@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.fl...
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.
Also why did they get rid of select all? Is there any excuse for that?
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.
I love the fervor with which this is written, but the threat is so weak I literally chuckled.
Imagine your an exec or manager on the team for keyboard development. You read this, get to the end to discover the user is gonna switch devices for... 2 whole calander years?
What's that amount to? Maybe 2 device upgrades on If your a die hard gotta have the newest latest model phone each year. Then what? you'll be back?
The threat doesnt even carry the weight losing a user for a 2 year blip, registers more as a dropped ping request then a drop in revenue.
If meant to be whimsical sure nailed it. To be fair I mean any boycot with a large scale mfg carries about the same weight. just thought it fell flat as much as anything.
I think this is the wrong read on the “threat”. One user going out of their way to spent time writing this post is a canary in the coal mine. Most users never give feedback, they just churn. This is the same reason your toothpaste has a phone number on the back - that one random person who cares deeply calls the number and provides invaluable feedback on the product.
It’s not about the one person, it’s about that person representing tens/hundreds/thousands of customers. This feedback is a gift to a product manager that listens.
The article ended up making it to HN and, at least the discussion I'm seeing, is highly critical of Apple's recent design changes. There isn't a threat you can construct that'd throw 20% of Apple's profit into uncertainty, but losing their mantle of technical excellence is something that will deeply damage Apple in the long term. Microsoft seems hell bent on being a worse example right now but if the grade of Apple's products slips too much then the price markup they enjoy will be eroded which is a very dangerous cycle to fall into.
There is a possibility that this "threat" could go viral. Now something dumb your company is doing is being discussed everywhere. Companies hate that kind of publicity. It's the kind of thing that sticks around and lingers even after things have been corrected.
It can't go viral until you actually make a post for people to find and promote. Step one has now been completed. Step two is gaining traction.
Your comment makes no sense to me. What in your opinion would be a strong threat? 'Tim Cook, open the suspicion package I sent you in the mail!'?
I mean, this random person added a countdown timer, and after that revealed that when it reaches the end, if Apple hasn’t met some arbitrary demand they’ll leave the platform but probably be back (just in time to spend more money on another device) and that the colour of a phone is enough to get them back.
This is one of the emptiest threats I’ve ever seen. This is about as effective as having a madman inside your house destroying your property with a baseball bat and saying “if you don’t stop smashing my stuff in the next 72 hours, I’ll consider writing mean things about you in my diary”.
No need to get specific. Write a blog post about how the keyboard is broken and say you’re leaving for another platform because of it. It’s not like Apple is going to check when you did it or for how long (or care). The theatrics are unnecessary and laughable, they undermine the whole message. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone inside Apple is sharing this with their colleagues and laughing.
Another random blog post about the broken iOS keyboard would not get any traction. This is getting traction.
I'm pretty sure the author realized that Tim Apple isn't shaking in his boots, looking at the numbers going down. That's not the point, the point is that it's funny and interesting and thus getting attention.
It's even worse: based on "orange iPhone" they just bought an iPhone 17. So they'll skip the next two iPhones and be back in 2028? Sounds like a standard upgrade cycle.
Don’t we all deserve a little whimsy in our lives?
> I randomly tried Android again for a few months last spring. Using a functioning keyboard was revelatory. But I came crawling back to iOS because I'm weak and the orange iPhone was pretty and the Pixel 10 was boring and I caved to the blue bubble pressure. But the keyboard on this beautiful phone is worse than ever.
Most of those problems aren't solved by software. You are using your phone as a fashion item.
As a lifelong Android user (in the EU, where Apple hegemony is not as strong) I always saw Apple as the "pay more for more polished ecosystem UX" option. So it always surprises me when things that are trivial on Android/Linux are sticking points on iOS/macOS. Worse, it seems that proprietary means you can't do anything to fix them yourself.
Their software quality really went downhill in recent years, really hope whoever comes in after Cook treats it as priority
Maybe they started to use some internal "Siri Code" tool ...
They should stick to Claude Code, like everyone else.
I'm getting a strong feeling that the first generation of really, really talented people who built iOS in the 2000s have now to a substantial degree moved on/retired. Similar feeling with OS X/macOS.
Please correct me if I'm wrong - it is after all just a feeling.
I have this feeling for every software out there.
People who like building new things, like building new things.
I would say Catalina in 2019 already had enormous issues, there were hard faults in Console pretty much daily that Apple never bothered to fix. (Plus hundreds of minor faults per day)
I had to downgrade to Mojave so the wheels likely came off internally around then.
Recent?
They have been last to get Widgets. They don't have apps I use (terminals, emulators, pulse wave generators). Not to mention Gemini AI is actually really nice for scanning a screen and doing actions with it.
Apple is always 2nd place or worse. Except marketing, they are #1.
"Quality" and "features you happen to want" are two different things.
Their hardware is world class. Software? Not so much.
They sold the Macbook air with Broadwell processors for over 3 years. They only changed the processors because intel discontinued them. They skipped 3 generations of processors.
It would also be fair to say they didn't skip any generation of processors with that gap in updates, they merely sat out the first two years of Intel shipping Skylake five years in a row.
And in the meantime, they did use those first two years of Skylake for the 12" MacBook; the next update to the MacBook Air was after the last update the 12" MacBook ever got. For a while, the 12" MacBook was the more premium, thinner and lighter alternative to the MacBook Air with more advanced technology (and could plausibly have been construed as the intended successor to the MacBook Air), then in 2018 they merged back together with the introduction of the first MacBook Air with a Retina Display.
I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say here.
They sold old hardware for the same price 3 years later as if it was a premium product. They didn't really have an excuse, they've been the most valuable public company on earth since like 2010.
What do you mean? For a phone? Are people doing anything on a phone that you can't do on an Android? Be realistic, not idealistic or giving test situations that no one actually uses.
On desktop? Uh... There is a reason Nvidia is #1. Wake me up when I can get Nvidia on Apple.
Anecdote but I've never had issues with the keyboard, or with Siri mishearing me (just to touch on another common pain point that people talk about re: Apple tech). I've always interpreted stories like this as the people who are most affected by it being vocal and speaking out (as they should), while the majority who aren't just have nothing to say because it all works fine.
> Worse, it seems that proprietary means you can't do anything to fix them yourself.
We can install third-party keyboards on iOS, so I'm not sure why that's not being considered here.
> the majority who aren't just have nothing to say because it all works fine.
This is a bad way to go through life with this reasoning. It is pretty well understood that in normal situations the vast majority of people are not vocal even if they feel the same way about things the vocal people are saying. As an example I use a lot, congress critters use a formula to get the pulse of the constituents. If they receive a hand written letter (yes, I learned about the formula when people did that), they'd multiply that by some factor knowing that if one person felt strongly enough to send in a letter that others also felt that way. Phone calls were the same, but with a smaller multiplier as it was easier to make a call that write a letter followed by emails with yet a smaller mult. This was all well before social media, but I'd imagine searching tweets would give a pretty good indicator as well now. A single tweet would be worth something, but tweets with lots of retweets and heavy comment activity would be something else. Even if a tweet is something done pretty much on a whim with little thought behind it like that letter.
The silent majority is called that for a reason. It doesn't mean they are happy or content. Ignore that reality at your own peril.
anecdatum: I've encountered the dumb keyboard behavior and haven't written any scathing blog posts about it, I've just grumbled out loud and upvoted the ones I've seen.
So consider the possibility that many people are affected but haven't reached the threshold of writing something about it.
Yeah I used to love the iOS keyboard 5 or 6 years ago but now I find it completely baffling, and the way it goes back into my sentence to change words around the word I just typed is very frustrating as I will then have to edit those words back.
Dear Tim Apple, I meant exactly what I typed please stop changing it because your product manager doesn't think I know English.
When I had iPhone for work, the first thing I did was install gboard. Iphone's native keyboard has always been less accurate. I have no idea how to describe it because I haven't researched it.
And to be clear 'do anything to fix them yourself' is as simple as install a third-party keyboard from the official Play Store, if you had such an issue as this with the default 'GBoard'.
You can install third-party keyboards on iOS too, I'm not sure why that's not considered an option in this case.
I had an iPhone for three months until I switched back to Android because the keyboard was trash. The one thing I could not believe is how even SwiftKey on iOS is horrible, even though it's my default keyboard on Android, and I've been very happy with it.
This comment explains why:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1l2gg3r/thirdparty_ios...
tl;dr: gatekeeping by Apple. Yes, it would probably be embarassing to Apple if someone built a way better touch keyboard.
Long-time iOS user here. My motivation for iPhone has always been "you pay more for fewer features and customization, but the UX is more polished." For the past 5-ish years, the UX has consistently gotten considerably worse. Not just the usual things like the horrible keyboard and atrocious Siri capabilities, it's all the stuff that used to just work. Nothing deal-breaking by itself, but all together feels like death by a thousand cuts. I'm at the point where I'm seriously considering Android.
Also add Liquid Glass, it strains the eyes.
Even siri got worse, when I say call <nickname of my gitfriend> now it does some location based search, and calls sonebody, when near home it is a doctor, when on the other side of the river it is a flower shop, at othe rplaces other random non-contacts, with a contact having the sting it used for search, as her nickname is always part of the called person… It used to work flawlessly as expected…
I would be fine with Siri actually if if could handle simple fixed phrase based task, no AI, as it could a few years ago.
The most frustrating aspect of Siri's quality decline is that super-basic things inexplicably stop working. For years I have been able to say "call <wife's name>" and Siri called my wife. A couple weeks ago she started dialing another contact I haven't talked to in 15 years with a similarly-pronounced name (but different spelling). I had to delete the old contact to stop that behavior from happening.
They said it was Apple Intelligence - they didn't tell you how intelligent it would be!
I'll sometimes ask Siri to take me to a local address, and it'll instead pick some random address in a city 2500+ miles away and start routing me there like that's obviously what i wanted
I’m not sure if gitfriend is a typo.
I’m lonely and really want a gitfriend to push and merge with! Please tell the story of how you got one!
/s for the /s impaired
I'm afraid of commits.
You could wait a bit after forking.
Squash commit can fix the conflict.
Doesn't work if there are too many diffs
Diffs can always be patched up.
From an outsider that used their products years ago.
Apple has shifted from working to produce quality to working to maximize profit ... when it comes to software.
The only thing that would change this would be a new CEO or Apple hemorrhaging money with more people buy alternative solutions.
To be fair ... Microsoft is in the same down hill spiral in quality and the IT industry staying with them allows form the to do this.
Apple’s implementation of desktops/workspaces is maddening.
In the US Apple is the
"Use it or your social group will not want to interact with you"
option.
Outside of tech circles (where apparently people easily get their entire family and friend network on signal), people want to use imessage and only want to use imessage. Android phones can't support imessage because they are poor low quality phones that cannot handle imessage. So you need a high quality phone like iphone so you can use imessage and easily communicate with your friends and family.
This strategy of leveraging friends and family to pressure people into getting iPhones was intentional and came out in the Epic trial lawsuit.
I shit you not there is a large percentage of people in the US that think Android phones are not capable of sending pcitures and videos.
> Android phones can't support imessage because they are poor low quality phones that cannot handle imessage.
Android phones can't use iMessage because Apple never opened it up, contrary to what Steve Jobs was hinting at back when it was released.
Nowadays I believe you can get a blue bubble when chatting from an Android with an iPhone user by using RCS / JOYN.
You don't get a blue bubble for using RCS. That's still reserved for iMessage exclusively. (At least, on iOS 26 in the US on T-Mobile)
Yeah, there's a myth spread on the internet after Apple announced rcs support in iMessage that it was the end of green bubbles for android users. But green bubbles still exist; they never meant the other party is just using sms, they meant the other party isn't using iMessage.
Pretty sure that was sarcasm.
> Android phones can't support imessage because they are poor low quality phones that cannot handle imessage. So you need a high quality phone like iphone so you can use imessage and easily communicate with your friends and family.
You are missing the /s right?
The last sentence makes it clear that it is sarcasm
> "Use it or your social group will not want to interact with you"
Maybe your "social group". If your friends refuse to talk to you because of the cell phone brand you use, I have bad news for you: They might not really be great friends.
That’s not what this is about. If you have a group chat with one android user, it used to make all aspects of the interactions clunkier. Green bubbles, sending a new text instead of reactions, etc. as such, people would get left off of a list. Those small interactions add up over time.
If your "friends" care enough about small stuff like that to cut you out of their conversations, they're not your friends.
Seriously, sounds more like a local user group than anyone who cares about you
This just isn't true anymore (besides the green).
Yes. Mean girls at school are mean. If everyone has the same color bubble they’ll just find something else to be mean about.
This is correct. Everybody has green bubbles in Europe even on iOS, because everybody is using WhatsApp. But mean people are still mean.
This is the state of friendship in the social media age.
Texting images and videos to iPhone users used to be much worse than it is now, but it's gotten better in the past few years if my (Android) experience with my family (iPhones) is any indication.
The hard to tell part is I'm also crossing carriers to message them, so that might have been the issue as well.
> I shit you not there is a large percentage of people in the US that think Android phones are not capable of sending pcitures and videos.
Source? Would love to read this one lol
It was kind of true a very long time ago except in potato quality. And if you were out of data, but was connected on WiFi instead, you actually couldn't. And you still can't text a large video across the Android / iPhone chasm, can you?
‘Potato quality’ ahahahahahahhaa I hope this was iPhone autocorrect to prove the point.
No, it's an old phrase. It came from the question, "Was this filmed on a potato?" when someone posted a video of particularly bad quality, as if their phone was a potato.
It wasn’t too long ago either. I mentioned it before in prior comments but due to how MMS works at one major carrier (verizon) they sent picture quality back to pre-smartphone days for a large % of android users.
The quick explainer is phones send a user agent with the request to fetch a media message, this user agent contains a link to a file that describes what the device can handle. Apple and Blackberry hosted these files themselves, Verizon hosted most of the android ones on its network itself. They decommissioned the server hosting them a few years ago which made it so all affected devices pulled the lowest potato quality image down for compatibility. Huge number of complaints.
i wanted to hate apple so much at the advent of the smartphone era, so when i made the switch from flip to smart, i went with a samsung and gingerbread and it was such a universally awful experience compared to the iphone mobiles my employer issued (before BYOD). i gutted it out through the life of the contract and switched to iphone for my personal as well and have been quite happy up until ios 18. if there is no appreciable change in the next version, i plan to export my curated music library/playlists and walk away from my "sign in with apple id" accounts and set up new ones. liquid glass is just that painful and hostile of a user experience.
>"Use it or your social group will not want to interact with you"
I see this in middle and lower-middle class people.
But in the upper-middle class, this is a non issue. We know how Apple manipulates people who struggle to spend $50/mo on a phone.
This feels like 5 year old social media bullshit.. can we let it rest?
5 year old as in .. a child of 5 years old
It's so many things other than the keyboard I notice are just like, "wtf, who and why decided this was a good idea?"
In safari browser, if you want to go to the menu where you can favorite/bookmark a page, the tiles on the menu are literally different and in different order every time. Sometimes you might need to press an additional button to find what you're looking for, sometimes it's there, sometimes clicking "favorite" will just go "ok, favorited" message, other times it asks for an extra prompt. Like, why? Just be consistent, I can adjust to all the "PM trying to save their role by reinventing something that isn't needed" like liquid glass, but the usability itself suffers all over the place in the latest ios releases. It's very difficult to understand, because up until a little while ago it had been consistently very good.
Highly recommend Nintype third party keyboard. Such a breath of fresh air to have a keyboard made for power users.
The project is abandoned but it still works well. I hope someone sees this and gets inspired to build something to replace it. If you do you can have my money!
> You were the "it just works" company. Now you're just a fruit that I used to know.
This had me simultaneously chuckling and sad, because it feels very true.
Switching from Android, I was shocked by how much in fact did not just work. I kept a running list of basic features that were clearly broken.
Especially around text editing. It seems like they made some fundamental mistakes with their text inputs that they are playing hard defense on. I never know if a given field is going to respond to long-press, double tap, or what context menu I will get if any.
I agree it that this behavior as insane and should be fixed.
Do however note that it is possible to install another keyboard on iOS, which may alleviate your suffering before you switch to Android in about 120 days.
Personally I rely on Gboard [0] every day for the simple reason that it auto-detects several (more than two) languages, and of course it has the added benefit of not having this crazy bug. Gboard is google software however, so it does come with huge privacy issues, and others will hopefully point out better alternatives.
Gboard is a lot better than the native keyboard. Strange that OP is going to such lengths to complain when iOS supports other keyboards.
The main benefit I've found with Gboard is a larger vocabulary, and perhaps a less aggressive autocorrect that doesn't constantly try to correct technical terms into similar common words.
I’m not suggesting this is the author’s reason, but avoiding a Google product that keep a trail of everything you type seems like a strong argument.
I have Gboard and have weird issues with it crashing randomly. Not sure if it's because it's hamstrung by the limitations of Apple's support for alternative keyboards or what.
> orange iPhone was pretty and the Pixel 10 was boring
I guess this is really important to people.
One time I broke an Android, which happened to be white, and spoke to the insurer for a replacement. The agent insisted she find me another white phone, not another Android, and though an iPhone was suitable. She couldn't grok how the OS and phone specs were more important than the color.
Right? Most people encase it in an opaque phone case anyway.
Android: Here's the phone; knock yourself out
Apple: Father knows best (but Father is getting old and sometimes forgets things)
Windows: If only we understood what the ancestors knew
Android is more "here's a pocket panopticon we hope you won't unconfigure"
Apple is more "here's this refined product which we designated as refined after a heavy session snooting cocaine off a toilet seat"
To be fair my iPhone spys on me in much more actively creepy ways than my android ever did. Showing ads for nearby pizza places at lunchtime on the homescreen. Telling me at about the time of my son's soccer that I may be interested in going to the place where his soccer is about now (despite me never using navigation on my phone) etc
More like: Apple: Father died a while back, but Step-Father is here now and he doesn't love you.
If Steve jobs was still around, the iPhone would be considerably worse.
This is a bold statement - care to elaborate?!
Just to play both sides here, on pixel there is a news feed if you swipe the home screen right. It is now infused with ai summaries rather than the first few lines of the story with no way to go back.
Course, I can switch to a different launcher, but it makes it much less of a "batteries included" sort of product.
There is a setting to disable this. Long press on your home screen background > Home Settings > Toggle "Swipe to access Google app"
I’m glad this just isn’t me.
I’ve been noticing a slow decline in my iPhones ability to autocorrect or hit the key I wanted to hit (it’s already made two mistakes just typing this out).
I thought it was a “me” thing, and “there’s no way a feature like autocorrect or key sensing would regress”.
I was apparently wrong.
I was once blown away by iPhone 8 editing capabilities. The keyboard seemed to work OK (minus swipe-to-type, but that wasn't great on Android either), and using 3D Touch to move cursor and select text was the most pleasant text editing experience, even better than on the desktop (arrow keys and vim hjkl).
And then it was all removed in a software update.
I never understood why Apple discontinued 3D Touch. I agree that it was a very nice typing experience.
3D Touch was a useless gimmick for most users because it wasn’t discoverable. The move cursor feature didn’t disappear btw. It’s now in the space bar.
> I caved to peer pressure. If you don't fix this thing within four months I will switch to your competitor for one maybe even two product cycles.
He sure showed them. The people I know using super old iphones are doing more than their public commitment to buy more apple products as often as they can -- after a brief tolerance break, of course.
I really wish someone could start a legitimate competitor to Apple. They are so bloated and just squeezing service revenue out of us. The M chips are great but the software is so buggy.
Yeah, but it's not really their software that's the moat they rely on. It's a lot more to that. They have incredible branding, Devices may be MID, but at least they make good commercials guys..... Plus, everyone's like sheep. If everyone's getting the latest iPhone, they're going to continue to get the latest iPhone because everyone else is getting the latest iPhone. *Sending dis off of a MacBook with my iPhone 16 in my left pocket btw*
I don't think the devices themselves are mid. My M-series MacBook pro is fantastic. The battery life, suspend resume, the track pad, the audio quality, it's all really good hardware. Name a better laptop; I'll wait.
I’d love to see (it won’t ever happen) what the bug fix for this is. I tried doing what the video said and just typing thumbs up over and over again and I didn’t actually have any trouble.
> see the bug fix
Possibly re-tuning of some LLM parameters? Or forgetting some bad learnings... sounds like it's specific to a small-ish percent of users.
I just typed "thumbs up" ~50x and was not able to reproduce the bug. But, as was pointed out in another thread somewhere, since I don't have 'Predictive Text' enabled maybe that has something to do w/it. So; I enabled 'Predictive Text' and there's the bug. It's consistently misspelling 'thumbs' with any number of different variations.
Disabling 'Predictive Text' seems to correct the bug; however, there must be something in the algorithm that's causing this that Apple does need to fix.
I never have predictive text, autocorrect et al. turned on. I somehow never figured it could work well. To be honest I did not give it a chance, but I'm happy to just always get exactly what I type. Don't remember running into any issues like author of the op article.
Funny thing is theres probably some Apple employees reading this right now kidding themselves into thinking this is an end user problem. It's not - your keyboard is bloody awful now, you made it worse.
> theres probably some Apple employees reading this right now [...] you made it worse.
Apple employees reading this right now: "IDGAF about the keyboard, I made 500k in TC last year."
I used to think the android keyboard(s) were terrible when I switched over to iOS, but now after switching back to a android, it feels leagues ahead of iOS 26's kb
Keep autocorrect on and turn off predictive text. Makes the experience way better.
Is predictive text the one that reaches back and changes correct words that I had already finished typing?
Man, gboard does that on android so much that I wound up installing and using heliboard. It kinda sucks but at least it doesn't "fix" your message after you type everything
Whatever it is, it's bad on GBoard, too, if you possess better than a 6th grade vocabulary.
This helps, but it's not nearly enough, thanks to the terrible (and continually declining) quality of predictive tap zone enlargement for keyboard keys.
One thing you can't fix is that every iPhone and iPad invisibly resizes the keyboard keys as you type.
:(
This is actually a necessary feature for a touchscreen keyboard to feel usable, and it's been in iOS since day one. The problem is that it has gotten not only much worse over time at predicting which tap zones to enlarge, but it also feels more aggressive. For example, tapping the shift button on the iOS keyboard enlarges the Enter/Return key's touch area so much that I am unable to immediately tap the microphone icon to turn off dictation. If I've tapped shift, I need to then wait a second for the predictively-enlarged tap zone to shrink before I can turn off dictation.
I disagree that it's necessary and I wish I could disable it. They even have it enabled on iPads, which are a tad larger than the original iPhone, and which can be used with the official stylus.
"Necessary" was probably too strong a word. I'm definitely no expert so I can only offer anecdotes, but for the first ~decade of iOS, the keyboard felt amazing to use. I felt super fast and typing mistakes were rare. Now I feel like I'm constantly fighting the keyboard to type the letters I actually want to type.
Agree at this point that I would disable it (in its current state) if I could, but when it worked correctly it was a huge boon to typing.
IOS 26 has been a massive dissapointment. I was strong-armed into updating this week with the vulnerability they refused to patch in 18.x, and it's what I would describe as "Gen Z's Vista"
I'm one of the developers of Mister Keyboard. If you want, you can give it a try! Everything essential is completely free, maybe it works out for you.
For something that is as personal as a keyboard, it would be good to know what "Usage data" you are collecting and how it is used. I am eager to switch away from ios keyboard, but I do not trust most developers to have access to what I type. I understand it is "not linked to me", but this is an area where heavy skepticism is warranted.
This is exactly the reason why I haven't looked into other keyboards. Gboard seems like a google-sponsored key logger? Anyone know of some good privacy-focused ones?
The keyboard stuff is really embarrassing. I’ve definitely been making more mistakes in the last few years.
I thought I was just getting more fumbly and it was making me question whether something neurological was going on. (Only "symptoms" were weird issues typing on my phone when I never had these issues on the android devices I'd used prior).
Didn’t you mean “Apple, fix my keyboard before the timer ends or I’m leaving g iPhone”
The website sucks because I had to do work to understand the problem.
HOWEVER, the bug is interesting.
I can't reproduce this bug, but I have a suspicion as to what it is. As pointed out in the linked video the hitbox for buttons changes size based on predicted next letters.
The hitboxes are dynamic based on the most likley next letter. But that changes depends on your typing style. For example my real name is similar but not the same to a common english name. however both auto correct and the dynmaic hitbox allows me to reliably type my name, now.
This took time, but when I recently got a new work phone, I had to train it to accept my name.
TLDR: I don't think its a bug, I think its a learnt behaviour based on your most common words.
With a couple brief exceptions, I've been an iPhone user since 2007. I'm not far from switching to Android myself. I'm not under any illusions that Google doesn't have some serious flaws, in some ways definitely worse than Apple, but from a usability standpoint I do find the keyboard and autocorrect behavior just atrocious on my iPhone.
It starts as annoyance, progresses to frustration, then overt anger at a lack of action from Apple. I'm at that last level now.
They pulled their head out of their ass when the MBP evolved into a frustrating pile of crap, and I think my 14" M2 Max MBP is my favorite laptop ever. So they DO sometimes listen to their users. Now is the time to listen again.
I thought they fixed the bug where autocorrect would add text but repeat one word in the middle so it would look like: “I’m trytrying to”
Been an issue for two years or so. Resetting, all that doesn’t help.
I have recently switched from 7 Plus to 16e. Now I make typos all the time. I still do not know who I should blame primarily, my muscle memory or Apple.
Wow I thought it was just me
I’ve definitely noticed more typing errors
"the orange iPhone was pretty"
Yeah well...
Android keyboards will make you return to iOS in less than a week
You can use gboard on iOS and it's a bit better. But still not as good as Android.
I like it, bookmarked, let's see how this extortion fares
It's so bad. I think it has to do with touch targets because the slide to type is great in my opinion.
Apple: "you're holding it wrong"
I really hope someone at Apple is paying attention.
The text entry experience on iOS 26 really is frustratingly bad. Almost unusable (I’ve been going to the laptop for anything more than a few words).
It’s not just the keyboard (display glitches too), but the keyboard UX is particularly awful.
In the past, it seemed like Apple paid very careful attention to the minute details of timing size, etc. All that seems to have gone out the window with this liquid gas BS.
I keep an iPhone SE 1st gen as a secondary phone. It still has the last best keyboard iOS had. Almost zero mistakes. Probably because no AI and other overoptimizitation BS. Every time I go back to my primary 13 I want to cry.
I am not sure what I just read.
If only there were a viable third option besides Apple and the world's largest advertising company.
There is, you can have an de-googled android.
It works, but very cumbersome. The value add in phones is really services, not the hardware/OS.
I stand by this pledge. I even have a Clicks keyboard to avoid the iPhone one. I have an interesting hypothesis as to why, and it's counterintuitive. The larger the screen gets, the less accurate a touchscreen keyboard is. I picked up an original iPhone and started typing and it was outstanding how accurately and quickly I did.
Let's take an exaggerated example. Surely, a touchscreen keyboard the size of a flatscreen TV is too large. Maybe even the size of a regular computer monitor. So where is the happy spot, and why? I think it's because of our manual error-correction and the software error-correction. On the smaller iPhone keyboard, if I make a mistake, it's obvious and I click the backspace key. There's much less software error-correction on a smaller screen because of a smaller room for error per key. On larger screens, I find that if I touch a key at a certain angle, it will register an adjacent key through the software. I also find that my fingers have to travel farther, and that increases the rate of errors. Not only that, the obsession with decreasing bezel size requires me to hold the phone in weird ways so it doesn't register a swipe from the sides.
Personally, the iPhone 6 was peak iPhone. I find that the obsession with decreasing bezel size is also compulsive because it significantly increases miss-swipes and introduces weird work-arounds like the "notch", "island", or hidden sensors. The flat screen also made the keyboard desirable. It was also slow enough so that the surveillance from the autocorrect wasn't useful but fast enough for everything else.
> But I'd like to think it should mean something to the engineers, UX designers, product people, and whoever else had a hand in building this thing.
It means literally nothing. The people working at Apple now are just there for the paycheck. They push some prompts into an LLM, pick through the output, push something to production that satisfies the acceptance criteria, and move on.
There is no one staying up late doing extensive testing and refinement to get things perfect. There is no one taking pride in the work they’ve done when they push keys on the iOS keyboard. All that has been cut up and distributed through a system of tickets, teams, and managers so that the amount of pride that finally trickles down to engineers is barely more than the pride of taking a big shit.
Actively hostile is a good way of putting in. Absolute dogshit is another no less accurate description.
But I doubt Apple gives a fuck. They're too busy making promos about how much cardboard they're saving per year shipping their dogshit products, or sending their C suite guys to do WSJ interviews about how much they care about privacy and are a premium brand while at the same time working overtime to implement 3rd party ads into their own ecosystem. They just simply aren't at all aligned with the company that existed when Jobs was still around.
don't panic, he's bluffing
What’s really disappointing is that Apple is making money hand over fist, and yet they seemingly make so little effort. Please Apple, for the love of all that is holy, fix cmd-tab, Ctrl-tab, and desktops on the Mac.
Apple's money comes from iPhone hardware and App Store revenue. That's it. Anything that's not directly related to bolstering those profit centers is chopped liver to Apple's business model.
If you're holding out hope for the Mac to be a first-class citizen, you might want to identify how it's making Apple money first.
You would think someone had undergone a lobotomy or is having a stroke until you realise they have an iPhone. The autocorrect is so funny.
That moment when you hit send only to notice right after it's too late that it auto "corrected" a few words of what you said into what it thinks you wanted to say.
agreed, found an old android phone from 10 years ago it was better at typing than the latest (dogshit) iphone keyboard
Google keyboard, anyone?
This explains why my typing has basically turned to shit on my iPhone meanwhile on PC it's been fine. Frustrating!
Apple's keyboard sucks on my iphone too. Everytime the autocorrect fucks up, I swear at tim cook in my head.
"We want to surprise and delight our customers" turned into fuck with and frustrate.
"Oh no. Anyways"
This seem like an odd take. Android has bugs too, you just haven’t used it long enough to notice.
> I caved to the blue bubble pressure
Had me until then. Zero respect for this, frankly.
It’s a joke, just like “Apple, if that’s really your real name”.
Can you elaborate? Is this a glassmorphism reference?
There has been an on-going meme around users using imessage getting messages from other imessage users which appear as one color and messages from android users(or anyone I think?) as another. So people know you are the android user in a group of apple users or whatever.
I did not think any one gave a shit outside of kids.
I have a group of adults in my social circle who won't migrate a group chat to anything other than iMessage so that I can participate. I'm genuinely angry at them for this and angry at Apple for its role in creating the situation.
I just learned about this, too. It turns out that in the US, being an iPhone user is cool and being an Android user is lame, and you can tell who's who in group chats, because the messages that go over iMessage are represented with blue speech bubbles and the rest are in green bubbles.
That's not quite how it works. You can't have a group chat that's mixed iMessage and SMS/MMS.
If an iMessage user creates a group chat where not everyone is using iMessage, then it's MMS. I suppose now it could be RCS if everyone's using a device and carrier that supports RCS, but I haven't kept up with that. MMS has a bunch of limitations relative to any modern internet messaging app, so people don't want to use that.
Some people are also very reluctant to install third-party messaging apps.
In most countries, the most used messenger app is Whatsapp or Wechat or LINE or KakaoTalk or whatever.
In the USA, the most common messenger is iMessage. Unfortunately, unlike all the other apps I named, there's no Android app for it. Instead, if you try to iMessage an android recipient, suddenly iMessage turns into your phone's SMS app (not really sure why, feels like that should be a separate app), and half the features go away.
You can no longer remove people from group chats (if any 1 of them has an android), you get strange messages sometimes, you don't get typing indicators. If they use RCS, and then go on a vacation to a country without RCS, suddenly your chat can break in very strange ways.
As a result, it's very common in the US for people to be ostracized from iPhone friend groups due to not having an iPhone.
When you use dating apps, if eventually you trade numbers and your partner is a green bubble, that's usually enough to end any chances at a relationship. Your family will remove you from the family group chat after the first low-resolution group photo.
A company made a solution to this called Beeper Mini, allowing people to have blue bubbles while using android phones, and Apple of course immediately shut it down because Apple wants the iOS club in the US to have this tangible social benefit, of you being able to have a wider dating pool, being able to talk to your family, and so on. https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/10/apple-confirms-it-shut-...
It's a truly bizarre state of affairs.
I’m honestly not sure which is more dystopian: the American blue/green bubble divide, or the situation in Spain where my doctor sends blood test results over WhatsApp, delivery drivers call me on WhatsApp, and couriers ask me to share my live location because they can’t find my building. Nearly all day-to-day communication is funnelled through a single Meta-owned channel.
I think the least dystopian is a semi-government owned app, like WeChat in china.
iMessage is also controlled by a private company, and by my estimate, one of the most evil ones. Apple and Google are the two companies most complicit in feeding highly addictive and exploitative gambling apps to kids via their app stores, and they both profit massively off of it via 30% cuts.
The least dystopian communication is email. Plenty secure, you are able to set-up your own server, you can communicate with everyone regardless of their OS or client. Rich text, photo support, video support. Open protocols.
A sort of email but then for short messages would be awesome.
That's got to be the most dystopian one of them all! It's government owned, so conspiracy theory is that the CCP can see everything you write and hear and see in the app. Whatsapp is end to end encrypted, so meta knows your metadata, so they can show you ads, but that's tiny dystopia compared to the government of the country you live in reading and listening to everything you do on your phone
Wanting to have iMessage so your messages show up blue instead of green when you text iPhone people
In chat on the iphone, ios users see fellow ios users with blue bubbles, but see android peasants with green bubble. There's social pressure to "be blue like everyone else" and the author caved in.
The social pressure is also technological. RCS integration was a big improvement but it's still not up to par.
It's not "ha, greens are poor", it's "android arnold can't be in the group chat because it'll fuck it all up"
The tiny company behind Signal, and a bunch of even smaller companies making messengers, manage to make their app work just fine on iOS and android (and most of them on desktop too, some even in the browser).
For some reason, the (second) richest company on the planet, which has a messenger app, is incapable of making an android app for their messenger and chat protocol.
There's a technological issue, and it's nothing to do with RCS or SMS, it's that iMessage for some reason doesn't have an android version.
It's a business decisions to do vendor lock in. "Free market"
It's not a technical issue, iMessage, whatsapp and Signal can all internally communicate just fine. It's a corporation trying to exert monopolistic pressure to box out competitors by forcing additional social pressure.
Why does everyone describe this wrong, every single time this comes up? It’s the consistency of the wrongness that confuses me.
No, you do not see others’ messages as blue or green. You see your own as blue or green to indicate what kind of messages you are sending.
If it was ever otherwise, it certainly hasn’t been for many years.
Ah yes, previously, the much-submitted, but took 2 months to get any traction, video:
iPhone Typos? It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken [video]
it's so infuriating how bad I am at typing now.
>i'm weak
>I caved to the blue bubble pressure
This is basically how I view iphone users. They buy an inferior product because Apple exploited their lack of status. From moms, to teens, to low-middle income people... Heck, its even infected some perpetually single techies who are so insecure they buy the inferior Apple product.
These companies that exploit such psychology is disgusting. From Apple to Nintendo to Disney, there is something that feels immoral about how they market to their customers.
And you bet they have contracted out some marketing team to patrol every social media to downvote/upvote/comment as 'reputation management'...But hey they contracted them, plausible deniability.
I switched to iPhone for battery life. Additionally, Apple isn’t an advertising company like Google.
However, I agree that Apple should cooperate with Google on messaging. Signal is so much better, but it’s hard to get people to switch.
Aren't all the major manufacturers clustered around roughly the same battery life?
Sure, there may be an hour or two's difference between equivalent models from different vendors, but it's nothing like the Garmin vs Apple watch situation - they're all in the same "it'll probably last a weekend, but definitely not a week" ballpark.
If you don't have concerns over security, don't care about AI, don't need niche apps, don't need tech/nerd apps, don't worry about vendor lock-in, I can totally see caring about battery life.
So how many days does your battery last? No that isnt a good question, How often do you run out of battery? No that isnt a good question, android users aren't running out of battery.
How did Apple convince you this mattered?
> Additionally, Apple isn’t an advertising company like Google.
What does "advertising company" mean? Apple does in-fact sell advertisements[0], and relies very heavily on marketing to convey their value proposition.
[0] https://ads.apple.com/app-store/help/ad-placements/0082-sear...
> > Additionally, Apple isn’t an advertising company like Google.
What does "advertising company" mean? Apple does in-fact sell advertisements[0], and relies very heavily on marketing to convey their value proposition.
That's how good they are advertising, they built a brand around how they don't use advertising.
Impotent rage if I ever saw it. Where is the capacity of feeling shame or embarrassment?
I did a lot of classic Mac programming in its day. I knew how to react to the events, and how to use a Color QuickDraw window’s RefCon, and how to mark parts of a window for redraw.
I don’t understand how it works internally anymore. I mean I can program it, but none of the way linear logic used to apply.
I’m concerned that it’s internally very overcomplicated, because that’s how software is supposed to be designed now, but the “simplicity” is like a second system effect. A whole layer that makes clicking a button appear to work, when really there is no code flow that resembles the process.
Terrorizing Apple with a countdown threat is probably not going to accomplish much.
You could try installing Gboard (https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/gboard-the-google-keyboard/id1...), or SwiftKey (https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/microsoft-swiftkey-ai-keyboard...)...and there are probably other options.
It may be even more obvious, but there are settings in general/keyboard that you can toggle.
I noticed a bit of a shift in the stock typing experience, but I adapted and it's fine.
Of course, the first party keyboard doesn't work, you should use the ones that definitely do not phone home to either Google or Microsoft.
Of course regular window management doesn't just work out of the box, you should install one of the many different window managers on macOS.
I was under the impression that to get a product that just works, I can buy Apple hardware, right?
The sad part is, that Apple used to make somewhat stable, functional software. I started with the iPhone 3 and a bit later with Mac OS Snow Leopard. It all started when Mr Cook decided to serve the shareholders, instead of focusing on Apple's core values. The software went downhill in such a speed in just a few years. And moving out of the ecosystem is a painful, if not unbearable, task that barely anyone loves to do. At least I can't even think about moving back to Android.
I recently tested Swiftkey after Typewise is sadly abandoned. It's sooooo much better than the stock keyboard. Not only is the auto-correct working incredibly well (garbage like witjoit is correctly transformed to without, which Apple Keyboard can't), Swiftkey also manages multi-language typing astonishingly well. Last but not least, I can customize it. I am also not signed in to my account, so no settings or whatever is stored on Microsoft servers.
Telling anybody to install third party shit to fix first party shit should have been a hint to you that what you're saying is laughable.
Throwing random nonsense about 'general/keyboard' settings (that don't exist, btw) because you yourself can't think of anything specific should have been another.
The keyboard, specifically the Autocorrect, is fucked and has progressively worsened over the past 5 years. It's atrocious today. This is a first party problem that shouldn't need 3rd party solutions, end of story.