just doesn't have the great UX people claim they do.
        tambourine_man 8mo ago
        I actually prefer the all caps keyboard and switch it on on iOS. It looks like a physical keyboard and the constant flicking between upper/lowercase is distracting and annoying
        leptons 8mo ago
        Well good for you, I guess?
        b112 8mo ago
        As bfinn once said on IRC, as he wrote in caps: <BFINN/#debian> ALL BIG LETTER ON KEYBOARD HERE!! <CosmicRay/#debian> haha <BFINN/#debian> TO NO LITTLE LETTER! https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.misc/c/7AdXvE7KQzk/m/N7y3Z4yAi_cJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.misc/c/7AdXvE7KQz...
        8mo ago
  - jorl17 8mo ago
    YES. WHY?! GOD WHY!?!!?!?!?! I'M GOING INSANE!!
  - razingeden 8mo ago
    My favorite ( /s) IOS hassle - aside from running around on 12% battery at all times, didn’t I buy a pro max for the extended capacity ? - … is not being able to paste into an empty box unless I type a letter there and select it/clobber it/overwrite it And I just LOOOOOVE not being able to tap a URL in safari and get to the end of it to add parameters or change a path anymore… Just gave my MacBook that hasn’t been turned on in months away(i haaaaate Tahoe) and been using GrapheneOS on a pixel 7a. so far I’m not in love with it but I’m getting used to it and starting to like downloading apps anonymously (if I name the app, I’ll probably get scolded) anyway this might be the end of the line for me and Apple.
  - everdrive 8mo ago
    They're a modern tech company. They need to changes things every so often no matter what downsides come with the change.
- hypercube33 8mo ago
  It's not just apple - windows and android autocorrect are more auto incorrect these days.
  - soco 8mo ago
    I can't tell about windows - never used autocorrect there - but GBoard became laughable. I don't think I was able to use its suggestions since a few years. For instance, it will NEVER but really never put a uppercase I when I'm talking about myself. Never. I could select it from suggestions if I feel like, but I kinda gave up (this is written in Windows, that's why you see capital Is). Or my name, used quite often right, is also never spelled correctly - although it's there in the suggestions. I am using a yahoo email, GBoard knows the username, but it will ALWAYS suggest a gmail extension, which simply doesn't exist. I don't know any other keyboard which can properly handle multiple languages, so I'm stuck with GBoard, but it's nothing to be proud of.
    - netsharc 8mo ago
      I have the same email @yahoo.com and @gmail.com (one is mostly for online shops etc), and the amount of time GBoard thinks it needs to recommend @gmail.com, it's obnoxious... But the correction offers are still okay for me, I can mash keys around my email username and one of the corrections offered will be my username...
    - owenthejumper 8mo ago
      SwiftKey can handle languages, but it kind of sucks too , lol. It crashes all the time
      - soco 8mo ago
        No it cannot. SwiftKey has exactly two "languages": one is French, the other is German/English/Italian/Romanian. Yes it's a mash of all four, which makes the default swiped word and the suggestions exactly useless. Who the hell thought that was a good idea... only Samsung keyboard offers separate languages as well, but it's kinda worse in suggestions than GBoard.
- mrmuagi 8mo ago
  Autocorrect not getting simple character substitutions is beyond frustrating.
  - notorandit 8mo ago
    Do you know a corrector that "understands" a typo at the third or fourth character? If it's 1st or 2nd, then it's ok.
- longfacehorrace 8mo ago
  It's not just the keyboard. My iPhone 15 is often so unresponsive I am tapping twice as much. Example but the issue not limited to web browsing; Safari will do nothing, I tap again, it does the thing, then it does the thing again due to the second tap. I have to tap back to get to where I really wanted to go.
  - itopaloglu83 8mo ago
    Sounds like the liquid glass animations are so heavy that if the system is busy with anything else for a second then everything simply breaks. I remember seeing the videos about cpu usage spiking over 40% just to show the control center. And similarly, even on a Mac I find myself clicking on links and button multiple times, just for things to work. It has a dedicated keyboard, how is it that they messed it up so much that a physical keyboard stops working. It's an interrupt based interface, it takes less than a millisecond to process things, how can someone mess things up so freaking stupidly.
    - longfacehorrace 8mo ago
      Shortcuts run but often do not trigger all the stages in a pipeline. No issues with same shortcuts prior to installing iOS26. These Shortcuts do not trigger UI transitions. They send data over network. Sounds like Apple management enabled a quality assurance failure that is fostering so many distractions for users it's turning people against Apple. Tim Cook handing his replacement a dumpster fire.
    - seec 8mo ago
      That was basically the whole point of it. Apple makes money selling hardware; they have a vested interest in making things slower/worse to incentivize people to buy newer hardware. This is why you can never really trust Apple and also why no matter how bad Windows gets, it's still a better deal because at least you can count on the fact that PC businesses will compete on the hardware front to get your money. Choosing Apple is a lot like being in an abusive relationship; you can't leave because the switching cost are quite high, so you tolerate a lot more abuse than you would be willing to otherwise. And this is the reason people try to not rely on Apple software too much; if you do, they truly have you by the balls.
- winternett 8mo ago
  The same things are happening on Android too, no coincidence.
- Fr0styMatt88 8mo ago
  What I don’t get is why it can’t tell I’ve gone back and edited a suggestion or correction it gave me and correct itself in the future.
LollipopYakuza 8mo ago
I understand your point, but for an issue that's been addressed so many times, it doesn't sound necessary to get into details. The issue doesn't seem to be that Apple doesn't know but that they don't care. However, if I, as the author cared to justify that "it's not only me", I would have listed more posts and feedback. I feel like I have read at least 4 times about the broken keyboard, it should not be hard to find a few other links.
- Someone1234 8mo ago
  It does make me wonder if Apple's own employees actually dog-food iOS day-to-day. It just seems like, you could stop any iPhone user in the street and ask them "How do you find the keyboard?" And get a consistently negative response, but yet nobody within Apple seemingly has noticed for YEARS. Everyone says iOS 26 did it, but I strongly disagree, I disabled most options in General -> Keyboard like three major iOS versions ago, and moved to Swiftkey* in iOS 18 (although iOS keeps changing my keyboard preferences back to the default). *SwiftKey is also a shit-show with the "Your Tap Map" crap you cannot disable, where it moves the keys and makes the thing inconsistent. Just goes to show how bad Apple's keyboard is, when I'll put up with it.
  - zem 8mo ago
    if my experiences at google are any indication, when it comes to "regular user" facing features management pays very little attention to negative feedback from the engineers. it always seems to be assumed that we are atypical in our dislike for things.
    - duncangh 8mo ago
      This is incredibly resonant
  - bombcar 8mo ago
    It's so bad that I have to assume that Cupertino is filled with people who "hold the phone differently" and tap with their long fingernails or the very tip of their fingers or something. I'm always mistyping and I don't know how to fix it to do what they want.
yeah879846 8mo ago
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graemep 8mo ago
Why not install an different keyboard app?
Normal_gaussian 8mo ago
It turns out he posted a better example in his blog post about it - https://thismightnotmatter.com/a-little-website-i-made-for-apple-inc/ https://thismightnotmatter.com/a-little-website-i-made-for-a... - which is technically linked to in the bottom of the site. I guess if you spend your life learning UX from Apple this is what you get...
- butterfi 8mo ago
  Thats a pretty snarky thing to say about Apple. They were arguably the pioneers in OS UX... granted, its not the end all, be all, but still. You could do worse.
  - bartread 8mo ago
    > You could do worse. Perhaps you shouldn't encourage them. Based on recent software releases from Apple they might see it as a challenge.
  - Lammy 8mo ago
    > arguably Sick of this weasel word. Either argue it or don't.
    - james_marks 8mo ago
      Even worse, "I would argue that..." It's not hypothetical if you are here, in the current tense, arguing that. I've mostly cured myself of the habit, but its tough.
      - gilrain 8mo ago
        “I would argue that…” is a weaker statement, because it ends with an implied “…but since I don’t care that much, I’m not ‘seriously’ arguing that.” It’s not at all equivalent to the strong statement “I argue that…”, which has no such qualifier. Why cure yourself of useful conversational nuance?
    - digitalPhonix 8mo ago
nunez 8mo ago
I have autocorrext turned off on my keyboard and typed this without any corrections. These sre the issues i've faced with the stock keyboard: - accidental periods when typing URLs in Safari - key target inaccuracy (though turning off swipe-to-tect gas ikproved this a little, though not enough) - key latnecy which causes letters innsome words to get swapped or extra unwated letters to appear (this could be a me-getting-older prblem, howeverg - autocorrect suggesting words that I've never typed before (I turned on autocorrect for this list item to make sure i gave it a fair shake; it didn't suggest anything crazy this time, but the number of times it has in the past has led me to turning it off, even after iOS 18 wherein the keyboard supposedly used a small language model to improve suggestions) I also type longform on my phone sometimes; the keyboard makes this much more exhausting than it needs to be.
- itopaloglu83 8mo ago
  I don't know if you experience any of these: - Clicks on buttons and links not registering, and needing to click multiple times, sometime to no effect. - Safari not suggesting the website you visit multiple time a day, and points you a random website you have never visited before.
  - nunez 8mo ago
    Yes to both. That and Safari reloading the page you were just on (from the cache, sometimes) if it can't reach a URL
- iamacyborg 8mo ago
  A lot of these issies seem damiliar to me as well on the glasskwyboard pn my iphone13 mini. Also typed without any maual fixes. My typingwas mucu better before glass.
  - sarmasamosarma 8mo ago
    [dead]
- firecall 8mo ago
gwbas1c 8mo ago
I think the point is that the keyboard is so broken the problems should be obvious to the people who work on the iPhone.
- itopaloglu83 8mo ago
  Exactly. There are some Apple folks here who keep gaslighting users with their iOS 26 concerns and every other issue by calling them weird names and asking them to not complain. The damn keyboard is broken, one would've known that if they used it more than a few minutes a day in real life examples. Stop shutting people off and use your own damn products instead of getting them all made in China and sell them.
  - gwbas1c 8mo ago
    You get that kind of nonsense when people get an irrational attachment to a technology brand. I see that a lot with Tesla, there's the group that praises them publicly and makes outrageous claims about self-driving... But remains strangely silent about how the windshield wipers don't work right and Tesla won't fix them.
isodev 8mo ago
One can also see it like: The grievance is apparent to every iOS user who has used pre-iOS 18 keyboards or any of the major Android keyboards. It’s also not just one problem, autocorrect and the keyboard combined make for at least a dozen seemly different defects
chmod775 8mo ago
The YT video they linked is excessively clear about what the issue is. There's no point in explaining it again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo
- pseudalopex 8mo ago
  > Sure, the video you link to is more descriptive, but it's a lot to ask of a visitor to click through and watch a separate video.
  - chmod775 8mo ago
    No, it’s not a lot to ask. That is assuming the user doesn’t first have to offer incense and whisper a fervent prayer to the Omniscient Deity of USB Devices to seize control of the mouse and click the link in divine intervention. However for most of us that is uncessary and clicking a link to a video requires no effort at all.
    - halostatue 8mo ago
      TL;DW. I don't watch video complaints. I don't watch most YT videos except at 2x because by time the person who made the video got started saying what they're trying to say, I could have finished a text article version of the same thing. Most people speak way too slowly for me to be interested in what they're saying, especially when they could have written an article that is more information dense and it typically shorter in any case. Videos have value for enhancing reports, but are mostly useless as reports themselves. So yeah, it's too damned much to ask to watch a video.
      - chmod775 8mo ago
        Sorry. That comment is too long. Didn't read. Hope you didn't waste much time on it. Jokes aside, that video is 2:23 long and it gets to the point within the first 33 seconds, at which point they have demonstrated the issue. You're being beyond incredibly silly right now.
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kcrwfrd_ 8mo ago
The article on the average pilot and aircraft cockpit design is fascinating. Now I’m entirely invested, what was the problem causing the crashes? How did they solve it?
- gregdeon 8mo ago
  Same here. If you shouldn't design for the average dimensions, what _should_ you design for?
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ozzyphantom 8mo ago
I see where you’re coming from, this was an impulsive creation after months/years of frustration without any expectations. For anyone curious of my experience here are my main pain points: - autocorrect failing to correct minor mistakes - autocorrect “correcting” a mistake with another mistake - autocorrect “correcting” correctly typed words - swipe to type is painfully behind Gboard (third-party keyboards are universally under-supported and inferior to Android equivalents) - “Select All” is often hidden away - Selecting/unselecting text in general is a pain - keyboard seems to run out of steam after hitting a certain word count in applications such as Apple Notes or iMessage and take forever to register taps - The Big Daddy: key taps registering incorrectly in one of two ways: 1. Clearly tapping a letter “taps” a different letter (hot spots poorly calibrated) 2. A correctly tapped letter (keyboard highlight indicates correct letter) but incorrect letter is rendered on document Anyone irl I’ve discussed the iPhone keyboard with has described frustration so I figured this as more a “some of us are annoyed” flare than a technical manifesto. As another commenter noted I put a tiny link to my slightly more detailed blog post once this started gaining traction but I’m just having fun here really. Happy Friday the 13th everyone!
- nashashmi 8mo ago
  > - autocorrect “correcting” correctly typed words This brings up so many emotions. I disabled autocorrect. I don't give a damn if my words are spelled wrong but they should not be words that I did not type! I will add: text prediction was so much better before that I could be very sloppy and it would still figure it out. Now I have learned to be more careful with the keyboard.
  - renmillar 8mo ago
    I got anxious about autocorrect potentially inserting the wrong words and what kind of social fallout that could cause, so I just disabled it entirely. Takes longer to type everything manually but at least my anxiety has gone down.
- jonplackett 8mo ago
  I have genuinely considered if my (and perhaps everyone on hn) life calling should be just to make a better touch keyboard. Bearing in mind the amount of constant pain and torment the current best keyboards inflict upon the world, can there be any more urgent problem to tackle? Forget climate change guys. Make a keyboard. Save the world.
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andrewmcwatters 8mo ago
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m463 8mo ago
but anyone who uses the keyboard knows the statements to be true. I have just switched to turning autocorrect off. The "select all" comment hit home. I frequently try to copy/paste text and it is maddening to try to locate "select all" And cursor movement? ugh. It is so painful to move the cursor to one specific letter that I frequently just erase everything and start over.
- kbrkbr 8mo ago
  How did you make that happen? I use swipe keyboard in iPhone. I turned off all "autocorrect" features they offer. Still their random generator keeps replacing perfectly fine words _and the words before them_ with random crap that makes no sense. Heck, I even turned off all features, and still it happens. So I switched to another keyboard from appstore. I would switch to another OS, but I find the others even worse in some respects I care for deeply.
  - m463 8mo ago
    it is under "Keyboard" in settings. I turn off: auto-capitalization auto-correction smart punctuation
hedora 8mo ago
Did they edit the article after your post? There’s a list just after the first paragraph. Anyway, I was just considering switching to android today after repeated problems with the keyboard, maps, siri and notifications / incoming calls. They’re almost as bad as pre-iPhone Linux phones at this point. Q: “Can it be a daily driver?” A: “Sure, as long as you also carry a Garmin/TomTom, and a dumbphone or pager”.
nurumaik 8mo ago
> It feels like someone changed the keyboard to optimize for some typing behavior that doesn't match my own I want the keyboard to work the following way -- after I press the button: 1. Letter that I pressed (not a random one) appears 2. Instantly iOS keyboard somehow fails both. I have no idea what "typing behavior" can you optimize for to end up like this
boringg 8mo ago
I mean you could do what i did and turn off autocorrect…
nottorp 8mo ago
As an iOS user I don't have any specific grievances, but I can definitely say the keyboard has got shittier and shittier in the past few years. Apple's problem is their keyboard used to "just work" as the original article says. No one knows what magic they did back then, but it's obvious that they turned it off now. They're still better than the spell checker in MS Teams, although that's not really positive.
bjoli 8mo ago
I am not sure there is much more to say. I have used an iOS device for many years and "broken and nearly useless" perfectly describes every aspect of the iOS keyboard. I have always just suspected that it is the same as it was with the lack of t9 dialling. Everybody knew it was awful, but apple just stuck their head in the sand and asked their users to just live with it. There are many things I dislike about iOS (most notably the settings app), but those are just intermittent annoyances but the keyboards is still so infuriatingly bad. The reaction at work when I brought a usb keyboard to plug into my phone when I had to write something wasn't "why do you do that?". It was "I have thought about that as well. The keyboard sucks".

srmatto 8mo ago

The recent changes to the iOS keyboard and text editing in general have been very counter productive for me as well. Tap to select doesn't really work the same way anymore and the logic of it isn't clear to me which makes it unpredictable. Typing accurately itself has gotten really difficult. I used to be a pretty quick typist on the iOS keyboard but now I find myself looking for my Mac to send a message from there or using voice to text more. Folks can thumb their noses at Reddit but the top comment in every post about iOS updates since 26.0 was released is some variation of "fix the keyboard." The problem seems very real for a lot of users.

raylad 8mo ago
Also why did they get rid of select all? Is there any excuse for that?
- DamnInteresting 8mo ago
  It's still there, it's just difficult to know when it will appear. Sometimes it takes one more tap than expected, or sometimes one must deselect a word and tap again, or change focus away and back again. Very sloppy UI.
  - filoleg 8mo ago
    Yeah, it is still there, and there is a pretty clear cut logic for when it will appear. If you tap while a word is selected, it won’t appear. If you tap on the cursor while a word isn’t selected, it will appear.
    - DamnInteresting 8mo ago
      If by "clear cut logic" you mean a consistent process, then sure. But if you mean intuitive, I must disagree.
      - microtonal 8mo ago
        Especially because it was working fine and understandable in older iOS versions. Also for some reason autocorrect seems to have gotten a lot worse. It has become nearly impossible to type a grocery list without all kinds of annoying wrong corrections.
      - filoleg 8mo ago
        Yeah, good point. Your guess was right, I meant it in the sense of consistency, not in the sense of it being intuitive without knowing about it
- bobbylarrybobby 8mo ago
  Select all always appears if you have no text selected and never appears if you have some text selected. Insane UI decision by apple but that's how it is.
  - thehappyfellow 8mo ago
    Which means you can't select all on text which isn't editable - insane!
    - leptons 8mo ago
      It honestly doesn't surprise me. Apple is not some bastion of good design. They are mediocre at best, always have been. It was pretty hilarious to me that for so many years the keyboard on iOS only had CAPITAL letters. No matter the state of the shift key, the letters on the keyboard just stayed the same. After many years they finally figured it out, but it's one example of many about how Apple just doesn't have the great UX people claim they do.
      - tambourine_man 8mo ago
        I actually prefer the all caps keyboard and switch it on on iOS. It looks like a physical keyboard and the constant flicking between upper/lowercase is distracting and annoying
        leptons 8mo ago
        Well good for you, I guess?
        b112 8mo ago
        As bfinn once said on IRC, as he wrote in caps: <BFINN/#debian> ALL BIG LETTER ON KEYBOARD HERE!! <CosmicRay/#debian> haha <BFINN/#debian> TO NO LITTLE LETTER! https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.misc/c/7AdXvE7KQzk/m/N7y3Z4yAi_cJ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.misc/c/7AdXvE7KQz...
        8mo ago
- jorl17 8mo ago
  YES. WHY?! GOD WHY!?!!?!?!?! I'M GOING INSANE!!
- razingeden 8mo ago
  My favorite ( /s) IOS hassle - aside from running around on 12% battery at all times, didn’t I buy a pro max for the extended capacity ? - … is not being able to paste into an empty box unless I type a letter there and select it/clobber it/overwrite it And I just LOOOOOVE not being able to tap a URL in safari and get to the end of it to add parameters or change a path anymore… Just gave my MacBook that hasn’t been turned on in months away(i haaaaate Tahoe) and been using GrapheneOS on a pixel 7a. so far I’m not in love with it but I’m getting used to it and starting to like downloading apps anonymously (if I name the app, I’ll probably get scolded) anyway this might be the end of the line for me and Apple.
- everdrive 8mo ago
  They're a modern tech company. They need to changes things every so often no matter what downsides come with the change.
hypercube33 8mo ago
It's not just apple - windows and android autocorrect are more auto incorrect these days.
- soco 8mo ago
  I can't tell about windows - never used autocorrect there - but GBoard became laughable. I don't think I was able to use its suggestions since a few years. For instance, it will NEVER but really never put a uppercase I when I'm talking about myself. Never. I could select it from suggestions if I feel like, but I kinda gave up (this is written in Windows, that's why you see capital Is). Or my name, used quite often right, is also never spelled correctly - although it's there in the suggestions. I am using a yahoo email, GBoard knows the username, but it will ALWAYS suggest a gmail extension, which simply doesn't exist. I don't know any other keyboard which can properly handle multiple languages, so I'm stuck with GBoard, but it's nothing to be proud of.
  - netsharc 8mo ago
    I have the same email @yahoo.com and @gmail.com (one is mostly for online shops etc), and the amount of time GBoard thinks it needs to recommend @gmail.com, it's obnoxious... But the correction offers are still okay for me, I can mash keys around my email username and one of the corrections offered will be my username...
  - owenthejumper 8mo ago
    SwiftKey can handle languages, but it kind of sucks too , lol. It crashes all the time
    - soco 8mo ago
      No it cannot. SwiftKey has exactly two "languages": one is French, the other is German/English/Italian/Romanian. Yes it's a mash of all four, which makes the default swiped word and the suggestions exactly useless. Who the hell thought that was a good idea... only Samsung keyboard offers separate languages as well, but it's kinda worse in suggestions than GBoard.
mrmuagi 8mo ago
Autocorrect not getting simple character substitutions is beyond frustrating.
- notorandit 8mo ago
  Do you know a corrector that "understands" a typo at the third or fourth character? If it's 1st or 2nd, then it's ok.
longfacehorrace 8mo ago
It's not just the keyboard. My iPhone 15 is often so unresponsive I am tapping twice as much. Example but the issue not limited to web browsing; Safari will do nothing, I tap again, it does the thing, then it does the thing again due to the second tap. I have to tap back to get to where I really wanted to go.
- itopaloglu83 8mo ago
  Sounds like the liquid glass animations are so heavy that if the system is busy with anything else for a second then everything simply breaks. I remember seeing the videos about cpu usage spiking over 40% just to show the control center. And similarly, even on a Mac I find myself clicking on links and button multiple times, just for things to work. It has a dedicated keyboard, how is it that they messed it up so much that a physical keyboard stops working. It's an interrupt based interface, it takes less than a millisecond to process things, how can someone mess things up so freaking stupidly.
  - longfacehorrace 8mo ago
    Shortcuts run but often do not trigger all the stages in a pipeline. No issues with same shortcuts prior to installing iOS26. These Shortcuts do not trigger UI transitions. They send data over network. Sounds like Apple management enabled a quality assurance failure that is fostering so many distractions for users it's turning people against Apple. Tim Cook handing his replacement a dumpster fire.
  - seec 8mo ago
    That was basically the whole point of it. Apple makes money selling hardware; they have a vested interest in making things slower/worse to incentivize people to buy newer hardware. This is why you can never really trust Apple and also why no matter how bad Windows gets, it's still a better deal because at least you can count on the fact that PC businesses will compete on the hardware front to get your money. Choosing Apple is a lot like being in an abusive relationship; you can't leave because the switching cost are quite high, so you tolerate a lot more abuse than you would be willing to otherwise. And this is the reason people try to not rely on Apple software too much; if you do, they truly have you by the balls.
winternett 8mo ago
The same things are happening on Android too, no coincidence.
Fr0styMatt88 8mo ago
What I don’t get is why it can’t tell I’ve gone back and edited a suggestion or correction it gave me and correct itself in the future.

LollipopYakuza 8mo ago

I understand your point, but for an issue that's been addressed so many times, it doesn't sound necessary to get into details. The issue doesn't seem to be that Apple doesn't know but that they don't care. However, if I, as the author cared to justify that "it's not only me", I would have listed more posts and feedback. I feel like I have read at least 4 times about the broken keyboard, it should not be hard to find a few other links.

Someone1234 8mo ago
It does make me wonder if Apple's own employees actually dog-food iOS day-to-day. It just seems like, you could stop any iPhone user in the street and ask them "How do you find the keyboard?" And get a consistently negative response, but yet nobody within Apple seemingly has noticed for YEARS. Everyone says iOS 26 did it, but I strongly disagree, I disabled most options in General -> Keyboard like three major iOS versions ago, and moved to Swiftkey* in iOS 18 (although iOS keeps changing my keyboard preferences back to the default). *SwiftKey is also a shit-show with the "Your Tap Map" crap you cannot disable, where it moves the keys and makes the thing inconsistent. Just goes to show how bad Apple's keyboard is, when I'll put up with it.
- zem 8mo ago
  if my experiences at google are any indication, when it comes to "regular user" facing features management pays very little attention to negative feedback from the engineers. it always seems to be assumed that we are atypical in our dislike for things.
  - duncangh 8mo ago
    This is incredibly resonant
- bombcar 8mo ago
  It's so bad that I have to assume that Cupertino is filled with people who "hold the phone differently" and tap with their long fingernails or the very tip of their fingers or something. I'm always mistyping and I don't know how to fix it to do what they want.

yeah879846 8mo ago

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graemep 8mo ago

Why not install an different keyboard app?

Normal_gaussian 8mo ago

It turns out he posted a better example in his blog post about it - https://thismightnotmatter.com/a-little-website-i-made-for-apple-inc/ https://thismightnotmatter.com/a-little-website-i-made-for-a... - which is technically linked to in the bottom of the site. I guess if you spend your life learning UX from Apple this is what you get...

butterfi 8mo ago
Thats a pretty snarky thing to say about Apple. They were arguably the pioneers in OS UX... granted, its not the end all, be all, but still. You could do worse.
- bartread 8mo ago
  > You could do worse. Perhaps you shouldn't encourage them. Based on recent software releases from Apple they might see it as a challenge.
- Lammy 8mo ago
  > arguably Sick of this weasel word. Either argue it or don't.
  - james_marks 8mo ago
    Even worse, "I would argue that..." It's not hypothetical if you are here, in the current tense, arguing that. I've mostly cured myself of the habit, but its tough.
    - gilrain 8mo ago
      “I would argue that…” is a weaker statement, because it ends with an implied “…but since I don’t care that much, I’m not ‘seriously’ arguing that.” It’s not at all equivalent to the strong statement “I argue that…”, which has no such qualifier. Why cure yourself of useful conversational nuance?
  - digitalPhonix 8mo ago

nunez 8mo ago

I have autocorrext turned off on my keyboard and typed this without any corrections. These sre the issues i've faced with the stock keyboard: - accidental periods when typing URLs in Safari - key target inaccuracy (though turning off swipe-to-tect gas ikproved this a little, though not enough) - key latnecy which causes letters innsome words to get swapped or extra unwated letters to appear (this could be a me-getting-older prblem, howeverg - autocorrect suggesting words that I've never typed before (I turned on autocorrect for this list item to make sure i gave it a fair shake; it didn't suggest anything crazy this time, but the number of times it has in the past has led me to turning it off, even after iOS 18 wherein the keyboard supposedly used a small language model to improve suggestions) I also type longform on my phone sometimes; the keyboard makes this much more exhausting than it needs to be.

itopaloglu83 8mo ago
I don't know if you experience any of these: - Clicks on buttons and links not registering, and needing to click multiple times, sometime to no effect. - Safari not suggesting the website you visit multiple time a day, and points you a random website you have never visited before.
- nunez 8mo ago
  Yes to both. That and Safari reloading the page you were just on (from the cache, sometimes) if it can't reach a URL
iamacyborg 8mo ago
A lot of these issies seem damiliar to me as well on the glasskwyboard pn my iphone13 mini. Also typed without any maual fixes. My typingwas mucu better before glass.
- sarmasamosarma 8mo ago
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firecall 8mo ago

gwbas1c 8mo ago

I think the point is that the keyboard is so broken the problems should be obvious to the people who work on the iPhone.

itopaloglu83 8mo ago
Exactly. There are some Apple folks here who keep gaslighting users with their iOS 26 concerns and every other issue by calling them weird names and asking them to not complain. The damn keyboard is broken, one would've known that if they used it more than a few minutes a day in real life examples. Stop shutting people off and use your own damn products instead of getting them all made in China and sell them.
- gwbas1c 8mo ago
  You get that kind of nonsense when people get an irrational attachment to a technology brand. I see that a lot with Tesla, there's the group that praises them publicly and makes outrageous claims about self-driving... But remains strangely silent about how the windshield wipers don't work right and Tesla won't fix them.

isodev 8mo ago

One can also see it like: The grievance is apparent to every iOS user who has used pre-iOS 18 keyboards or any of the major Android keyboards. It’s also not just one problem, autocorrect and the keyboard combined make for at least a dozen seemly different defects

chmod775 8mo ago

The YT video they linked is excessively clear about what the issue is. There's no point in explaining it again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo

pseudalopex 8mo ago
> Sure, the video you link to is more descriptive, but it's a lot to ask of a visitor to click through and watch a separate video.
- chmod775 8mo ago
  No, it’s not a lot to ask. That is assuming the user doesn’t first have to offer incense and whisper a fervent prayer to the Omniscient Deity of USB Devices to seize control of the mouse and click the link in divine intervention. However for most of us that is uncessary and clicking a link to a video requires no effort at all.
  - halostatue 8mo ago
    TL;DW. I don't watch video complaints. I don't watch most YT videos except at 2x because by time the person who made the video got started saying what they're trying to say, I could have finished a text article version of the same thing. Most people speak way too slowly for me to be interested in what they're saying, especially when they could have written an article that is more information dense and it typically shorter in any case. Videos have value for enhancing reports, but are mostly useless as reports themselves. So yeah, it's too damned much to ask to watch a video.
    - chmod775 8mo ago
      Sorry. That comment is too long. Didn't read. Hope you didn't waste much time on it. Jokes aside, that video is 2:23 long and it gets to the point within the first 33 seconds, at which point they have demonstrated the issue. You're being beyond incredibly silly right now.

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kcrwfrd_ 8mo ago

The article on the average pilot and aircraft cockpit design is fascinating. Now I’m entirely invested, what was the problem causing the crashes? How did they solve it?

gregdeon 8mo ago
Same here. If you shouldn't design for the average dimensions, what _should_ you design for?

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ozzyphantom 8mo ago

I see where you’re coming from, this was an impulsive creation after months/years of frustration without any expectations. For anyone curious of my experience here are my main pain points: - autocorrect failing to correct minor mistakes - autocorrect “correcting” a mistake with another mistake - autocorrect “correcting” correctly typed words - swipe to type is painfully behind Gboard (third-party keyboards are universally under-supported and inferior to Android equivalents) - “Select All” is often hidden away - Selecting/unselecting text in general is a pain - keyboard seems to run out of steam after hitting a certain word count in applications such as Apple Notes or iMessage and take forever to register taps - The Big Daddy: key taps registering incorrectly in one of two ways: 1. Clearly tapping a letter “taps” a different letter (hot spots poorly calibrated) 2. A correctly tapped letter (keyboard highlight indicates correct letter) but incorrect letter is rendered on document Anyone irl I’ve discussed the iPhone keyboard with has described frustration so I figured this as more a “some of us are annoyed” flare than a technical manifesto. As another commenter noted I put a tiny link to my slightly more detailed blog post once this started gaining traction but I’m just having fun here really. Happy Friday the 13th everyone!

nashashmi 8mo ago
> - autocorrect “correcting” correctly typed words This brings up so many emotions. I disabled autocorrect. I don't give a damn if my words are spelled wrong but they should not be words that I did not type! I will add: text prediction was so much better before that I could be very sloppy and it would still figure it out. Now I have learned to be more careful with the keyboard.
- renmillar 8mo ago
  I got anxious about autocorrect potentially inserting the wrong words and what kind of social fallout that could cause, so I just disabled it entirely. Takes longer to type everything manually but at least my anxiety has gone down.
jonplackett 8mo ago
I have genuinely considered if my (and perhaps everyone on hn) life calling should be just to make a better touch keyboard. Bearing in mind the amount of constant pain and torment the current best keyboards inflict upon the world, can there be any more urgent problem to tackle? Forget climate change guys. Make a keyboard. Save the world.

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andrewmcwatters 8mo ago

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m463 8mo ago

but anyone who uses the keyboard knows the statements to be true. I have just switched to turning autocorrect off. The "select all" comment hit home. I frequently try to copy/paste text and it is maddening to try to locate "select all" And cursor movement? ugh. It is so painful to move the cursor to one specific letter that I frequently just erase everything and start over.

kbrkbr 8mo ago
How did you make that happen? I use swipe keyboard in iPhone. I turned off all "autocorrect" features they offer. Still their random generator keeps replacing perfectly fine words _and the words before them_ with random crap that makes no sense. Heck, I even turned off all features, and still it happens. So I switched to another keyboard from appstore. I would switch to another OS, but I find the others even worse in some respects I care for deeply.
- m463 8mo ago
  it is under "Keyboard" in settings. I turn off: auto-capitalization auto-correction smart punctuation

hedora 8mo ago

Did they edit the article after your post? There’s a list just after the first paragraph. Anyway, I was just considering switching to android today after repeated problems with the keyboard, maps, siri and notifications / incoming calls. They’re almost as bad as pre-iPhone Linux phones at this point. Q: “Can it be a daily driver?” A: “Sure, as long as you also carry a Garmin/TomTom, and a dumbphone or pager”.

nurumaik 8mo ago

> It feels like someone changed the keyboard to optimize for some typing behavior that doesn't match my own I want the keyboard to work the following way -- after I press the button: 1. Letter that I pressed (not a random one) appears 2. Instantly iOS keyboard somehow fails both. I have no idea what "typing behavior" can you optimize for to end up like this

boringg 8mo ago

I mean you could do what i did and turn off autocorrect…

nottorp 8mo ago

As an iOS user I don't have any specific grievances, but I can definitely say the keyboard has got shittier and shittier in the past few years. Apple's problem is their keyboard used to "just work" as the original article says. No one knows what magic they did back then, but it's obvious that they turned it off now. They're still better than the spell checker in MS Teams, although that's not really positive.

bjoli 8mo ago

I am not sure there is much more to say. I have used an iOS device for many years and "broken and nearly useless" perfectly describes every aspect of the iOS keyboard. I have always just suspected that it is the same as it was with the lack of t9 dialling. Everybody knew it was awful, but apple just stuck their head in the sand and asked their users to just live with it. There are many things I dislike about iOS (most notably the settings app), but those are just intermittent annoyances but the keyboards is still so infuriatingly bad. The reaction at work when I brought a usb keyboard to plug into my phone when I had to write something wasn't "why do you do that?". It was "I have thought about that as well. The keyboard sucks".