alt Hacker NewsFix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android
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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.
Reminds me of some research I once did in order to reduce typos on low-end Firefox OS devices. The capacitive touchscreen had horrible limitations, especially for typing. It had bands across the screen where it could only detect one finger at a time. Once you picked up typing speed it ended up in similar misses you see in the YouTube video, albeit even worse (you end up with a letter between your two fingers).
Eventually found two simple but effective ways to improve autocorrect/typing performance. First build a personalized and adaptive touch model trained on the device itself, mainly to fix simple typos. Second to fix low end screen limitations, use simple heuristics based on touchstart, touchmove and touchend [1].
Anyways, I'm no iPhone user but interesting to read. It would drive me nuts.
[0]: https://www.brianweet.com/2015/03/24/implement-touch-model.h... [1]: https://www.brianweet.com/2015/04/08/low-end-touchscreen-lim...
I almost switched to pixel before getting my new 17 pro max. I feel like im just constantly fighting the ios keyboard or having to type so slowly and carefully but it still is screwing up. I have a pixel 8a and Im shocked how quickly I can type on it while constantly tip toeing and fighting the ios keyboard.
It's ironic because my first iphone i used was a 4s and i was pleasantly surprised how nice it was to type on after using samsung phones. Now it's like the tables have turned. Im constantly fighting the ios keyboard. Sometimes when i tap and get the wrong character i will move my thumb to where i would have had to type to get that wrong character and i know for sure i did not move my thumb that far away from the character i actually wanted and thought i tapped on. Im honestly shocked how bad typing on ios has become. i got a pixel 8a just to amuse myself and i was again totally surprised how fast and easy the typing was. something is going rotten inside apple.
even controlling when the keyboard appears and when you want it to go away is frustrating on ios. i find the little universal down arrow on the pixel phones much better.
I have a lot of issues with dictation as well which I feel has gotten much worse as it gets "smarter." It used to take literal dictation & I could say "comma" "period" etc. to insert punctuation. Now it tries to guess when commas or full stops should be added and it's horrible. If I pause to take a breath it puts a comma or period, sometimes entirely changing the meaning of the sentence.
Recently I said "I ran into this too earlier on the project" and it wrote "I run into this tube earlier on the project." So now I'm running into a tube... because this makes more sense than "too"? And it can never write the names of immediately family members I text about every single day, and it has 5th grade vocabulary so if I said I demurred or that something was germane or any other word beyond the 500 most common words it butchers it.
What I want: 1. let me handle the punctuation manually 2. assume a broader vocabulary 3. let me specify how people's names are pronounced!! How are we this many years in and it still misinterprets my wife's name on a daily basis?
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.
It will be hard, but I’m transitioning out of Apple ecosystem regardless of whether they improve.
Just like Windows 11, I get ads whether I want them or not - just got a push notification for a new financial product (!!!) despite going out of my way to opt out.
iOS 26 made my 16 Pro, practically brand new, feel slow. I upgraded because my 13 mini was slow, and I chose Apple in the first place because they had some of the best performing phones (especially cpu/gpu; they always had less ram but before llm it didn’t matter).
The keyboard is horrible, but I don’t trust Google or Microsoft keyboards either; I think my next phone will be graphene; just waiting to see who their new hardware partner is.
I loved Apple TV because it was fast; under 26 it is slow.
I chose Mac for best in class hardware. That is unfortunately unchanged; really hoping snapdragon X 2 elite has good Linux support.
My Apple Watch, despite doing nothing new it didn’t used to do, has also become slow and annoying, and its battery was never as good as it should have been. When I jump to Android I think garmin is probably the best choice, but maybe there are good wearables now. Unfortunately Android doesn’t have its act together re:built in health data database.
Replacing Athlytic and keeping my history will be one of the biggest challenges in the transition.
Competitors unfortunately still have huge blind spots even if some of the core experiences are better.
It's not so bad over here in android world. If you don't like the keyboard you can just pick a different keyboard.
+1. From the original post, I found this video to be particularly damning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo
Does anyone have an explanation for how something like this passes QC at a company with the resources of Apple? Is this video misrepresenting something?
> The iOS keyboard has been broken since at least iOS 17...But I came crawling back to iOS because I'm weak and the orange iPhone was pretty
So the keyboard has been broken since iOS 17 (>2 years [1]), and to show your displeasure, you bought an iPhone Pro?
Your threat of leaving in 3 months rings hollow. All Apple has to do is verbally say things will get better and, if they can't even do that, you only commit to leaving for two years.
If you want to leave, just leave. I am confident that blue bubble pressure will exist in 3 months. I am also confident that the iPhone 18 Pro will be pretty. If a nice color and blue bubbles are enough to keep you in the iOS ecosystem today, why should anyone believe you will leave tomorrow?
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/06/ios-17-makes-iphone-m...
The most frustrating one for me is how in safari in the address bar the keyboard changes and drops '.' to the right of the spacebar in the exact spot I usually hit the spacebar with my thumb (because I'm just tapping the edge, not stretching to the middle of the screen).
This means in the modern mode of using the address bar as search, and not to type a domain manually (which is what I believe most people are also doing) I just end up with a search string separated by dots which Google can evidently deal with but is just very annoying.
I see threads on the internet going back years complaining about this issue and yet there's no configuration to change it. It would be such a simple and easy fix (like, just give me the regular keyboard, nothing special). It's a bit baffling since it seems such a glaring everyday UX problem.
> 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.
I agree that this behavior is 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.
> 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.
I emphasize with the author: switching from Android to iOS was an abysmal change in terms of keyboard quality. I installed GBoard which is way better but the experience is not the same as with a default keyboard.
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.
Arg. What's the quippy internet adage for this?
Where someone (traditionally in a FOSS project's support / bug report / feature request pages) posts some angrygram of "Fix my pet peeve OR ELSE YOUR PROJECT IS DEAD TO ME!!11!!one!11!!!"
The only thing that's coming to mind is "emotional blackmail" but that's not it...
> and I caved to the blue bubble pressure
Ha! I feel this. I was a long time Android user since the original G1 (aka HTC Dream). Was a strictly Pixel phone user for my last 4 phones. Recently jumped over to iPhone. For the most part I’m enjoying it.
There are minor things, like the keyboard being annoying to type with. For instance, when I’m typing something into the URL bar of Safari, for some reason, I’m constantly hitting the period key next to the space bar, and I feel like I’m not anywhere close to it.
I also find it confusing how to dismiss the keyboard. Android had a very clear icon for this, on iOS it’s just a checkmark which is a little misleading in my opinion.
On iOS, speech to text is pretty good, but I have to annunciate clearly, where I felt that android was a little bit more forgiving.
Another issue I’ve noticed is that I don’t think the GPS (or maybe it’s just Google maps) is as accurate as it is on android. On iOS, if I’m on a highway it sometimes thinks I’m on the shoulder road next to the highway. So I’m constantly being rerouted to get back on the highway. I felt like I didn’t have that on android.
Back to the blue bubble thing though. Being the one and only android user amongst my friends and even my wife, I was always hearing about how I ruined the chat. I didn’t realize until switching over to iOS just how integrated everything is and what you can do in the chat when everybody else is on iOS, like editing previous messages, being able to answer messages via your Messages app on your laptop, and of course, not having images and videos getting compressed terribly. Although RCS chat improved that more recently.
One thing I do love is that automation and shortcuts is something that’s natively part of the system and that I don’t to install some app like Tasker or whatever the more modern version of that is.
At this point, I really like both of the OSes. What made me actually finally switch over was that everyone I knew who had an iPhone would have it for like five or more years and I was going through pixel phones every two years. I got tired of spending all that money.
For what it’s worth, swipe to type works just fine on the native keyboard, for those who didn’t know.
Agree about many of the other bugs / issues.
I've been staying on iOS 17 and macOS 15 because I just don't see iOS/macOS 26 as an upgrade in any way. This is the first time I haven't been running a beta or getting a day one upgrade for Apple operating systems. I can't imagine moving away from iPhone or a MacBook, however if they want to avoid OS fragmentation and security issues caused by users like me refusing to upgrade, 27 better address these UX and stability issues.
Yeah, text editing on iOS has gotten progressively worse and worse. It's astonishing how much it has degraded in usability compared to the earlier versions of iOS. "It just works" is no longer a phrase I would ever consider saying about iPhones or Apple products in general. Pretty disappointing as they used to be quite an inspiration for quality software design.
"I caved to the blue bubble pressure"
The fact that this is a real thing is ridiculous. Say no and move on with life. This is the type of freedom that is actually freeing.
The actually issue according to another comment [0] is this[1]:
> Around iOS 17 (Sept. 2023) Apple updated their autocorrect to use a transformer model which should've been awesome and brought it closer to Gboard (Gboard is a privacy terror but honestly, worth it).
> What it actually did/failed to improve is make your phone keyboard:
> Suck at suggesting accurate corrections to misspelled words
> "Correct" misspelled words with an even worse misspelling
> "Correct" your correctly spelled word with an incorrectly spelled word
Which makes me wonder: is Transformer model good with manipulating short texts and texts with errors at all ? It's kind of known that open weight LLMs don't perform well for CJK conversion tasks[2], and I've also been disappointed by their general lack of typo tolerances myself as well. They're BAD for translating ultrashort sentences and singled out words as well[3]. They're great for vibecoding, though.
Which makes me think, are they usable for anything under <100 bytes at all? Does it seem like they have a minimum usable input entropy or something?
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006171
1: https://thismightnotmatter.com/a-little-website-i-made-for-a...
2: The process of yielding "㍑" from "rittoru"
3: No human can translate, e.g. "translate left" in isolation correctly as "move left arm", but LLMs seem to be more all over the place than humans
> 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.
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
I thought this was just me!
Every now and then, I feel like I simply cannot tap the correct keys. Things I do from muscle memory are jumping to the next letter over. This isn't just a temporary problem. It lasts for days/weeks.
Then suddenly, it's fine again.
> 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.
I love how diverse humans are, this is literally an alien sentence to me, it's actually impossible for me to conceptualize. I'm here with my Pixel 7 mourning my Pixel 4a, which was exactly the same to me as every other phone but had the fingerprint unlock sensor on the back which is the only meaningfully differentiating feature. I guess can imagine a non-boring phone like one of those gamer phones, but I can't imaging wanting one, and I can't imagine a phone that's exciting in a way I care about. The idea of finding a phone boring enough to want to switch from it though is just crazy to me. Is scrolling instagram and texting people and googling directions somehow different and exciting on iOS?
(save i guess i'd probably be pretty excited if a company was giving me root by default and not having banking apps break because of it)
There’s one specific thing driving me insane: it corrects “we’re” to “were” and “we’ll” to “well” EVERY TIME. It even did it while writing this comment. If I go into the symbols menu and find an apostrophe and type it in IT MEANS I MEANT TO PUT IT THERE
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.
Im convinced its all planned to force users to upgrade. The “7 years of updates” selling point is just a trojan horse to install a newer iOS that makes the product run like garbage.
Id honestly prefer never to update than get these bogus “security updates, features and fixes”
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I watched the video and immediately tested it on my iphone. It's true?? About 50% of the time, typing "Thumb" resulted in "Thimb" or "Thjmb", while the visual feedback on the keyboard showed u being pressed instead!
Other comments here say Predictive Text is the culprit, but I already had that off. I also turned off Slide to Type. Same result.
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 always imagine employees from the vendor (in this case Apple) reading the blog or this thread. They’re here, lurking. I see you! I see you in the shadows!
Anyway, they know things we don’t, for both good (real constraints that users don’t see) and bad (fake constraints from bad internal decisions).
But dear Apple employee reading this: if you have fought the good fight, I appreciate your attempt, please keep it up. If you didn’t, we’re having a keyboard experience that you shouldn’t be proud of, no matter what the internal corporate logic maze you are caught up in.
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.
> 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.
If your decision-making is this poor, you cannot say for sure that you're leaving iPhone.
Reading everyone’s comments it looks like there is a lot of rant with current iPhone state. I’m also feeling last releases introduced huge regressions. I bought an iPhone 16 seen many issues including keyboard ones.
I do hope Apple’s iOS 27 will be focused on fixes and optimizations. Apple Intelligence isn’t useful if the basic experience is mediocre
—— Sent from my iPhone sorry for the autocorrect
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"
Fix your website before the day ends or I'm not upvoting
Not sure if it's gotten worse in the last release for English-only users, but for us writing in and often mixing multiple languages in the same message, the spelling correction has gotten way better in the last releases.
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!
My guess is that the 'wrong letter entered' bug is by design.
The keyboard animation happens on the touchdown event, whereas the letter is entered into the text box on the touchup event.
Between the two, more information might emerge about the touch - for example the exact shape of the touched area, and movement during the touch, etc.
I would guess the keyboard sees a down in one spot, and an up in a slightly different spot which falls into another letter.
It’s also reading your inner thoughts via neurallink
Keep autocorrect on and turn off predictive text. Makes the experience way better.
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.
> 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'm switching to Android for good. (Good = at least 2 calendar years)
wow, such a commitment. Not only it's as said only one customer but it is a customer who thinks "for good" is just skipping one phone. Which means she/he usually buys phone every single year.
What a bold and committed move. It's astonishing...
I tried to call Tim Apple to complain about the shitty keyboard on my phone — here's what happened:
I thought it was just me… like maybe my hand eye coordination was failing as I aged or maybe my dexterity was decreasing. Its been driving me absolutely nuts since i upgraded my phone a few months ago.
I'm thinking of switching to iPhone after always having and Android. All these negative posts are really making me reconsider though.
@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...