[abanana]

A line early on in the article caught my eye:

> they serve the same functional goal — input numbers

Well, yes and no. Same as how, when it comes to data types, it often has to be pointed out to inexperienced developers that a phone "number" isn't a number in the mathematical sense - you can't add or multiply 2 of them together to get anything meaningful. It's an identifying string, that happens to use only digit characters. "123" in a telephone number is three individual unrelated digits, whereas "123" in a calculator represents the number one hundred and twenty-three.

So the functional goal isn't exactly the same. One is entering individual characters, but on the other you're more likely to be thinking "one hundred and twenty-three" as you type its digits.

It may or may not be related to the actual reason for the inversion of layout, but the subtle difference felt like a (possibly minor) error in the initial premise.

[ztetranz]

It's sounds silly when the Android auto in my car reads a text message. "Message from twenty four thousand, five hundred and thirty nine ..."

[Cordiali]

Tangentially related, when websites mess up the digit grouping in phone number input fields, I've noticed it becomes quite hard to read. Must be a headache to get it right though, because it's a convention that changes from country to country, but it's easily worse than not grouping the digits.

[toast0]

Not that it's always right, but Google's libphonenumber has formatting rules for phone numbers that work pretty well. But you need to know the right country, which isn't always easy; people may enter a local number and the site context isn't always enough to know what country is implied.