Why is the iOS keyboard getting worse every year? | Hacker News Reader

Why is the iOS keyboard getting worse every year?

46 pointsapeters25 comments

I can’t be the only one who noticed.

No matter the model. It’s a pain to write with it. Writing faster or correcting longer words totally drives it nuts.

It’s slow, not precise and just not clever.

I have the same feeling, back in the iPhone 5 and 5S days I used to be able to type very fast with hardly any typos, now I type slower and make more typos. I weigh the same (I even lost some weight I had gained during the COVID era). The two things that have changed are the screen size and the version of iOS.

I have never had autocorrect on. My guess is that iOS is somehow trying to be more clever than me and slightly shifts the keys' hitboxes in a poor attempt to overcompensate for what it thinks is my fingers' clumsiness.

Touch used to be highly precise overall. I used to be able to click on very small text in Safari with earlier version of iOS. It's not just the keyboard.

>My guess is that iOS is somehow trying to be more clever than me and slightly shifts the keys' hitboxes in a poor attempt to overcompensate for what it thinks is my fingers' clumsiness.

I feel like this happens to me regularly. I thought I was loosing my mind.

Yes. I had previously wondered if iOS keyboard usage could be used to track cognitive decline in Health, but the keyboard is declining faster than I am.

Its really had a significant impact on my usage. Its laggy and incorrectly interprets events or even worse wont register them at all - such a fundamental aspect of using the device im not sure how they fuck up testing these releases. Latest iOS on iPhone 12 Mini.

Because Apple’s monopoly position in mobile means the company doesn’t have to keep you happy to keep you as a customer. What about android you say? Apple has been able to achieve customer lock-in which gives them a de facto monopoly because the barrier to quitting is too high.

Complain to the FTC and your state’s attorney general. Apple needs a slap or else they’ll keep using anticompetitive practices to keep customers even when they don’t have the best product or the best price.

Just wait for EU open store ruling

This is not relevant to the discussion, Apple allows third party keyboards. I'm currently typing this on Google Gboard.

I thought it was just me. Seems like the keyboard is more difficult to use with each update.

Turn off “Slide to Type” in the settings if you don’t use it. This appears to increase accuracy in my experience.

I just tried turning it off.

And I turned off predictive too.

This is the first thing I have tried to type and it is much faster I think.

Perhaps because that whole band of possible words is gone and I can just look at the keyboard and the output.

Thanks.

I was working with an iPhone 6 today with iOS 12 installed and I was shocked how much comfortable typing was

When correcting a typo, tapping on the character in a word selects the entire word instead of putting the caret next to the tapped character. Also, long pressing "space" doesn't move caret as it moved to in previous iOS versions.

Having lag trouble? Mine had been getting worse and worse, so today I finally reset my phone. No issues at all now. (issues included delays in opening messages, delays in characters appearing in the text box after attempting to type on the keyboard, and delays in responding after the send button was pressed)

If autocorrect is being trouble, you can always reset your autocorrect dictionary - it seems to get into bad habits sometimes.

The auto learning black box is an idiotic idea.

A few years ago, the default Android keyboard started interpreting most anything that could match a brand name or trademark as such. I got really sick of backspacing to remove capitalizations.

My interpretation: The trends and ads and marketing people have their fingers in the keyboard pie. Not really a surprise that they would.

Another reminder that this whole system is not really created to serve me, the user...

Never bothered me and I don't think this is a marketing thing.

But on Android you can always use another keyboard, or go to gboard settings, text correction and turn off auto-capitalization.

I didn't realize the settings were that fine grained -- that's on me. I thought it was all or nothing, for auto-correction.

Thanks!

Hmm... Upon reflection, I may have a vague memory of seeing that -- well before the brand name capitalization went berserk. I may have originally kept it because beginning of sentence capitalization was a nice to have. I tend to use the default keyboard along with whatever they are calling swipe-typing these days.

Nothing to add but I started spotting these "is the iOS keyboard getting worse or am I going crazy" threads (mostly on twitter) last year but I swear in the last ~4 months it has gotten demonstrably worse...like it's comically bad. My typing accuracy these days is dreadful.

The iOS 17 swipe keyboard is the worst it’s ever been. I have to constantly go back and edit my discord messages.

Years ago I had iPhone 3GS and iPhone 5. I remember being amazed how fast I could type on it. Today I simply write "I'll write a better answer on the computer later".

Yea I keep thinking maybe my co-ordination is getting worse. I used to be able to type like a champ on the phone, now its a garbled mess and I'm constantly fixing mistakes :/

The iOS keyboard Offers A Positive Feedback To A “Player”

Lingxi Is Who She Needs To Take The Responsibly. The Description “Dyslexia” Is Not Supposed To Take The Response.

Thank You For Your Question. Lingxi is Learning.

Are you sure your fingers are not getting fatter? That is what I assumed, but I have gained over a hundred pounds.

Because, Apple isn’t good at many aspects of ML and particularly, LLMs which power text input on iOS 17.

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