[DamnInteresting]

@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...

[srmatto]

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.

[raylad]

Also why did they get rid of select all? Is there any excuse for that?

[mrmuagi]

Autocorrect not getting simple character substitutions is beyond frustrating.

[Fr0styMatt88]

What I don’t get is why it can’t tell I’ve gone back and edited a suggestion or correction it gave me and correct itself in the future.

[winternett]

The same things are happening on Android too, no coincidence.

[hypercube33]

It's not just apple - windows and android autocorrect are more auto incorrect these days.

[longfacehorrace]

It's not just the keyboard. My iPhone 15 is often so unresponsive I am tapping twice as much.

Example but the issue not limited to web browsing; Safari will do nothing, I tap again, it does the thing, then it does the thing again due to the second tap. I have to tap back to get to where I really wanted to go.

[Normal_gaussian]

It turns out he posted a better example in his blog post about it - https://thismightnotmatter.com/a-little-website-i-made-for-a... - which is technically linked to in the bottom of the site. I guess if you spend your life learning UX from Apple this is what you get...

[butterfi]

Thats a pretty snarky thing to say about Apple. They were arguably the pioneers in OS UX... granted, its not the end all, be all, but still. You could do worse.

[ozzyphantom]

I see where you’re coming from, this was an impulsive creation after months/years of frustration without any expectations.

For anyone curious of my experience here are my main pain points:

- autocorrect failing to correct minor mistakes

- autocorrect “correcting” a mistake with another mistake

- autocorrect “correcting” correctly typed words

- swipe to type is painfully behind Gboard (third-party keyboards are universally under-supported and inferior to Android equivalents)

- “Select All” is often hidden away

- Selecting/unselecting text in general is a pain

- keyboard seems to run out of steam after hitting a certain word count in applications such as Apple Notes or iMessage and take forever to register taps

- The Big Daddy: key taps registering incorrectly in one of two ways: 1. Clearly tapping a letter “taps” a different letter (hot spots poorly calibrated) 2. A correctly tapped letter (keyboard highlight indicates correct letter) but incorrect letter is rendered on document

Anyone irl I’ve discussed the iPhone keyboard with has described frustration so I figured this as more a “some of us are annoyed” flare than a technical manifesto.

As another commenter noted I put a tiny link to my slightly more detailed blog post once this started gaining traction but I’m just having fun here really.

Happy Friday the 13th everyone!

[teekert]

My fav is when iOS autocorrect corrects me AFTER pressing send.

Be glad you only type in one language and that it is US English (probably) ;)

[nashashmi]

> - autocorrect “correcting” correctly typed words

This brings up so many emotions. I disabled autocorrect. I don't give a damn if my words are spelled wrong but they should not be words that I did not type!

I will add: text prediction was so much better before that I could be very sloppy and it would still figure it out. Now I have learned to be more careful with the keyboard.

[teekert]

My fav is when iOS autocorrect corrects me AFTER pressing send.

[Toutouxc]

> Clearly tapping a letter “taps” a different letter

My iPad Mini 6 sometimes gets into this state, especially after deleting something, when tapping one of the keys in the lower right corner becomes completely impossible, it always registers as this different key (I don't have the iPad nearby to check which one), and it stays broken like this until I press a few other keys. It's incredibly frustrating and it's been there since day 1.

[bentcorner]

> Clearly tapping a letter “taps” a different letter (hot spots poorly calibrated)

FWIW I encounter this in Android every so often (using gboard). Anecdotally I don't know what causes it (I swear sometimes it's worse and sometimes it's better), but Android isn't entirely problem free.

[jonplackett]

I have genuinely considered if my (and perhaps everyone on hn) life calling should be just to make a better touch keyboard.

Bearing in mind the amount of constant pain and torment the current best keyboards inflict upon the world, can there be any more urgent problem to tackle?

Forget climate change guys. Make a keyboard. Save the world.

[nunez]

I have autocorrext turned off on my keyboard and typed this without any corrections. These sre the issues i've faced with the stock keyboard:

- accidental periods when typing URLs in Safari

- key target inaccuracy (though turning off swipe-to-tect gas ikproved this a little, though not enough)

- key latnecy which causes letters innsome words to get swapped or extra unwated letters to appear (this could be a me-getting-older prblem, howeverg

- autocorrect suggesting words that I've never typed before (I turned on autocorrect for this list item to make sure i gave it a fair shake; it didn't suggest anything crazy this time, but the number of times it has in the past has led me to turning it off, even after iOS 18 wherein the keyboard supposedly used a small language model to improve suggestions)

I also type longform on my phone sometimes; the keyboard makes this much more exhausting than it needs to be.

[itopaloglu83]

I don't know if you experience any of these:

- Clicks on buttons and links not registering, and needing to click multiple times, sometime to no effect.

- Safari not suggesting the website you visit multiple time a day, and points you a random website you have never visited before.

[iamacyborg]

A lot of these issies seem damiliar to me as well on the glasskwyboard pn my iphone13 mini.

Also typed without any maual fixes. My typingwas mucu better before glass.

[firecall]

Recent versions of iOS make me feel like it wont let me type spaces anymore, I'm always adding full stops instead!

I've given up bothering to correct it now.

So I just search for why.is.ios.keyboard.broken and google seems to know!

Sure, I can consciously and deliberately hit the spacebar, but for a decade or more I had zero issues with causally typing and not looking.

Is it a result of moving to Pro Max sized phones? It could be, and maybe the spacebar is just now further away. I'm willing to concede it could be that.

But then there are many reports of other people with issues....

[chongli]

autocorrect suggesting words that I've never typed before

Ahhh yes, there's nothing like when autocorrect turns because into Decatur!

[LollipopYakuza]

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.

[DamnInteresting]

Well, presumably the page's intended audience is software developers at Apple. As a software developer myself, I am all too familiar with the unnecessary churn caused by vague bug reports. It saves time when people include details like error messages (when applicable), steps to replicate, expected result vs. actual result, etc.

Besides, users and developers don't always use software the same way, have the same settings, follow the same forums.

[Someone1234]

It does make me wonder if Apple's own employees actually dog-food iOS day-to-day.

It just seems like, you could stop any iPhone user in the street and ask them "How do you find the keyboard?" And get a consistently negative response, but yet nobody within Apple seemingly has noticed for YEARS.

Everyone says iOS 26 did it, but I strongly disagree, I disabled most options in General -> Keyboard like three major iOS versions ago, and moved to Swiftkey* in iOS 18 (although iOS keeps changing my keyboard preferences back to the default).

*SwiftKey is also a shit-show with the "Your Tap Map" crap you cannot disable, where it moves the keys and makes the thing inconsistent. Just goes to show how bad Apple's keyboard is, when I'll put up with it.

[isodev]

One can also see it like: The grievance is apparent to every iOS user who has used pre-iOS 18 keyboards or any of the major Android keyboards.

It’s also not just one problem, autocorrect and the keyboard combined make for at least a dozen seemly different defects

[gwbas1c]

I think the point is that the keyboard is so broken the problems should be obvious to the people who work on the iPhone.

[itopaloglu83]

Exactly.

There are some Apple folks here who keep gaslighting users with their iOS 26 concerns and every other issue by calling them weird names and asking them to not complain.

The damn keyboard is broken, one would've known that if they used it more than a few minutes a day in real life examples. Stop shutting people off and use your own damn products instead of getting them all made in China and sell them.

[nottorp]

As an iOS user I don't have any specific grievances, but I can definitely say the keyboard has got shittier and shittier in the past few years.

Apple's problem is their keyboard used to "just work" as the original article says. No one knows what magic they did back then, but it's obvious that they turned it off now.

They're still better than the spell checker in MS Teams, although that's not really positive.

[hedora]

Did they edit the article after your post? There’s a list just after the first paragraph.

Anyway, I was just considering switching to android today after repeated problems with the keyboard, maps, siri and notifications / incoming calls.

They’re almost as bad as pre-iPhone Linux phones at this point.

Q: “Can it be a daily driver?”

A: “Sure, as long as you also carry a Garmin/TomTom, and a dumbphone or pager”.

[kcrwfrd_]

The article on the average pilot and aircraft cockpit design is fascinating.

Now I’m entirely invested, what was the problem causing the crashes? How did they solve it?

[gregdeon]

Same here. If you shouldn't design for the average dimensions, what _should_ you design for?

[nurumaik]

> It feels like someone changed the keyboard to optimize for some typing behavior that doesn't match my own

I want the keyboard to work the following way -- after I press the button: 1. Letter that I pressed (not a random one) appears 2. Instantly

iOS keyboard somehow fails both. I have no idea what "typing behavior" can you optimize for to end up like this

[m463]

but anyone who uses the keyboard knows the statements to be true.

I have just switched to turning autocorrect off.

The "select all" comment hit home. I frequently try to copy/paste text and it is maddening to try to locate "select all"

And cursor movement? ugh. It is so painful to move the cursor to one specific letter that I frequently just erase everything and start over.

[kbrkbr]

How did you make that happen?

I use swipe keyboard in iPhone. I turned off all "autocorrect" features they offer.

Still their random generator keeps replacing perfectly fine words _and the words before them_ with random crap that makes no sense.

Heck, I even turned off all features, and still it happens.

So I switched to another keyboard from appstore.

I would switch to another OS, but I find the others even worse in some respects I care for deeply.

[chmod775]

The YT video they linked is excessively clear about what the issue is. There's no point in explaining it again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo

[pseudalopex]

> 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.

[bjoli]

I am not sure there is much more to say. I have used an iOS device for many years and "broken and nearly useless" perfectly describes every aspect of the iOS keyboard.

I have always just suspected that it is the same as it was with the lack of t9 dialling. Everybody knew it was awful, but apple just stuck their head in the sand and asked their users to just live with it.

There are many things I dislike about iOS (most notably the settings app), but those are just intermittent annoyances but the keyboards is still so infuriatingly bad.

The reaction at work when I brought a usb keyboard to plug into my phone when I had to write something wasn't "why do you do that?". It was "I have thought about that as well. The keyboard sucks".

[boringg]

I mean you could do what i did and turn off autocorrect…

[graemep]

Why not install an different keyboard app?