Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

When the iPhone launched, Apple talked a lot about how the typing system worked.

What I remember is that it sounded like pretty simple lookups. As you typed, the software compared your word to, essentially, a weighted dictionary to guess what you were going to type next.

If you typed “b” it was flummoxed. But if you typed “behav” it knew the next letter was almost certainly going to be “e” or “i” (for behavior). It may have been more complicated than that, but probably not much. It was 2007 and the phone CPU was not powerful.

One interesting thing I remember is that they said the phone enlarged the touch targets for highly predicted next letters. For example it would be easier to type an “e” than a “w” after you had typed “behav”, because the tap boundary expanded around the “e”. Cool stuff!

And if you did type behavw and hit space, it would autocorrect to behave.

At some point I recall Apple announcing that they had switched autocorrect to a full machine learning implementation. Rather than a simple deterministic look-up, it was trained on a huge corpus of text, and reads the whole chunk of what you’ve written so far to make predictions. Everyone does this now, it’s how they deliver the (incredibly annoying and stupid IMO) one-tap suggestions for email and text replies. “Thanks!” “Noted.” “I’ll get right on that.”

In my memory, that’s when typing got a lot more annoying on iPhones. The quality of suggestions went either down or weirdo or both. For example it just tried to sub-in “Quaker” for “quality” in the previous sentence. Why??

Wow, thank you for posting this, I was just thinking this!

Most people here focus on autocorrect, which isn't such a big problem for me since I'm used to having it off.

But what the hell is wrong with the cursor placement? It is so incredibly broken, it has a mind of its own, and never goes to where I mean to put it.

Simply tapping on text puts it in the wrong places, but holding and dragging cursor or holding and dragging on the spacebar to move it also works terribly, somehow it never does what I need it to.

Selecting text is just as terrible.

It's also impossible to put the cursor in the middle of a word. WHY NOT? Just put the cursor where I tap! It is so easy to do on Android.

I find it much easier to type and move cursor on my Galaxy S9 than on my iPad mini, despite the iPad having a much bigger screen.

I've been using iPhone >10 years and cannot agree more. One example: from iOS 7 (that flat UI), I began to make much more frequent typos than ever before. Before that, I didn't make much typo before the update even without looking at the keyboard but not anymore after the update. What I heard is that Apple did extensive studies on usability of virtual keyboard when it's launching iPhone and as a result keyboard visual on the screen was intentionally off from the actual layout based on actual typing patterns. And for some reason it seems they scrapped that idea, or at least changed it significantly. Don't know why. Maybe I'm an outlier and everyone else is happier with the change.

But this is just one example; almost every 2~3 years, I've experienced a noticeable level of degradation of my typing accuracy, though not as much as the iOS 7 change. I wonder if there's anyone else whose experience matches to mine.

Try disabling slide to type. I don't use it, so if it's on, it introduces inaccuracies.

So it's not just me. I went from a 5 to a 6 to a 12 mini. My typing is horrible on the 6 or the 12. IDK if it's the screen size or what. It's not about getting used to it; it's been years for me. When I occasionally pick up the old 5, it's instantly easy for me to type again. So it's definitely the phone's fault, not mine. I'm 26 years old. However, the cursor was always impossible to control, no change there.

Also, it's stupid that the new phones don't have headphone jacks, the gestures they used to replace the home button are wack, and the 5 was the perfect size. The sole reason I stopped using it was AT&T dropped support. Usability was more important than CPU/camera/whatever strength.

It's not just you. I'm in my early 20's and I've noticed typing has gotten considerably worse over time. Me and my friends used to be able to text each other without looking at our phones while holding a conversation, but now it's a lot harder. I've had to rely on slide-to-type more and more instead.

I switched from Android to iOS a year ago. My first annoyance was the autocorrect, it was slightly worse, especially switching languages a lot, but what was unbearable was that iOS would often correct my last typed word AFTER I HIT SEND. That is a deadly sin imho. I've since turned autocorrect on again because I guess I'm just not precise enough, I try to always end with a space now. I still gets me every now and then though.

My name is not an English word and it’s been years but the phones (3 iPhones) have never been able to predict it correctly ever. They always predict some English word — even longer and shorter. I must have typed it a trillion times on my phone by now. But no, still not. It’s the same name on my iCloud and hence on my phone. In contact book obviously. In all the email accounts I’ve added. I have tried correcting it and accepting the suggestion in quotes. Doesn’t work. But no.

It's not you: it's got worse. My work phone was recently upgraded to an iPhone 12 and it's way worse for typing than the 6S it replaced.

Lots of typos, and if you hold the phone slightly wrong you end up with it not responding because the edge of one of your fingers will be in contact with the touch sensitive area so it registers as a multitouch. I have big hands with long fingers so this is hard to avoid whilst maintaining a firm grip on the phone. Super annoying.

I imagine the latter could be mitigated to some extent with a case but the phone is big enough already without bulking it up by adding a case. (I have tried cases before - not a fan at all.)

Not just you :) It's even worse if you use more than one language.

I regularly use both Romanian and English, sometimes in the same sentence and definitely in the same chat app to different recipients.

On old versions of iOS the checker eventually caved in and accepted my language mix no matter what language I had set the keyboard to.

These days it's really insane. Yesterday it managed to capitalize 3 words in the middle of an all Romanian sentence with the keyboard set to RO. No idea why, neither RO nor EN capitalize anything in the middle of a sentence and I don't have a German keyboard acivated.

The suggestions seem mostly useless as well. Even when it gets the language right.

I use SwiftKey. I was skeptical about swipe typing at first, but it has completely won me over. I would struggle going back to regular typing now.

I am often communicating in two different languages at the same time and SwiftKey can handle suggestions without breaking a sweat. Apple has come out with their own swipe keyboard and I gave it a shot, but it is nowhere near good enough.

Specifically, the dual language suggestions are essentially non-existent and as far as I remember, the current language of typing was relatively front and center on the keyboard (there was a dropdown button to switch languages) instead of something the keyboard picks up from context like SwiftKey does. It also felt kind of ugly compared to SwiftKey.

But since Apple came out with their own swipe keyboard and as of recent I've read some articles about them planning to nerf the 3rd party keyboard APIs, I expect SwiftKey will pack up shop at some point. I just hope by that time the Apple swipe keyboard is usable, because I'll get arthritis from the regular keyboard with the amount of retyping one has to do while using it.

Totally agree about cursor scrolling. Half the time, it has no idea where my finger is.

Since I discovered Apple’s slide-to-type[0], I rarely have to key the letters, since the algo guesses more accurately than when I actually use individual keystrokes.

Also, with stt, the delete erases the whole word, so corrections are faster, too.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/how-to-use-the-iphones-new-...

I’ve changed my keyboard settings and am very happy with the iPhone keyboard after readjusting. My settings:

Auto Capitalization: On

*Auto-Correction: Off

Check Spelling: On

Enable Caps Lock: On

*Predictive: Off

Smart Punctuation: On[1]

*Slide to Type: Off

Character Preview: On

“.” Shortcut: On

The ones with an asterisk make the biggest difference, and you may have to readjust to not having crazy touch targets.

[1] I like the look of “” vs "", personally, but it’s good to know regardless that it does this because it won’t work if you are typing a sting literal, lol.

With the new UI updates here are a few things that I find help.

• 1. Turning ON haptics in the keyboard section

• 2. Turn OFF the “suggestions”

• 3. Teach the autocorrect what I want to type. (Correct the same word a few times and you will trigger machine learning)

• 4. Turn keyboard sound OFF

• 5. Grab the cursor directly, don’t use the “spacebar trick” unless you’re going to move to the front or end of an input box (treat it like PGUP/PGDWN)

I've always used MessagEase (both on Android and iPhone). It is a keyboard layout that was originally designed for the Palm Pilot, and it is optimised for typing with one finger. I don't use any sort of autocompletion, yet I'm usually the fastest typist in the room. More info: http://www.exideas.com/ME/index.php

I wish there was an autocorrect for obvious errors, not changing context of a word like hell -> he'll, well -> we'll, nickel -> Nicole (this is a weird one), and many more. Better yet, it should just underline the word and let me manually correct it like software used to before everyone tried to do ai nonsense. Apparently that red underline is part of the OS but I don't recall actually seeing it.

Yes, I absolutely agree with you. It is WAY worse than it has ever been. What you described is exactly what I have been plagued with... (I never thought I was messing up, because it was such a DRASTICALLY different experience)

In general, a lot of things calibrated for the generation of users after 2010 lost something.

I assume for the keyboard, it's focusing on making it easy for the general population to express their day to day thinking, which makes sense. But if you are using more diverse words than the general population, more complicated phrasing, technical jargon, or multiple languages, the keyboard will fight you.

It's also true for google search results quality, youtube suggestions, UI that electron apps expose and so on.

I can clearly see I'm neither a market nor a technical target for a lot of people creating products today.

Definitely and unequivocally getting worse. Seems to be the trend on most consumer devices. The latest interface on the Kindle, for instance, verges on unusable. Whoever signed off on that should be fired.

Yep! It’s so incredibly hard now. My error rate is extremely high and the prosperity of the iPhone to change things I’ve intended to type, and then do it three times in a row when I’m trying to force a specific word, drives me mad.

I feel like something changed with autocorrect and the default correction is often wrong. And then sometimes I see myself getting a word auto corrected 3 times before I type it in a way that’s corrected properly, or I need to select the right suggestion manually. It feels like autocorrect stopped looking at the whole sentence for context and often just corrects to something that doesn’t make any sense. It didn’t use to be like that I think, but it’s all subjective feelings.

They need to seriously reconsider how fast interfaces change. Far too often I go to click on the right word suggested only for it to then change the word right before the click. Seems to happen in many contexts though.

I distinctly remember being blown away by typing on an iPod touch when it first launched: it seemed almost impossible to make a mistake. The keys plus whatever other software (predictive text?) worked incredibly well.

Now I’m on an SE2 and have typos constantly. I really thought it was just me, somehow.

THANK YOU. I thought I was going insane. This shit is broken. Wow.

I played with a friend's Pixel a few weeks ago and I was surprised by how much better the typing experience was. Especially so if you have set up multiple languages. Support for non-mainstream languages is a joke on iPhone. Even the Google keyboard for iOS is shit, but I can't blame that one on Apple.

I can't justify changing my phone now, but I'm highly considering my next phone to be an Android.

Thank you for asking. It’s definitely worse. I keep wishing there was a way to roll back or trial new keyboard behavior engines. This experience is powered by a lot of data, none of which we can see or edit. If I could go in and unlearn some things it’s learned, that’d be nice. Safelist. Blocklist. So many things to tinker with, out of reach. It’s really sad because it’s the essence of accessibility.

I turned off autocorrect a few years back, and noticed no change in recent years with that turned off. But the autocorrect experience was very bad and in my view caused more errors than it fixed

It’s not just you. They keep making changes that aren’t intuitive or wanted and never revert them. Gboard is pretty much the same. Things like guessing proper names even if I didn’t touch the shift bar and with the iPhone keyboard I absolutely hate that it changes words I’ve finished swiping even though I have autocorrect off. It spends more time trying to guess what I meant than the letters I manually type or glide type either way. Don’t even get me started on text selection on here. I miss good old Swype so much. I guess if you can’t beat them, then buy them out and shut them down. I keep swearing that I’m going to Velcro one of those small Bluetooth handheld keyboards on the back of my phone case.

It's autocorrect that kills me - feels like they've got a boolean check[0] backwards, because my iPhone is constantly switching its/it's, well/we'll, ill/I'll and others to the wrong version.

[0] - obviously there's no such code for autocorrect, I imagine it's just some AI soup now

I've felt this way for a really long time with touchscreen keyboards in general. I'm pretty sure I'd be overall faster when taking into account accuracy with my old 9-button dumb phone and no autocorrect. I used to be _really_ fast typing on those things, and could do so without looking at the screen to make sure my fingers were going where I thought they were. I had actually considered trying to find an Android phone featuring physical buttons (9 buttons, not a full keyboard) for this reason.

Vent: I'm on Android and still haven't seen a well done cursor scroll. It usually requires me to select the position accurately which is PITA. I wish there was a simple way to do that.

I was using an iOS 6 device as a daily driver until April, 2022, then moved to iOS 15.

The typing experience on iOS 6, and cursor placement/word selection, is so much better than iOS 15. I hate typing on my iOS 15 device. The whole “hold the spacebar” mechanic is inferior to how cursor positioning worked in earlier versions.

(I had a short stint using a “burner” Android phone back in September and that did make me pine for iOS. Even iOS 15’s keyboard was better than whatever Android version that phone was using.)

Best response here is disable slide to type and maybe predictive text: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33257455

Another approach is to murmur to your phone -- the voice to text has gotten remarkably sound. I see lots of people press the Siri button and literally murmur sotto voce, texting paragraphs impeccably much faster than typing.

Agree with everything, and additionally I keep getting off-by-1-key typos that I didn't have years ago. Especially (for some reason) when trying to type space or backspace.

I hear you. I’ve been on iPhones since the 4 and always typed with autocorrect turned off. When swipe-to-type finally came out I was stoked, but it constantly screws things up. “To” instead of “too” or vice-versa, it’s never the one I actually want (and “of” vs “off” as well, they need to work on these types of pairs), “s” instead of “a”, “o” instead of “I”, apostrophes for words I’m trying to pluralize. And while I can’t verify, my theory is that words with negative connotations are downweighted. I mean good luck ever getting an actual curse word out of it, but I’ve also noticed it with plenty of other words.

ETA: selecting misspelled words to choose replacement seems completely broken to me. 99% of the time I can’t even tap it to select even though it’s underlined in red.

The SE was the best phone I ever had, and even though the screen was smaller, I rarely made typos. Copying and pasting text was a breeze.

I can't even tell how I'm supposed to select text correctly on my new iPhone. I think I need to look up a YouTube tutorial.

I’ve been having the exact same issues and thought it was just me.

Thanks for putting words to it and posting it.

I have used both iPhone and Android and the typing experience is one thing that is way better on Android in my experience.

I feel exactly the same way, but I'm getting older too, so it could be age. I doubt it, though. My phone keyboard frustrates the shit out of me, and I come to dread doing ANYTHING with it.

When I had a Nokia with a hardware keyboard, I could write at 90wpm with zero typos without even looking at it. It was phenomenal. Now? Every second letter is a fat finger, auto-correct gets it wrong every other word, and it's a frustrating ordeal trying to move the cursor to exactly where I want it to fix it.

It undoubtedly reduces the number of messages I send because it's such a draining experience.

Autocorrect has always been problematic - there are loads of websites devoted to such fails [0]

You've got three basic options:

- disable autocorrect and see just how bad a typist you really are (related: setup your own autocorrect shortcuts)

- use a different keyboard (Grammarly is one popular choice (though I don't use it anymore on mobile...I too often use my phone where LTE is spotty))

- type slower to not plow past the autocorrect options

-----------

[0] https://www.qwant.com/?q=autocorrect+fail

[Typed on an iPhone]

I think this may be false memories. The iPhone keyboard was utterly miraculous back in 2008 and was improved upon with software revisions and larger screens.

I really think that 14 years later we’ve all forgotten how magical it is that capacitive touch keyboards work as well as they do. Now that we no longer see it as magic we have less patience for it whenever it does the wrong thing.

As far as I can tell, typing on it right now, the current keyboard seems to me as good as it has ever been.

I just wish I could make iOS turn off the stupid "." shortcut they attach to the spacebar. All my google searches look like "how.do i.find.a better.phone"?

Oh how I miss force/3d touch.

With it, the spacebar trick worked on the entire keyboard, and even text selection was possible by pressing harder to start/stop selection.

As an android user, I thought it was just me that was unable to type on iOS, relieved to hear that I'm not alone.

But also, I've noticed that typing on Android has gotten worse too as phone sizes went up. I make noticeably more typos on my >5inch pixel devices than I ever did on my <5inch nexus devices. It's still far better than iOS, but I would've expected larger screens to equal better typing experience.

If machine learning worked, my iPhone could take a long string of letters and see that I’m invariably putting an “n” between words where a space should be and fix it for me.

Typing on my iPhone is my worst daily tech experience.

My worst weekly tech experience is my Amazon FireTV needing to be rebooted every time my cable internet blinks. That it can’t recover gracefully, like every other device in the house — including Amazon Echos — mystifies me.

I noticed it too. Somehow, typing on earlier iOS-es produced much less mistakes. I also remember some version where it broke substantially, and I realized that just over a week or so (well, another explanation is I got old that week). Now it’s unbearable and I often leave my typos in chats as is, giving up after 2-3 attempts, or immediately because I foresee the struggle.

I also tried an android phone (and gboard on ios). Same shitty input, but better correction, especially for qwerty-typos. Sadly, the board itself feels like shit and I returned to apple one, plus I don’t trust google to handle my input pii/ads-wise.

Another apple keyboard quirk is that it is stubborn for the first letter of a word. E.g. if I type fouble, at no time it will suggest double. Fou -> For, foubl -> found, ends up with foible. These letters are not even close, what were they or their NN thinking? “Double” is a simplest, qwerty-levenstein-nearest word for this input. I don’t even know what foible means. Since that change I began to pay attention to first letters, otherwise my text turns into complete gibberish.

Gboard often does a much better job with autocorrect.

Besides software changes, I'd look at the hardware.

The newer iPhones are all too big for many peoples' hands. I thought that the iPhone 4S size was just about perfection: it felt like I could easily reach every single spot on the screen while holding the device with one hand and not straining. Everything since then has felt much harder to comfortably type and control while using.

And unfortunately, I think it might be very easy for the market to misread the sales data and think that many customers continuously want bigger and bigger screens. If the only size options available are all too big, then it makes some sense to just optimize for a better gaming/movie experience if the typing experience is going to suck no matter what so many people might just end up buying the biggest phones even though they want a much smaller one.

Give me an iPhone 4S sized iPhone with a modern camera, processor, and screen, and I'd be perfectly happy with that experience.

Same experience here.

I actually thought this was a me problem and not an iPhone problem. I figured I was just getting lazy and had become too reliant on autocorrect to clean up my mistakes over the years.

I do notice that I tend to type much faster than I did 5-10 years ago. If I deliberately slow myself down like 30% I'm able to type almost flawlessly. Does this resonate with anyone else?

Commas and periods are a great part of my native language (of course they are essential in many languages), yet I couldn't find a way to set up comma and period to show on my dad's new work iPhone the way they appear on Android -- on the first page of the keyboard.

Pagination is required to access not only periods and commas, but also numbers and to some extent accents (čšž via press-and-hold). The mentioned cursor-to-text snapping annoys me so much that I can't use that phone to write more than a couple words, yet this entire text was written on a touch-screen phone.

There exist apps to customize the keyboard, for example [0], that was recommended on reddit, but I did not test it yet. Like a lot of iPhone apps, those aren't usually free.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/bb/app/unicode-pad-pro-with-keyboards...

Something absolutely has changed in the last couple of iOS major releases. I have noticed it as well around iOS 14 or so. I also feel like Siri (voice recognition for dictation of messages, etc) has deteriorated as well. It is getting to the point where I am considering moving to Android just based on my experience with that.

Absolutely! Typing on the iPhone is slowly becoming a frustration, especially if you are using many languages. It was so frustrating sometimes, that I must turn off autocorrection and prediction. In the initial release of iOS13, the keyboard can even freeze for an extended period of time. The updates seemed to correct the freeze, but the prediction and autocorrection is still subpar and irritating. In the last releases, the cursor scrolling, once a hallmark of iOS got worse. On the mobile website of FB, you can't move the selection properly anymore, although it works properly on Apple's own apps, so it might be a problem FB created. The most frustrating aspect about iOS keyboard is that user can not even edit the custom dictionary, they can only reset the prediction. On the top of that, typing on the iPad is getting worse, too. I wonder what the engineers at Apple are doing all the time? :(

I'll add my old man rant that physical keyboards are terrible now, and I somewhat blame Apple. Everyone seems to want as flat a keyboard as possible which does look pretty stylish I'll admit, but is not as ergonomic as the old Dell cheapo membrane keyboards. It makes sense on a laptop, but not on a dedicated keyboard. I fully acknowledge that it might just be the era of keyboards I grew up with and prefer, and luckily I can still find the old ones I like at Goodwill for $3, so my cup runeth over anyway.

As for phone keyboards, I've never been great with them but typing on a glass screen is a bundle of compromises anyway, and I haven't noticed them any worse lately. I remember reading that the touch spots for the keys are actually dynamically changing under your fingers as you type based on context, so I wouldn't be surprised if something changed and bit you though.

> cursor scrolling using either the spacebar trick or a hard press on screen is a complete mess

This sounds a lot like Android, so welcome to the party.

On the other hand, swipe typing has been the bomb for over a decade. Since it's now available on iOS, give it a chance. Maybe you'll find it makes up for the iPhone's recent declines.

I honestly have no idea how people tolerate iOS keyboard. No numbers? No common characters? In 2022? Really?

I often contemplate switching to iPhone to get away from Google, I've previously used 3GS and 4S for multiple years. But the keyboard is definitely in the top3 negative factors keeping me from it.

PS: I can't judge modern iOS autocomplete, but on Android it's a complete garbage. Simple typos when I press a nearby key are NEVER autoreplaced. Typos like - r4ady or hscker or ma ufacture etc. It seems to me it shouldn't be to hard to make an algo looking for all valid words checking each letter for replacing it with a 6 surrounding keys on a typical US keyboard and looking them in dictionary. But nope, no luck.

I own an iPhone 12 mini since its inception and I am 44 years old. You described exactly my problems. Somewhere on the road something broke, either me or the user interface. Also, the most painful breaking change for me is the fact that in safari the url bar is placed at the bottom since a while but I keep looking after it at the top of the screen while I type, even if there's nothing there, just something that resembles a dynamic dropdown list based on whatever I think I type. My brain can't seem to be able to accept and memorize the fact that the url bar was moved at the bottom, just above the keyboard.

After 10 years of typing perfectly on various iPhones, I suddenly started mistyping frequently a year or so(?) ago. I feel like its actually the phone and not me that has changed. Are there any Apple people here who can give a definitive answer?

Thanks for posting this. All this while, I have thought it's my age making me do this.

I miss 3D Touch so much, if only because of its awesome cursor placement trick — instead of the spacebar, you could hold a finger anywhere on the keyboard and take the cursor to the right spot, plus increase the strength to select words.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned in the comments is that putting a phone case on the later generations of iPhones messes with the accuracy of the touch sensation of the screen. This inevitably leads to even more typo issues because you hit something "correctly" but the input is recognized incorrectly. Not sure if this impacts Android but definitely changed with iPhones

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/1822/how-can-i-rec...

I think it might be worse, especially the cursor stuff, but also consider that your iPhone 12 mini has a smaller keyboard than the SE, since it’s not quite as wide. You might try enabling haptic feedback which is new in ios16.

Writing on an iPhone is the only activity I have been doing rigorously day in, day out for 10+ years without getting better at it.

With the old 3-press phones, I would have been invincible and able to write with the phone still in my pocket.

So frustrating.

I turned off autocorrect and it forced me to be a much more accurate typist.

My wife migrated from Android Device (Sony XZ2 Compact) to iPhone 13 Mini (because it was impossible to buy small but fast Android device when Sony was drown in torrential rain) a 6 months ago. Every out friend with iPhone said: "You'll accommodate to iPhone/Android difference fast, and everything will be Ok". Now, after half a year, almost everything is Ok, but not typing, editing text and interacting with text fields. She is screaming and shouting and sometimes crying when she need to type substantial comment on Facebook or big message in Telegram.

Maybe I’ve always had issues with typing correctly and having the device provide the appropriate autocorrect suggestions on the smaller screen size (even on the 5+ inch screens).

On selecting a word (single word), double tapping on the word works well for me. Same way, to select an entire paragraph, triple tap anywhere on that. There is no need to move the cursor and fumble with it for selecting these.

Text selection of other kinds has a lot of issues. One thing that bothers me a lot is how it mishandles punctuation marks when selecting a sentence or multiple lines. That’s certainly a long standing bug.

I've never been able to type well on a smartphone well, ever. I feel like I have to correct 5 of 6 words multiple times each. For me I have noticed no change for years so iOS14->15 I noticed no difference.

Same with selection. It's infuriating, has been since iPhone shipped, still bad 15 years later.

Sometimes I feel like I should attach a camera to my wrist to film me trying to use it and hopefully get some popular site to show just how much poor UX I put up with every day. Unfortunately it would be hard to do, it would show private info, and it would lead nowhere.

I've just had this bug where my volume for typing tones goes WAY UP HIGH for a couple seconds before normalizing to where it should be; it happens surprisingly often, as well as general lag.

Yup, same here and I'm on Android. I'm in my late-twenties and have spent most of my life on mobile devices and keyboards like most people here. Over the last couple of years I've been getting frustrated to no end by the exact things you're talking about. I always have to retype words, basic things get auto-corrected to capitalized, proper noun versions that make no sense in context, etc. I'm starting to think that the older folks that dictate their text via microphone have the right idea.

I make so many typos lately that when I read back what I’ve just typed it is often gibberish. I’ve seriously wondered whether I’ve suffered from serious cognitive decline (iPhone 11 pro max)

For how big fingers are, it does a pretty good job. Word selection is just a long press. A long press on space works well for moving the cursor. Definitely better than the loupe we used to have.

Am just here to agree with you on iPhone SE. Also using 12 Mini now.

Oh wow and I thought I'm going crazy, because I also make so many typos when typing on my iPhone 11 (normal size)! On any other Android phone I don't make nearly as many typos, and it just feels so much better. I never understood why, maybe the "hitbox" on the iOS keyboard keys is just smaller? Because I could swear I'm tapping the right key but somehow it often triggers a neighboring key.

Also agree with the horrible cursor movement and text selection, it is wack af on iOS

It indeed seems to worse. The cursor placement sometimes even seems to hang my phone for a few seconds (it gets hotter for sure). Also, I almost never intend to say ‘duck’.

I made far fewer mistakes and could type faster using the BlackBerry physical thumb keyboard. Apple should sell attachable thumb keyboards for their phones.

If you have two or more language keyboards it gets even worse. If you have the French keyboard installed you basically can't use English words that start with Q. Ffs, I get it if I type "Q" for the first letter of a text field and it suggests "Qu'est-ce". But, if I'm using the English keyboard and I say "Where in Q[ueens]?" and it jumps to French on the Q that's just ridiculous.

The Swiftkey app that made typing tolerable on the iPhone is now going to be killed for iOS starting next month. So there really isn't any alternative for now.

I was wondering the same. The auto-complete seems to be purposely counterintuitive, accepting some typos for words I would never type (or don't exist) and suggesting the wrong words as well. I wondered if I was just getting old as well. One strange thing that happens is when I try to type "I", it replaces it with "ai".

The iPhone tries to guess where you want to place the cursor, because surely if you press somewhere, it’s not what you meant.

Being able to force-press anywhere on the keyboard to move the cursor with precision, was replaced with force-press on the spacebar only. Awful idea, because then you can only move half-a-line down and half-a-word left and right.

But we get the “swipe an entire word” keyboard that Android had too, and it is nice.

What baffles me is the text selection/cursor placement is either absolutely garbage or cryptic to use. Also, why are the android based solutions so much vastly superior? Often a simple one letter misspelling completely flummoxes the iPhone keyboard. I never encountered that on my android keyboard.

This is the number one item that pushes me back towards android. I type a lot on my phone.

I wrote half my master thesis on an android phone, and this includes peobably 20 times the master thesis in notes. The absolute best ways to write ended up being (in that order):

1. A keyboard

2. A good dual-swype keyboard app (it was keymonk at the time)

3. Actual typing without any autocorrect for anything where the dictionary failed, which in a master thesis can be a lot

The physical keyboard is still the best, but it is hard to use it in the rain on a bus stop.

For me the issue is that it learns the words I use. If I accidentally mistype and don't correct a word once, that word is forever cursed.

You're getting older and keyboards are getting worse.

I would love to see videos of Tim Cook typing on his iPhone. Like with a camera recording his fingers tapping/swiping and the screen itself, side by side. I wonder if he gets frustrated with the poor quality or if he's received some Official Training that lets him make effective use of the keyboard.

I used to be able to type quickly and successfully on iPhones without even looking at what I was typing (I’ve had them since they released and in most sizes), but that’s not been the case for at least two years. It’s bad enough I am beginning to abandon the iPhone for almost all purposes. Maybe it’s me, or my age, but no you are not alone.

Having the same issue now after coming back to an iPhone after several years. Last time I used an iPhone there was Swiftkey, which was amazing.

Now, that seems to be gone from the App Store (not available in my country at least) and I am stuck with the default which is quite crappy, honestly.

Also, keys are too small for my fingers, so frustration keeps adding up.

No, and it's not just iPhone. The same class of problems is present on Android as well.

It's because they keep getting ideas, want to make things more complicated and need to justify budgets. IMO mobile keyboards (and in general mobile input and UI in general) were a solved problem 5 years ago and should've gone into maintenance mode.

Mobile typing experience IS terrible for anything other than routine work IMO. The fact that your keyboard takes up half of your already small screen space and that you'll have to look at your keyboard to type is a massive inhibitant for productivity. Not to mention the constant autocorrecting if you are doing any industry-specific work.

I think it’s overall better. I particularly like how autocorrections are presented above the keyboard instead of as boxes above the words (although sometimes you get boxes).

I do have some problems though. My phone thinks st (short for station or saint, I guess) is something I need to type more than “at” and will often leave me with tons of st in my sentences.

The most infuriating thing is trying to select text for copying and pasting it into text fields.

Both actions never work as expected.

This post inspired me to at least try turning off auto correction. I feel like it is fighting me at times and now I intend to find out if it ever really helped me and I didn't notice it.

I wonder if the default slide to type being ON has any bearing on this?

Turning auto capitalization off too, that I definitely fight with and it rarely makes a difference.

Mobile screens and devices are optimized for ad-display. Everything else is de-emphasized or getting more and more broken.

I agree something feels different, I could usually mitigate it with 3D Touch but that was changed a few phones back:

https://technicallychallenged.substack.com/p/my-favorite-iph...

I've been getting a lot more problems with typos, even on second or third attempt. I'm inclined to blame the OS for that as I'm pretty careful when I do the corrections. I haven't found the experience getting worse in other respects, but I don't like it at the best of times.

It's the opposite for me. Typing seems to have gotten easier. Especially now that Apple added their own swype-like functionality, I've found I'm more willing to type longer pieces of text on the phone, where I previously would have waited until I could type it on a computer.

If you think the autocorrect and text manipulation is bad on the standard iOS keyboard, you should try typing with the Grammarly keyboard. The autocorrect and cursor navigation is horrible. You may have better grammar, but the words are a garbled mess that don't have suggestions.

Am a long time Android user. Typing on iPhone is lot worse IMO than on Android, and I type and write a lot.

i can’t for the life of me reason why the changes to auto correct were ever seen as useful. that it changes a word you’ve typed two words ago (so it’s outside of your attention by the time you’re focused on getting the most recent word correct) is baffling.

Additionally, by designing it this way you’re guaranteed to only notice when this feature fucks up. If you typed the wrong word and moved on, you never notice. If you typed the right word and moved on, you see auto correct has fucked up after you send the message, or as it’s fucking up because you’ve learned to not trust the keyboard anymore so now you’re constantly rereading the last few words as you’re typing.

Really a shame they put effort into a feature that’s designed to frustrate the user in this way.

Hard agree. One of my biggest pet peeves is how the iPhone will correctly guess a swiped word and then change the prior word to an incorrect guess when the next word is swiped. Now you have to look at both the word that was just guessed and the word immediately preceding it.

Not just you. Typing on the iPhone has become increasingly a chore over the last few updates for me.

Thank you for sharing, I've had similar frustrations since the iPhone 11. The only constant I've been able to compare against is that my keyboard typing has not declined in accuracy.

Just today I was telling my mom to not get iPhone for next phone if I can’t figure it out I don’t want to think what will happen to her… select a word? No.. place a cursor in a particular place? No.. double tap to select everything? No…

I've found iPhone to be weirdly inconsistent. Like sometimes, autocorrect will recognize my name and autofill it, other times it won't. Also true with OTP recognition from text messages - sometimes it will detect automatically, sometimes it won't.

I always seem to hit the period key when I am in Safari somehow when I'm intending to hit the spacebar. I have now turned off slide-to-type and curious to see it that helps fix that... also disabling the " . shortcut " setting too

The only phone keyboard that I've ever been able to tolerate is microsoft wordflow. They discontinued it, and for $reasons (who knows...) it appears to no longer work on recent versions of ios. The apple keyboard is consistently mediocre, however.

Same here. Been using an iPhone since 3s. Glad (not really) to see its not only me. I tried Pixel 2(?) for sometime in between and my typing accuracy / experience was better with it.

With all the so-called AI/ML being used, shouldn't the typing get better?!

I have completely been feeling the same thing, but for me it's been more pronounced on iOS 16.

Also, iOS 16's change in dictation UX is quite frustrating given I was trained that it would stop listening after long pauses and it no longer does that.

Not to mention, auto accidents have risen sharply with these non-clickable on-screen keyboards.

I cant type on these things worth a shit. I miss the physical keyboard of the blackberry era.

There's something weird going on because it seems to get worse over time, but if you do "Reset Keyboard Dictionary" then it magically gets better again, for a few weeks or so, before getting worse again.

I have no idea what's going on.

Yeah this is something ive noticed too. It might have something to do with moving the touch targets on the keyboard or the machine learning has made it worse. Ive been thinking of making a kb that you can calibrate yourself.

too much data. I have an android phone and swiping constantly produces the wrong words unless I swipe very slowly. it was great many years ago, i noticed that a lot of the words it suggests are words other people might be using. so I feel they are training it with dataset from a large swat of users and that's the issue. if they limited it to the most common words in dictionary then words you typed, it would be great. I suspect this is how the original worked but they got the idea to make it better by training it with "all the words"

It seems to now do multiword correction - that is, it will change two words instead of just the current word. This leads to major meaning shifts when it autocorrects, leading to confused recipients.

Recent iOS convert. I miss my number bar, but otherwise I find the typing experience on iOS to be great, especially on iOS 16. Just disable autocorrect.

I've noticed this in the last 4-5 years or so. It's really bad, but I just put up with it. I just recently bought a Pixel 7 to see how that compares and just might switch over.

The text selection on iPhone is very bad indeed. I have an iPhone only so I can relate to the users, but I use my android most as a main phone because the UX of the iPhone is so bad.

For me the biggest problem is that the registered letter is not the letter that was hit by the finger, but the letter that the finger was lifted up from. Slide-to-type is off.

Try turning Auto-Correction off and Predictive Text on.

This is the closest approximation I've gotten to the original iPhone keyboard. I have Check Spelling off as well due to other reasons.

I've used android phones since I've had modern smartphones and I've had a similar experience. The built in keyboard by google/aosp was always flaky and, especially on small screens, a pain to use. I'll describe my keyboard journey and what ups and owns I experienced on android here:

After using the built in keyboard for a while came swipe-typing and it was a lot better, but still limiting. To this day I believe that swipe-typing still hasn't reached its full potential, but the keyboards that focused on it seem to gravitate back towards hybrid regular typing and swiping which in my opinion removes many advantages it had before, making continuous use somewhat awkward.

The next step in my keyboard journey was fleksy. Fleksy was built much like the apple keyboard, in that the keyboard would look where exactly you pressed (not only the key you actually hit) and try to correlate the most likely word from that, powered by a a personal word frequency statistic lookup. It worked so well that they introduced an "invisible keyboard" mode which did exactly what it said on the box, and even without visible keyboard it would work almost perfectly, that's how good their system was. The other controls where designed around their algorithm, it was highly encouraged to, instead of correct something inside of a word, just delete everything and re-write, much like you'd do on a computer where it's much faster to just ^w^w^w^w then to go back and correct that one letter. In addition, they had gestures to cycle through the other likely predicted words their engine determined from your touches.

Unfortunately, fleksy had trouble raking in money and so the nice thing they had went the way every piece of venture capital software goes, which is down the drain. They began adding ever more things that began nagging away at their core competency until at some point they ventured to a joint ios/android app, a total rewrite. At that point they also introduced machine learning and made away with their previous engine, lowering the prediction quality noticably.

It was at that point that I decided to switch to another app and went f-droid only, because if fleksy would've been free software I could've just taken the source and maintain it myself whenever google decided to break an api it uses.

Currently I use florisboard, a fork of the aosp keyboard with some changes like the swipe behaviour of the space bar and selective deletion using backspace swiping. It's not fancy, typing hurts sometimes, but at least it doesn't try to be smart. Software that tries to be smart and fails is much worse than software that doesn't try.

Nah the typing on the iPhone ist really bad, the predictions are total crap. Android text entering is so so much better - unbelievable

Seems like a change to how touch is recognized. Used to be a light tap registered and now it requires a much more pronounced touch. Really sucks for us touch typists.

Actually yes. I’ve always left autocorrect off, but I do find myself having more typos than before lately. Can’t put my finger on when specifically I noticed though.

This feels odd - lately I was getting very confused by the quality of my typing on iOS. It's reaffirming to see so many people with a similar experience.

I am on iPhone 13 Pro.

when ios launched it was competing with blackberry, a 55wpm mobile keyboard that I could use without looking.

now it's competing with droid, and most droid devices are lower-end so whatever the experience on flagship devices, it's going to be much worse on average

not what you asked but:

I recently booted an android 10 pixel 1, 5ish years old, 3 OS versions behind current, and keyboard input was starkly better than my normal droid 12 device (both tap keyboard + swipe keyboard)

relatedly, the back arrow on top of the contact card in imessage has been changed so that the region to the left of the arrow is just more contact card. I can't imagine that anyone would intentionally click there to open the contact card, and I also can't imagine that no one at apple tested the design and didn't accidentally click the contact card at least once and realize.

Using phones is a bad experience.

For me the old BlackBerry phones with their mini QWERTY keyboard was the peak in text entry usability. Touch screen keyboards are horrible.

iOS text entry and manipulation has always been a disaster in my opinion. It didn’t even have basic copy and paste for many generations. And now, text selection is nonsensical, and prediction is also similarly awful.

I still prefer to use an iPhone overall but this is one area where Android has always been superior I think.

I am exactly in the same boat. I switched from the 12 mini to the 13 mini and I think it's a little better but maybe that's placebo.

Auto-correct is the enemy of multi linguals.

It's near impossible to chat with my friends in a language different to my phone's primary language.

Does anyone else accidentally hit the Return key too often while typing? I feel like the space bar should be longer on the right side.

I do not own an iphone, but what you are describing sounds similar to what happens when the touch/screen calibration is off.

100% agree, good to know it’s not just me. I would like my 7 plus back and apple can charge me for security updates if they like

Wow, I was thinking the exact same thing as I recently switched from an ancient Pixel 2 XL to an iPhone 12.

I thought it was just me...

Glad my iPhone 6 with Swipe is still going.

I don’t recall any period where I could successfully type a whole sentence on an iPhone. Even this one.

My thumbs are still used to the wider space bar and I am constantly inserting a period in its place!

I noticed that when the keyboard is set to the wrong language accidentally, it becomes comically bad.

The new keyboard that just came out sucks.

I prefer the iPad keyboard (I use both an iPhone Mini, and an iPad Mini).

Thanks for your comment.

I really thought I was getting older to the point of only writing messages in the computer.

well it was always shit, and text selection/cursor placement was even shittier

use glide typing or install gboard

I turn autocorrect and all auto-complete and suggestions off.

Simple UI is good. ML assist makes UI more complex.

I never considered an iPhone until I could use custom keyboards.

(I use swiftkey, but just type the usual way.)

I stopped typing altogether and use voice dictation for any messages longer than one word.

I haven’t used a better keyboard than the one on Windows Phones. Currently am on iPhone

Hello you might be interested in some slide out keyboards Android like astro https://www.androidauthority.com/keyboard-phones-845839/ You can even root some of them and install lineagos

I turned off auto correct and just use the keyboard, its so much better..

Android too. It was about 8-9 years ago that typing started to feel worse.

Yes!

I'm not alone in thinking this!

I'm not crazy! (well at least not for this particular reason)

Absolutely have the same experience here and it drives me nuts.

I have a really, really stupid question. Have you gained weight are your fingers are simply bigger? I have huge fingers and typing on any phone involves a lot of "that is not the key I pressed!"

I use fleksy keyboard. Everything is easier that way.

in a few generations, phones won't have keyboards anymore, "you don't need that, we'll show you what you need to see"

It has gotten far, far worse in my experience

I have been thinking the EXACT same thoughts.

The fucking period moved.

You're most definitely getting older, but no reason to worry - most people are.

Strongly agree

You are old