[throwaway894345]

I generally agree, although there are all kinds of issues on iPhone as well. The one that bothers me most often is autocorrect sporadically changing correct English words to nonsense, or the complete inability to select certain bits of text properly (even in Apple apps).

[mod]

I'm so mad at all the phone keyboards for not having some kind of priority for predictive. And ability to remove words.

There's some typos I get consistently and the correction is from a very normal word (probably, for instance) to a really seldom used word (poetically, in this example) and I'd prefer to remove poetically from my dictionary than to keep having it pop up.

Repeat this for a couple dozen very common words that consistently give me problems.

[maxwelljoslyn]

> I'm so mad at all the phone keyboards for not having some kind of priority for predictive. And ability to remove words.

Now imagine how frustrating it is having to deal with an additional layer of invisible predictions, silently changing a word after you've typed it and moved on, consistenly only allowing you to say "1/4" instead of "one-fourth" with nowhere to change it ...

I have to deal with this every day because I use dictation do most of my typing. Due to a hand injury (RSI).

I am someone who cares very very deeply about precise and novel expression. It is very very difficult to do that when I have to fight multiple layers of tools that think they know better, with no way for me to provide feedback to the system, as you say"Priority for predictive."

For instance, just looked at how Mack OS voice dictation chose to punctuate and space the string

> say"Prio

Above. Or look at how it misspelled its own name, in the previous sentence!

[zebracanevra]

GBoard allows you to remove words, and the gesture is very simple. For example, "pepsi" is corrected to "Pepsi" but who wants that. So, just type "pepsi", and "Pepsi"'ll appear in the bar above the keyboard. Drag it up, and it won't be corrected again. Easy. As usual with gestures, zero affordance...

[sulam]

Sounds like the machine thinks you're writing too prosaically. I'd give in and indulge its flights of fancy.

[mulmen]

I turned off autocorrect a year ago. It’s easier to correct typos by tapping them than have to proof read for whatever properly typed word Apple changed for no reason.

The original iPhone had a much nicer cursor behavior and placement was easier with a tap or a hold-and-drag than it is to this day. I forget when this changed, I think it was about a decade ago.

[hnzix]

Tap and hold on the spacebar works pretty great for cursor placement.

[neillyons]

Thank you. This works so much better that tapping on the word to place the cursor.

[mulmen]

Thanks, I didn't know that was a thing.

[Lio]

I wish I could up vote this twice. Text handling on the iPhone is incredibly frustrating.

I'd add to the list of issues how hard it is to trigger the spell checker for underlined words and how poor its suggestions are when you finally do trigger it.

There are whole websites devoted to embarrassing errors caused iPhone text handling. I can't see why Apple don't bother to fix it. Even small iterative improvements would be OK.