[rafram]

Really? That’s surprising to me. The Arabic keyboard layout is very simple to learn, and people in the Eastern Arabic-speaking world (Egypt, Jordan, etc.) seem to use it pretty universally. Obviously people write online with the “chat alphabet,” but I’ve never heard of anyone in the Levant actually using it to input Arabic characters.

[lifthrasiir]

The existence of direct keyboard layouts doesn't always imply that they would be popular though. I think this happens fairly regularly around the world and the only major exception I'm aware of is Korean where no phonetic input methods were widespread at any moment.

[the_g0d_f4ther]

It’s also related to the the layout of the first phone’s keyboards, where you had to type up to three times to select a letter ( it also was latin characters only)

[j16sdiz]

Korean is phonetic.

[lifthrasiir]

Not exactly, though. And Japanese kana should be phonetic enough that a direct input method should be used for kana, but the dominant input method there is Romaji, i.e. typing Latin characters to get both kana and kanji. So that is not a defining factor.

[mtalantikite]

Yeah, it's the same in Algeria and Tunisa. I was working with a derja tutor for a while and on day one she gave me the phonetic map like the parent comment pointed out, as it's ubiquitous.