[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) ;)

[biztos]

As long as we are ranting: I have many multilingual converstations. At some point iOS started offering the "German/English" keyboard option. I assume it also does "French/Swahili" or whatever, but for some reason it didn't auto-create a combination for "Hungarian/English" which I use more than German/English.

This sounds like a great idea, but in practice it just autocorrects incorrectly in two languages instead of one. Which is a shame, since even the German government uses a lot of Denglish these days, you'd think it would be trainable.

Meanwhile, when the chat gets stuck in the wrong language, it's a comfort to know that selecting another (or trying to press Shift for that matter) will take me to Keyboard Settings at least 80% of the time. Because who knows when you might need to change those!

[devnullbrain]

Come on, the 6th word after 5 English words is obviously going to be a rare word in your second keyboard language, not another common English word.

[teekert]

On top this my own language is Englishifying so it’s understandable it gets confused. But still, the whole thing is infuriating when you type something correct and boom, it becomes a word in another language.

[johtso]

Yes this behaviour is infuriating, the surprise autocorrect! Can result in some really embarrassing messages being sent..

[whycome]

Try typing

Other times were not so bad.

[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.

[renmillar]

I got anxious about autocorrect potentially inserting the wrong words and what kind of social fallout that could cause, so I just disabled it entirely. Takes longer to type everything manually but at least my anxiety has gone down.

[teekert]

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

[andrekandre]

that is the worst! i hate that so much!

there must be some kind of event trigger on text focus being removed or keyboard hiding that does that... ughhhh

[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.

[eek2121]

The keyboard actually does this all the time, and many assume they are the problem (making typos, etc.). A few have recorded videos to show what is actually happening and it's wild. If I had a link handy I'd share it. The user directly taps on a letter, and the system picks what it thinks the user actually meant, even when the key hit was dead on.

Turning off slide to type in settings improves the situation, however it still happens.

[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.

[devilbunny]

There already was one. For all its faults, Swype for Android ~12 years ago was better than any swiping keyboard available now - both in its interpretation of swipes, and in its other features like "squiggle over one letter to indicate a double letter", "run your swipe above the keyboard to indicate a capitalized word", and the incredible editing features (it had an editing keyboard!). The Swype key, located in the bottom left? You could Swype-A to select all, Swype-X to cut, Swype-C to copy, Swype-V to paste. Swype-space brought up the editing keyboard.

[jonplackett]

Sounds great. When you say 12 years ago do you mean newer versions weren’t as good? Or was it discontinued or something?

I think the really puzzling thing about these keyboards is we all seem to remember typing being easier - even though phones back then were so much smaller. It makes no sense!

[bbarn]

I still use it on iOS, and I've tried to remove all other keyboards, but Apple still just seems to "make up" keyboards I don't know are installed. Or switch keyboards on me mid-typing a word to a weird native one I also don't show as installed. It used to be very occasionally this would happen but now it's so repeatable since 26 I can almost not use my keyboard.

One caveat, I have an Icelandic keyboard installed on there. Sometimes web controls will force an input box to a US english keyboard (or numpad), which is annoying but at least that's sort of covered by a spec. What really drives me nuts is when I'm mid typing on the swype keyboard and suddely it switches to a completely square grid keyboard with up and down quotes in the autocomplete (which is not actually autocompleting or correcting(which while technically correct has almost completely fallen out of popularity since the dawn of the internet)

[devilbunny]

I quit using Android ca. 2016 (not because I hated it, had other work-related reasons why) and Swype for iOS was only around for a brief period before Microsoft killed it (and most of the things that made it great).

I never used the much-vaunted tap-only iOS keyboards of the earlier iPhones. I have large hands (the OG Xbox Duke controller was very comfortable) and typing on those small screens always felt painful even though I was so often told it was great.

[gilrain]

It was bought by Microsoft and declined, yes.