I have had this conversation with several people. I feel like I used to be able to type with a fairly low error rate on a smaller screen with old iPhones. Now I feel that it is constant exercise in frustration as I will hit a letter and the keyboard will decide to pick the letter next to it. It is evolving backwards.
Switched from pixels to iphone in the last year or two and the keyboard is the biggest pain point by far. I tend to use swipe, so this particular issue isn't something I've come across. What I do run into is weird censorship issues where I'm trying to type "kill myself" or something similar and the phone will do anything to not provide that as an option. Then, when I try to manually change it, editing is a nightmare. Inevitably trying to change the ending of a word results in the entire word being deleted. It inserts spaces where I don't want them.
Is this some sort of psyop to get me to use siri to send texts?
35m ago edit: Apple uses many predictive systems for typing. My sentiment in pointing out just slide to type might be misguided as it does not exist in a vacuum. I'd love to see these tests redone with slide to type disabled. I'm leaving the original comment below for reference.
Slide to type. This "issue" is at most 6 years old for iOS users.
Turn off slide to type if you do not use it. Slide to type does key resizing logic. This is the direct cause of this issue. Please upvote this comment for visibility.
Please reply if you think I'm wrong. I see this get posted frequently enough I'm actually losing it.
I’ve been complaining about the iOS Keyboard for years, and the people I’ve been complaining to would act like I’m insane.
I suspect this last iteration broke it just enough for it to impact more people and make some of the problems I’ve been experiencing mainstream.
But yeah things like deleting when I meant to space, putting an “I” instead of “K” and a bunch of other little things like “thinks” instead of “things”, unintended periods; complete failure of spelling just generating gibberish “x” instead of “c” leading to un-autocorrectable failures; and if you want to reference the name of something that doesn’t fit the grammatical structure of the sentence but isn’t a mainstream item, forget about it.
Also “od” instead of “of”.
Seeing this video is super validating. Emotionally, it does a lot to make me feel vindicated.
Someone was telling me you can install 3P keyboards, does anyone have any recommendations?
I think the Apple software UI team has cultural problem in adhering to "one source of truth", and that's where most of the problems come from. I've seen this many many times throughout the years, from toggles, to actions, account creation (I have dupes from tapping a button too fast), etc: the UI doesn't match the internal state.
Another example is most any toggle that's linked to Apple cloud stuffs, like settings in your iCloud account or parental controls. You see it toggle immediately, but that's unrelated to the actual state. You can't know the actual state until you exit the page and go back. Meta gets this right with their apps: you toggle, the toggle turns disabled, then the toggle is re-enabled when the state is confirmed remote side.
I pranked a friend in college by tricking him into installing a “utility” on his Amiga 1200 that swapped adjacent keys into the key stream as he typed, but only above a certain speed. He called and woke me the next morning in a panic about losing the ability to type. He would type slowly and it would work fine. Then at normal speed and he’d get constant errors. He’d quickly pull his hands up to see what keys they were over. Did he have a brain tumor? How could he be a journalist if he couldn’t type! Did he need to change majors?
Is software just going to get worse from now on? Was the level of quality and feature improvement we've come to expect an artifact of high levels of investment based on expectations of growth that are no longer seen a valid?
The #1 problem I have typing on my iPhone is that I hit letter keys (mostly 'n') instead of the space bar and the phone just doesn't anticipate this as a possible typo and doesn't offer the right corrections. (I have AutoCorrect off.) It doesn't seem able to learn that this is a common typo, either.
It’s problems like this that make me wonder what high level leaders do anymore. Do they not use technology? Infinite tolerance for bugs? How is it someone with authority does not make it a mandate to file down some of these regular annoyances in everyday software.
The key that is punched into the input field is based on where your finger lifted up. So if you have slide-to-type on, the pop-up paddle that showed up on key-down won't change to where your finger slid to for key-up. That's why when typing fast with slide-to-type on you can get confusing UI hints like this.
It kind of seems like the grace period for the paddle hiding with slide-to-type needs adjustment. I just leave slide-to-type off.
I had an iPhone day 1 in 2007, and my typing on that day was better than it is today.
Once they added the suggestion bar above the keyboard things got noticeably worse. Every time they try to fix it they make it even worse than before.
With the current version, it’s not just the issue in the video I see as an issue. The two big problems I have are 1) repeated words, where I will type a word once, but auto-completion will inject another one. 2) The autocorrect will seemingly look at the whole paragraph I’m typing and change random words I typed several lines up and deemed correct. I will catch it doing this in real time, and sometimes it will flip a word back and forth repeatedly. I find I don’t just need to proofread while I’m typing, but also need to go through and re-read everything. It wasn’t always like this.
Maybe it’s my rose colored glasses, but I often think the iPhone peaked with the 4S.
I literally cannot type "its" without iPhone putting an apostrophe into it every goddamned time, even when it's obvious from the beginning of the sentence that the next word must be a verb not a possessive pronoun.
If I ever lose my marbles I know I'm going to accuse iOS of being in on it.
I have always used SwiftKey and Android. This year I switched to Apple because Android was being bloated by Samsung etc. I'm shocked by how horrible Apple keypad is. I also feel like the touch sensitivity of iphone is worse than Samsung phones.
I installed SwiftKey on iPhone too but even it seems sluggish.
I actually keep a bluetooth keyboard when I'm at my desk but am forced to use my phone. I really, really dislike touchscreens and touchscreen typing, and it's baffling to me that so many people seem to like it. The bluetooth keyboard is actually a little Logitech K380, and it's quite convenient as I also have it paired with my work laptop and my steam deck. I just push the button to seamlessly swap between pairings.
I guess I'm in an extreme minority here but... it's not broken if autocorrect is off.
I raw dog my typing everywhere. Zero autocorrect. The last time I did use typing assistance was on BB10 with the 'flick to complete' because it was out of my way enough that I could ignore it was there or use it to save a small amount of time. Otherwise I too have the fond memory of Windows Phone's keyboard (I ran it on the HTC HD2), I couldn't tell you why it was good other than it felt good to use, again without autocorrect.
However, I'm CERTAIN there's an ergonomics thing at play, the 'brain calibration' time for me to type accurately on a big screen takes longer. I ran the original iPhone SE's as long as I could and always carried a second android device that was huge by comparison. Today I have the 15 Pro and a OnePlus 11. If I spend a lot of time using the iPhone it takes a little time maybe 20 minutes or so to stop making easy errors on the OnePlus 11. However, going back to the smaller iPhone after being on the OnePlus for awhile, there's not really an adjustment, I can hit all the letters accurately.
I have large hands, I still want the smaller device. There is extra work to need to move your hand and eyes across a larger device. More space to misclick on.
Swipe to type is enabled on android/ios for me. I use it sometimes, if you are hesitant at all on iOS or have a tendency to drag fingers at all don't enable it or it will mess up your typing. It's of course enabled by default like autocorrect. Some people have issues with it.
Dictation is underrated on iOS at least. It just works better and faster than the shitty autocorrect for typing. Obviously not applicable to a lot of situations but when I don't feel like typing it works really well.
EDIT: And I really have to have it off, I switch between devices too much and even with them learning my style of writing, I write differently for different contexts and each OS does its own thing differently. I don't want to spend the extra mental bandwidth correcting the autocorrect or having to think of how that specific autocorrect will behave.
Same here. I even blamed it on switching between Italian and Spanish all the time and thought my brain was short-circuiting. But when you see the right key light up and a different letter shows up, something’s clearly off. Also: with battery saver on it’s basically unusable - the lag makes typing way worse. The video was oddly comforting. Turns out I’m not losing it.
I literally just had a dream about this. Where I needed to urgently send a message, but I kept messing up the text. Weird. At least now, I know I'm not just fat fingering it.
One-handed finger swiping to type doesn’t work as reliably as it used to either. I am not sure why.
My recent experiment has been very disappointing. Mostly post upgrading to iOS 26? I’ve had to painfully change my behaviour to two-handed typing by default.
My suspicion— they’ve changed the ML system that inferred words based on swipes, and the new one isn’t as good in real world use.
I know because I hqte iPhone keyboard so much, and the calculator app. I wish there’s an alternative timeline where we still have Palm keyboard with big screen
The first iterations of the apple keyboard were perfect. They literally did everything perfectly without any notes.
Then it seems like they’re started teaching to the bottoms of the class and added a bunch of terrible decisions: Substituting touch to select instead of touch to move cursor was a genuinely awful decision that now makes typing a constant chore, and it seems like their autocorrect is overcompensating so hard that it prevents me from writing perfectly good words simply because they’re not common ones.
Side note: anyone else have moments where you can’t press delete once predictive text has shown up?
Is there a trustworthy third-party "Retro" keyboard app - none of the shenanigans that made the default keyboard bad, and also no typing exfiltration to third-party servers?
I imagine the problem could be severe enough to some that they would pay the price of the Apple Developer program just so they may install such a Retro keyboard app from Github - if one exists?
iPhone keyboard is probably one of the several biggest factors I consider when once again I think "hmm, maybe this time I should upgrade to iPhone?". And then I'm confronted with this, ummm... thing, and immediately remember why I ditched iPhones years ago :) . How do you deal with it daily? I'm at a loss really. PS: I've owned 3GS and 4S and a few iPads, so I'm not just baseless here.
Yeah, something happened a few months ago where by iOS I'm now "hitting" the wrong key a lot, words like we'll and we're are constantly being automatically "corrected" to well and were and, most frustrating, it will auto"correct" the last word in a sentence from what is on the screen when you hit send. It went from almost always helpful to often frustrating.
I haven't been getting notifications from any messaging apps for a few months. I've checked all the relevant settings (do not disturb etc.). I also get random keyboard issues such as this one. This is my first iPhone. I have no idea why I paid premium prices for a premium phone if they can't even get notifications and typing right
The 3rd letter is the key here.
If you are going to look up a possible word that a user is typing, iOS waits until the third letter typed to do the lookup. Too many possibilities before then. So at the third letter typed, in the video it displayed the U, but his finger was low on the button. It displayed, then did the lookup, and while it was doing that lookup the u was still displayed, but the input moved to J without the display being updated. Maybe the lookup being spawned on the background thread caused enough delay on the main thread to not update the highlighted key before the touchUp event fired?
The most infuriating “feature” of autocorrect is that it includes all your contact names in your dictionary, with no way to opt out of this aside from disabling autocorrect entirely. This can lead to some awkward texts when your innocent typo (or even correctly spelled technical term) turns into a mention of someone’s name who should not be in your phone…
I wonder if this is related to the fact that every Apple app shows up as “recently accessing” contacts in App Privacy Report. And I don’t mean only photos (face recognition), but: Safari, Camera, Shortcuts, Mail, Health… why? I’ve never even configured a Mailbox. Why are these apps all accessing my Contacts?
This has been driving me up a wall. I was seriously considering if I had just gotten 'old' or something. I've had every iPhone since the first one, and suddenly I feel like I'm typing with mittens on.
I am surprised that there isn't a comprehensive test suite of (at least) virtual button presses replaying actual typed sentences for a product used by so many people that apple would run on a daily basis against each device.
The issue is that when you press down, the key you pressed down on first is not the registered character, it's where you release your finger at. When you type fast and you slide your fingers around, it misregisters.
As a bilingual/trilingual user (I have English, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, French and Chinese keyboards enabled, and use the first three on a daily basis), I have had surprisingly few issues with either swiping or pecking at the keyboard, perhaps because I automatically switch to pecking the instant I spot swiping going down the “wrong” decision tree.
But I also think having this many keyboards enabled makes iOS basically throw up its tiny virtual hands in frustration and nullifies most fancy predictions.
(This was mostly swiped in on an iPhone 15 Pro running iOS 26 with very minor hiccups)
I wish Apple would let you load different “dictionaries” for technical specialties so it wouldn’t try to autocorrect everything. For example, “IT”, “Automobile”, “Medical”, etc.
I’m using a 12 mini and I’m running into so many typos since the new iOS. Maybe the combination of buggy software with their smallest screen is making it even worse.
The iPhones autocorrect is one of my biggest frustrations coming from Android a few years ago. The biggest frustration for me is the tendency to correct the _second to last word_. I have never gotten used to this. I know i can stop it by "clicking" on the word instead of hitting space - but that feels slow and bad.
After a recent update, my keyboard started typing "and" as "and's". This happens 100% consistently, but only when swiping. I don't understand how such a bug happens. Yes, 's' is next to 'd', but "and's" is not even a word.
I detest Apple's, and Google's, and Amazon's, and nearly every tech company's feedback system.
Apple's is by far the worst. All feedback is private. There is no way to show or advertise support for feature. Like I want to go upvote the feedback from this video, but all I can do is file my own feedback, which is more work, and therefore more people will choose not to give any.
Both Apple and Google and Microsoft have "users help users". These are infuriating as there is no official answer or help. There's just some fan with an often completely wrong or irrelevant answer. There is zero indication that any of these companies look here to see what's broken.
while I definitely agree the autocorrect has gotten worse, what I find more of a problem is all the various other pop-ups that occur. For example, they recently added the ability to 'undo' an autocorrect, but this pop up grabs focus, and you can't click on text near this pop up, because the pop up will claim the click.
I've also had trouble getting rid of pop up menus (copy, etc). If I want to click on text, but it has decided to pop up a menu, it can be a real pain to get rid of it. (I had no problem on previous versions of IOS).
There's a fundamental law of features: Every feature you add may may make it better for people who use it, but it makes it worse for everyone else.
If you keep adding features, anything will eventually become unusable.
Although I do not use it myself, I had seen that some other people do, and that apparently you cannot disable autocorrect while still having prediction enabled (at least, that is what they told me); I think it might be useful to enable prediction without autocorrect.
This is a feature to get you to stop typing and to just speak. I have a couple friends that are almost exclusively speech to text. One friend is ESL and just finds the brain work easier and the other just figured it worked better.
Seeing this video has convinced me it’s a feature. I can’t see iOS development practices that shit and to read comments here about similar Android issues.
The best touch keyboard on a phone for me was always on the Blackberry Z10 phone.
The phone UI is also one of the best I used. Unfortunately, Blackberry went to shit.
My son has an Apple Watch SE 3 and it doesn't feature the keyboard and you literally cannot type a lower case 'n'. The only hack was putting in a space and then it will sometimes do an n (or multiple characters). It's bonkers bad.
I just hope them to provide an option to get rid of all those predictive models and just use a static, consistent layout. At least I can blame myself if my typo is from my own mistake.
Swiftkey on Android does this also and it's a very nice feature. I sometimes see a key lighting up that I didn't mean to press. I was just barely on that key, and it figured out that I didn't mean to press it
Not sure how it works. Maybe it looks at touch surface area movements during the couple milliseconds that I'm pressing down for? Or dynamically adjusts hitboxes as this video says iOS does? Whatever the method, it works very well after like fifteen years of training (I copy the data folder between devices and never update it or let it access the internet, so I'm sure it's just me training it and not anything else, nor incompatible versions ever throwing data away)
Note that this is different from the context-based autocorrect since that only triggers on spacebar or suggestion selection
I type in Dvorak and frequently the iOS keyboard's swipe typing bugs out and acts as if the layout is in QWERTY. I kind of don't believe it will ever be fixed...
I assumed it was just me getting worse at typing but combined with aggressively wrong autocorrect and mysterious blue lines under everything I type they seem to have ruined yet another perfectly good UX.
Also wth happened to the alarms page. Feels like they made the clickable area of the toggle 1/4 the size just to annoy me. Usually takes a couple tries to hit them when sleepy in morning
I've wondered for a while whether it's a dark pattern where they're trying to optimize for more text to speech in this post-literate world.
The iOS keyboard "just not working" is something I gripe about pretty much every day as a symptom of the world getting quantifiably worse than even five if not ten years ago, alongside a whole laundry list of enshittification transgressions.
That learned helplessness at the 2-minute mark... Install a different program if you don't like this one. There are options beyond "submitting a bug report and hoping for the best". The video makes it sound like Apple is some kind of holy spirit to which you can only pray. If there's no good options, and you can't code, you can even get together and fund someone to fix an open source keyboard if it's bothersome enough. There's always more options, especially in software
Another problem I'm having is.. with the latest iOS public betas, when you swipe down to bring up Siri search, it takes 2-4 seconds for the keyboard to show up. Every time. Went to an Apple store and they said, "re-install from scratch". Which isn't really easy these days, given work MFA accounts etc.
that to me looks like a error in whatever logic is behind the positional error code. You'd think they would have transformer models based on different layouts but maybe some weighting issues going on.. ie I would have thought its a model that is altering based on likelihood weights and maybe something up with that..
Well, possibly unrelated to all of this, but in my experience, multilingual spell-checking has gotten noticeably worse on both iOS and Windows, to the point where I had to disable auto-correct wherever that's possible (and that's, unfortunately, pretty far from everywhere!).
This particular problem manifests as: you're conversing in one language (say, French) and then use a single English word, at which point the spell-check and auto-correct permanently switches to that language, mis-correcting pretty much everything from that point onward.
(Classic) Outlook on Windows is pretty much entirely broken for me these days (even if I repeatedly mark the entire message as being in the majority language), as is Safari on MacOS: even in a completely-Dutch conversation, it always insists on auto-completing 'lang' ('long' but can also be 'tall') to 'language' and it's absolutely infuriating, and with no apparent way to disable the madness... (and, interestingly, no mechanism to detect that I dismissed the auto-complete for the 100th consecutive time, and that it's possibly not a desirable substitution)
My goodness. I honestly believed I was experiencing a decline in finger dexterity due to age, given the sudden increase in typing mistakes on my iPhone (I have been an iPhone user since the OG iPhone).
Tim Apple really needs to let go the clowns who managed to regress the keyboard input functionality.
There's a slightly different (I think) bug which I've been hitting since the update with URLs. The URL keyboard allows long-pressing on the . to open various TLDs, speeding how long it takes to write a URL.
In prior versions, you could long press to open the choices, then letting go would insert the default (eg .com)
With iOS 26, the touch target seems to be slightly different for triggering the options vs selecting them. I now frequently long-press, see the TLD choices with the default selected, and then releasing incorrectly inserts a single . instead of the TLD. This is infuriating when typing fast.
Dude - crazy. When I saw this post I was like - finally someone said it. But it isn't just "iPhone". Why is spell check so bad EVERYWHERE..... still?. Like, how is it I am still even able to share texts, emails, etc that have mistakes at all? I feel like "spell check" is so old school. Intent, and matching intent, without typos is way over due. A bit meta: but, I am going to have to re-read this post - why? I still send texts that say "What re you doing?" - hwy?
maybe what has happened is that the team needed some experts to measure improvements and tapped ppl with a career in optimizing for "User Engagement" so the more we fight the keyboard the more they cheer and grow the team
I’m so glad other people are having this problem too. The keyboard is just so bad now.
The autocorrect does help sometimes. But it fucks things up that were previously fine just as much as it helps so overall it’s probably worse than it used to be. Now
You need to constantly monitor every key pressed to make sure it hasn’t screed it up later.
I can't help but feel like some product manager is behind all this...
Why would it go from what felt like a predictable error to what feels like someone moving the keys around? I am guessing someone presented aggregate research that showed higher accuracy overall, but ignored the case that the errors feel like the voices are getting louder :D.
Hopefully they come up with a setting to change this, but knowing apple it probably won't happen. Is it time for custom keyboards to come back?
My english keyboard is broken but the two international keyboards that I have installed are borderline unusable. The keyboard situation has been atrocious for the past couple of versions of iOS but OS26 send it over the cliff.
THIS. I'm constantly sending typos in texts now even when typing slower on purpose. The software is clearly making choices for me that are wrong and I can't do anything about it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The most annoying to me is how close they put "enter" or "@" to space on the right side, so when you type with both hands you keep hitting those when you want to type a space
Even if they fix the keyboard, iOS as a whole can't really be fixed. This is a single symptom of a much larger problem. So much is broken, poorly implemented, or so laughably tasteless that it hurts my head to think about how it's positioned and accepted as a "premium" product. I understand that most people notice so little about the design of their surroundings that it's basically impossible for them to understand that this junk is inflicting thousands of tiny psychological cuts daily, but it makes me so very very sad that this is acceptable to so many people.
- As mentioned, keyboard input is offensively broken. Whiffed inputs, the entire text selection/cursor manipulation model sucks (not being able to select in the middle of a word is inexcusable unless you have Stockholm syndrome for the bandaids), the cursor manipulation is broken, keyboard gets stuck open or closed, etc. etc. I'm convinced the input design for this phone is a CIA psyop designed to drive you to madness so they can recruit you as a sleeper cell.
- Passcode inputs are also broken. Trying to enter your passcode at easily achievable speeds results in dropped inputs.
- Above point wouldn't be a big deal if it weren't for fingerprint scanning being given up for Face ID, which is complete dogshit that constantly fails-to-passcode trying and failing to scan my ceiling, or my face when it's against a pillow in the morning. It's also completely worthless when I'm unable to fully point my face at the phone (working on vehicles or in some other enclosed area) or am trying to use the phone completely off of muscle memory.
- The gesture navigation system is a fundamentally bad idea. I'm an average-sized man and reaching over to the left hand side of the screen to make back inputs requires me to shift my fingers on the back of the phone just to make the reach for the input. This is on a base-model iPhone 16, which is already a touch too large for many hands to deal with this input system. The hitboxes for navigation inputs are too small and many of the inputs are often shared with actions in apps, resulting in taking all sorts of actions you didn't want to. Android style 3-button navigation at the bottom of the screen solved this many years ago. As an aside, the 60 FPS screen on an $800 phone as a "fuck you" push to upgrade to an even fatter pig of a phone that suffers even more from the bad navigation is funny.
- The GPS is fucked up, at least on the iPhone 16. It takes forever to find its bearing, after which it usually holds onto it until losing its mind again at the most inconvenient time. The only phone I've seen with a worse GPS is a Unihertz Jelly. Being in the same league as a $150 niche night market special is shameful.
- I have a frustrating number of calls get dropped. I don't know exactly where this issue comes from but it's noticeable, I run into it a couple times a week. My previous S24 on the same carrier never dropped calls under the same circumstances, so I know not having this issue is possible.
- The flashlight implementation sucks. Being able to tap it off with screen input is incredibly frustrating when I'm fumbling around trying to do something in the dark. And of course, it turns the screen on so you can make this accidental input every time you turn the flashlight on with the assignable side button. Being able to adjust the brightness is something I've never found any use for and mostly just serves to annoy me when I accidentally turn it down with another unintended input, but maybe somebody somewhere gives a shit about this, I guess.
- The split notification/settings menu is incredibly annoying. The settings menu is already a reach on the smallest mainline models, the notifications menu basically requires whole-hand movement. 20% of the space in the notifications menu is taken up by a fuckoff huge clock that you can't configure the size of. The lack of notification icons results in me having to actually unlock the phone and check things instead of just being able to know at a glance (I know they wanted to distance themselves from the roached Android notification tray look but I don't care).
- Liquid Glass looks like shit. So does a lot of the rest of the phone but I don't really hold some moron designer's bad visual taste against a product unless it affects the usability of the product. And of course, it affects the usability of the product. I actually laughed out loud having a literally unreadable lockscreen clock after the iOS 26 update, with the factory-provided moon background to add a little more salt to the wound. It reads poorly and is tacky to boot.
- This is pretty minor but the constant nags about iCloud are very funny. These assholes just couldn't resist hounding you for 99 cents more after you bought their $800 fuckup. It's like getting nagged about a Sirius XM subscription in a Lamborghini.
Individual points may be taken care of, but the disease is terminal. The iPhone's success at this point is driven by network effects, marketing, and its posturing as a premium product. Grown adults have an emotional attachment to the brand and the lifestyle statement. Android vendors are aping this stuff now. The memories of quality software and the ability to recognize it is being actively erased from the collective memory. Hoping that any of this is going to change at this point is just pissing in the wind.
I'm gonna be that guy and say that this has never occured on Android. And if it did, I can install any keyboard I want and the issue would likely be gone (I use FUTO keyboard). Apple is ridiculously controlling and anti-hacking I still have no idea why hackers use it
iPhone Typos? It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken [video]
(youtube.com)690 points by walterbell 11 December 2025 | 428 comments
Comments
Is this some sort of psyop to get me to use siri to send texts?
Slide to type. This "issue" is at most 6 years old for iOS users.
Turn off slide to type if you do not use it. Slide to type does key resizing logic. This is the direct cause of this issue. Please upvote this comment for visibility.
Please reply if you think I'm wrong. I see this get posted frequently enough I'm actually losing it.
Please refer to https://youtu.be/hksVvXONrIo?si=XD7AKa8gTl85_rJ6&t=72 (timestamp 1:12) to see that slide to type is enabled.
I suspect this last iteration broke it just enough for it to impact more people and make some of the problems I’ve been experiencing mainstream.
But yeah things like deleting when I meant to space, putting an “I” instead of “K” and a bunch of other little things like “thinks” instead of “things”, unintended periods; complete failure of spelling just generating gibberish “x” instead of “c” leading to un-autocorrectable failures; and if you want to reference the name of something that doesn’t fit the grammatical structure of the sentence but isn’t a mainstream item, forget about it.
Also “od” instead of “of”.
Seeing this video is super validating. Emotionally, it does a lot to make me feel vindicated.
Someone was telling me you can install 3P keyboards, does anyone have any recommendations?
Another example is most any toggle that's linked to Apple cloud stuffs, like settings in your iCloud account or parental controls. You see it toggle immediately, but that's unrelated to the actual state. You can't know the actual state until you exit the page and go back. Meta gets this right with their apps: you toggle, the toggle turns disabled, then the toggle is re-enabled when the state is confirmed remote side.
Apple is unintentionally pranking the world.
It kind of seems like the grace period for the paddle hiding with slide-to-type needs adjustment. I just leave slide-to-type off.
Once they added the suggestion bar above the keyboard things got noticeably worse. Every time they try to fix it they make it even worse than before.
With the current version, it’s not just the issue in the video I see as an issue. The two big problems I have are 1) repeated words, where I will type a word once, but auto-completion will inject another one. 2) The autocorrect will seemingly look at the whole paragraph I’m typing and change random words I typed several lines up and deemed correct. I will catch it doing this in real time, and sometimes it will flip a word back and forth repeatedly. I find I don’t just need to proofread while I’m typing, but also need to go through and re-read everything. It wasn’t always like this.
Maybe it’s my rose colored glasses, but I often think the iPhone peaked with the 4S.
If I ever lose my marbles I know I'm going to accuse iOS of being in on it.
Not only Alan Dye, Eddy Cue, Craig Federighi also need to go. Bring back Scot Forstall.
I installed SwiftKey on iPhone too but even it seems sluggish.
I raw dog my typing everywhere. Zero autocorrect. The last time I did use typing assistance was on BB10 with the 'flick to complete' because it was out of my way enough that I could ignore it was there or use it to save a small amount of time. Otherwise I too have the fond memory of Windows Phone's keyboard (I ran it on the HTC HD2), I couldn't tell you why it was good other than it felt good to use, again without autocorrect.
However, I'm CERTAIN there's an ergonomics thing at play, the 'brain calibration' time for me to type accurately on a big screen takes longer. I ran the original iPhone SE's as long as I could and always carried a second android device that was huge by comparison. Today I have the 15 Pro and a OnePlus 11. If I spend a lot of time using the iPhone it takes a little time maybe 20 minutes or so to stop making easy errors on the OnePlus 11. However, going back to the smaller iPhone after being on the OnePlus for awhile, there's not really an adjustment, I can hit all the letters accurately.
I have large hands, I still want the smaller device. There is extra work to need to move your hand and eyes across a larger device. More space to misclick on.
Swipe to type is enabled on android/ios for me. I use it sometimes, if you are hesitant at all on iOS or have a tendency to drag fingers at all don't enable it or it will mess up your typing. It's of course enabled by default like autocorrect. Some people have issues with it.
Dictation is underrated on iOS at least. It just works better and faster than the shitty autocorrect for typing. Obviously not applicable to a lot of situations but when I don't feel like typing it works really well.
EDIT: And I really have to have it off, I switch between devices too much and even with them learning my style of writing, I write differently for different contexts and each OS does its own thing differently. I don't want to spend the extra mental bandwidth correcting the autocorrect or having to think of how that specific autocorrect will behave.
iOS supports third party keyboards. Surely anybody this bothered by it should investigate those and pick a better option?
There was an absolutely mind-blowing keyboard which supported multi-finger swiping called Nintype, but development on it has stopped.
My recent experiment has been very disappointing. Mostly post upgrading to iOS 26? I’ve had to painfully change my behaviour to two-handed typing by default.
My suspicion— they’ve changed the ML system that inferred words based on swipes, and the new one isn’t as good in real world use.
sent from my iPhone
Then it seems like they’re started teaching to the bottoms of the class and added a bunch of terrible decisions: Substituting touch to select instead of touch to move cursor was a genuinely awful decision that now makes typing a constant chore, and it seems like their autocorrect is overcompensating so hard that it prevents me from writing perfectly good words simply because they’re not common ones.
Side note: anyone else have moments where you can’t press delete once predictive text has shown up?
I also did a few other experiments that I unfortunately haven't had time to explore further[2]
[1] https://www.typenineapp.com
[2] https://medium.com/porsager/a-better-iphone-typing-experienc...
I imagine the problem could be severe enough to some that they would pay the price of the Apple Developer program just so they may install such a Retro keyboard app from Github - if one exists?
I wonder if this is related to the fact that every Apple app shows up as “recently accessing” contacts in App Privacy Report. And I don’t mean only photos (face recognition), but: Safari, Camera, Shortcuts, Mail, Health… why? I’ve never even configured a Mailbox. Why are these apps all accessing my Contacts?
>Who knows? Maybe they're just trying to simulate the butterfly keyboard in software.
Apple truly has some incredibly incompetent people working for it, obsessively focused on cosmetic style instead of substance and usability.
Alan Dye voluntarily leaving certainly won't solve the root problem that they didn't fire him years ago.
Bad Dye Job:
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
Gruber: Apple employees ‘giddy’ about Alan Dye’s departure:
https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/04/gruber-apple-employees-giddy-...
But I also think having this many keyboards enabled makes iOS basically throw up its tiny virtual hands in frustration and nullifies most fancy predictions.
(This was mostly swiped in on an iPhone 15 Pro running iOS 26 with very minor hiccups)
I'm working on this keyboard substitute with larger keys and split up keyboards: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/icantext/id6748927092. Give it a try if you want.
When i hit send, i want to send the message that is on my screen, not the message iOS thinks i meant to send.
(And that you cant just click into the middle of a word to edit one letter)
I havent found a root cause yet, tentatively chalked it up to advancing age.
I may have inadvertently selected a different keyboard (Samsung vs Google ) or wrong layout/settings when switching to newer phone.
Apple's is by far the worst. All feedback is private. There is no way to show or advertise support for feature. Like I want to go upvote the feedback from this video, but all I can do is file my own feedback, which is more work, and therefore more people will choose not to give any.
Both Apple and Google and Microsoft have "users help users". These are infuriating as there is no official answer or help. There's just some fan with an often completely wrong or irrelevant answer. There is zero indication that any of these companies look here to see what's broken.
I've also had trouble getting rid of pop up menus (copy, etc). If I want to click on text, but it has decided to pop up a menu, it can be a real pain to get rid of it. (I had no problem on previous versions of IOS).
There's a fundamental law of features: Every feature you add may may make it better for people who use it, but it makes it worse for everyone else.
If you keep adding features, anything will eventually become unusable.
Seeing this video has convinced me it’s a feature. I can’t see iOS development practices that shit and to read comments here about similar Android issues.
- You're in the middle of writing a sentence.
- The phone is trying to guess how that sentence will eventually be constructed.
- It goes back 3 words and changes one to match its guess.
- Its guess is @)%(*%@ WRONG
My biggest gripe is that when I say "want to" it replaces it with "wanna" unless I specifically enunciate "want to".
"Wanna" is NOT a word in english but there is no way to exclude it.
Frustrating.
Not sure how it works. Maybe it looks at touch surface area movements during the couple milliseconds that I'm pressing down for? Or dynamically adjusts hitboxes as this video says iOS does? Whatever the method, it works very well after like fifteen years of training (I copy the data folder between devices and never update it or let it access the internet, so I'm sure it's just me training it and not anything else, nor incompatible versions ever throwing data away)
Note that this is different from the context-based autocorrect since that only triggers on spacebar or suggestion selection
The iOS keyboard "just not working" is something I gripe about pretty much every day as a symptom of the world getting quantifiably worse than even five if not ten years ago, alongside a whole laundry list of enshittification transgressions.
I want an iPhone but without a touch screen. Give me a damn real physical keyboard.
LLM HUD displays can annotate ads, marketing copy and shopping carts with customer usability feedback.
This particular problem manifests as: you're conversing in one language (say, French) and then use a single English word, at which point the spell-check and auto-correct permanently switches to that language, mis-correcting pretty much everything from that point onward.
(Classic) Outlook on Windows is pretty much entirely broken for me these days (even if I repeatedly mark the entire message as being in the majority language), as is Safari on MacOS: even in a completely-Dutch conversation, it always insists on auto-completing 'lang' ('long' but can also be 'tall') to 'language' and it's absolutely infuriating, and with no apparent way to disable the madness... (and, interestingly, no mechanism to detect that I dismissed the auto-complete for the 100th consecutive time, and that it's possibly not a desirable substitution)
Tim Apple really needs to let go the clowns who managed to regress the keyboard input functionality.
In prior versions, you could long press to open the choices, then letting go would insert the default (eg .com)
With iOS 26, the touch target seems to be slightly different for triggering the options vs selecting them. I now frequently long-press, see the TLD choices with the default selected, and then releasing incorrectly inserts a single . instead of the TLD. This is infuriating when typing fast.
The autocorrect does help sometimes. But it fucks things up that were previously fine just as much as it helps so overall it’s probably worse than it used to be. Now You need to constantly monitor every key pressed to make sure it hasn’t screed it up later.
Why would it go from what felt like a predictable error to what feels like someone moving the keys around? I am guessing someone presented aggregate research that showed higher accuracy overall, but ignored the case that the errors feel like the voices are getting louder :D.
Hopefully they come up with a setting to change this, but knowing apple it probably won't happen. Is it time for custom keyboards to come back?
Does no engineer at Apple use iOS or they never face this problem ?
I don’t know wtf it thinks I’m doing because it doesn’t do any other action.
And liquid glass is still ugly and buggy. Apple has become enshitified.
- Random invisible touches and phone calls - BUggy Glass UI - Stupid battery management ..to say the least.
- As mentioned, keyboard input is offensively broken. Whiffed inputs, the entire text selection/cursor manipulation model sucks (not being able to select in the middle of a word is inexcusable unless you have Stockholm syndrome for the bandaids), the cursor manipulation is broken, keyboard gets stuck open or closed, etc. etc. I'm convinced the input design for this phone is a CIA psyop designed to drive you to madness so they can recruit you as a sleeper cell.
- Passcode inputs are also broken. Trying to enter your passcode at easily achievable speeds results in dropped inputs.
- Above point wouldn't be a big deal if it weren't for fingerprint scanning being given up for Face ID, which is complete dogshit that constantly fails-to-passcode trying and failing to scan my ceiling, or my face when it's against a pillow in the morning. It's also completely worthless when I'm unable to fully point my face at the phone (working on vehicles or in some other enclosed area) or am trying to use the phone completely off of muscle memory.
- The gesture navigation system is a fundamentally bad idea. I'm an average-sized man and reaching over to the left hand side of the screen to make back inputs requires me to shift my fingers on the back of the phone just to make the reach for the input. This is on a base-model iPhone 16, which is already a touch too large for many hands to deal with this input system. The hitboxes for navigation inputs are too small and many of the inputs are often shared with actions in apps, resulting in taking all sorts of actions you didn't want to. Android style 3-button navigation at the bottom of the screen solved this many years ago. As an aside, the 60 FPS screen on an $800 phone as a "fuck you" push to upgrade to an even fatter pig of a phone that suffers even more from the bad navigation is funny.
- The GPS is fucked up, at least on the iPhone 16. It takes forever to find its bearing, after which it usually holds onto it until losing its mind again at the most inconvenient time. The only phone I've seen with a worse GPS is a Unihertz Jelly. Being in the same league as a $150 niche night market special is shameful.
- I have a frustrating number of calls get dropped. I don't know exactly where this issue comes from but it's noticeable, I run into it a couple times a week. My previous S24 on the same carrier never dropped calls under the same circumstances, so I know not having this issue is possible.
- The flashlight implementation sucks. Being able to tap it off with screen input is incredibly frustrating when I'm fumbling around trying to do something in the dark. And of course, it turns the screen on so you can make this accidental input every time you turn the flashlight on with the assignable side button. Being able to adjust the brightness is something I've never found any use for and mostly just serves to annoy me when I accidentally turn it down with another unintended input, but maybe somebody somewhere gives a shit about this, I guess.
- The split notification/settings menu is incredibly annoying. The settings menu is already a reach on the smallest mainline models, the notifications menu basically requires whole-hand movement. 20% of the space in the notifications menu is taken up by a fuckoff huge clock that you can't configure the size of. The lack of notification icons results in me having to actually unlock the phone and check things instead of just being able to know at a glance (I know they wanted to distance themselves from the roached Android notification tray look but I don't care).
- Liquid Glass looks like shit. So does a lot of the rest of the phone but I don't really hold some moron designer's bad visual taste against a product unless it affects the usability of the product. And of course, it affects the usability of the product. I actually laughed out loud having a literally unreadable lockscreen clock after the iOS 26 update, with the factory-provided moon background to add a little more salt to the wound. It reads poorly and is tacky to boot.
- This is pretty minor but the constant nags about iCloud are very funny. These assholes just couldn't resist hounding you for 99 cents more after you bought their $800 fuckup. It's like getting nagged about a Sirius XM subscription in a Lamborghini.
Individual points may be taken care of, but the disease is terminal. The iPhone's success at this point is driven by network effects, marketing, and its posturing as a premium product. Grown adults have an emotional attachment to the brand and the lifestyle statement. Android vendors are aping this stuff now. The memories of quality software and the ability to recognize it is being actively erased from the collective memory. Hoping that any of this is going to change at this point is just pissing in the wind.
I've been using it for years- much better at recognizing and more performant.