I was slightly surprised by the author’s example experiments. Deleting x from the middle of a word does not sound like a common editing task to me and I think it would be much more common to just select the whole word and retype it. If that means the UI is more optimised for other interactions than deleting letters from the middle of words, I think that’s fine. It seems pretty important to have the tests be realistic or their results won’t relate much to the real world.

It is possible to connect a keyboard to a phone though obviously this is a bit silly. But it does seem obvious that people don’t care that much about the text-editing experience. And iPhones tried being better at text editing and apple dropped those changes, so it does seem they at least didn’t feel the change was worth it:

- you used to be able to select a word and pressing shift would toggle the suggested correction between regular, capitalised, and uppercase. That feature was dropped

- with the pressure-sensitivity feature, you could press on the keyboard to turn it into a kind of touch-pad for moving the cursor, this meant your finger didn’t get in the way of the text so you could see where the cursor was going. You could press harder to begin a word-by-word selection then move to select more or press harder to upgrade to sentence/paragraph selection. Apple got rid of the pressure-sensitive screens in newer phones and give them a long-press space bar gesture, but this doesn’t allow for selection (as far as I know) and makes it hard to move the cursor down.