I've been using it for several months since the developer beta came out; overall I'm extremely positive on it. One of their better releases that seemingly focused more on quality and refinements than new-features.
Siri is definitely worth using now, even if it remains still a work-in-progress/needs continued refinement. It can surprise you in good ways, but it isn't consistently good yet.
The keyboard remains unfixed, as is tradition. The same issues they've "fixed" like three or four releases now, seemingly are identically broken, and I'm lost faith they CAN fix it.
The iOS Keyboard and Search on Windows, are like the perpetually broken things that both companies have "fixed" every year for the last ten+ years and yet... It is almost farcical as this point.
Apple's search is so comically bad. For example, I can click on my applications, and I have an app called Chess. I can often type letters C-H-E-S-S and have it not show the Chess app. This is inside the applications folder!
Many people have complained before. Honestly I ONLY search for app names in spotlight search or application window, it should be trivial to make it actually work. Maybe i just need to vibecode some alternative search bar :(
It’s so much worse than that. This happens to me on a daily basis with both MacOS and iOS. Say I’m searching for Chess, I’ll get to the C-H and it’ll show the Chess app, but enter that next -E and it’s totally gone. It feels like the system is designed like “Well, I showed them Chess when they entered CH, but they kept typing, so they must not actually want Chess.” This ends up breaking for me like 95% of the time, and the only way around it is to search like “C”…wait for results…”H”…wait for results…etc. It’s maddening.
This, and then, if you notice, and backspace to remove the 'e', it doesn't put chess back into the search results, since it figures that everything that matches 'che' also matches 'ch', and so doesn't update it. Sometimes, if you add the 'e' again, it _will_ find chess, sometimes you need to type the 's', or even the final 's' before it gives you chess back again.
And sometimes, it finds what you want, but before you can select it, it decides that it has found something better, and places that in the place where you wanted to select, causing you to select the wrong thing. And then it thinks that because you selected this, it must be what you want, and starts to push it to the top…
Search is definitely frustrating.
Weird, the same stupid crap happens with Windows. I’ve had to learn the exact N character search to find the things I use often; any more or less and the result with that name is buried. It’s like Microsoft and Apple are just pip installing same broken search package.
On Windows I use PowerToys' Alt+Space command bar which does a much better job. In fact, it's the only search I use on Windows.
I switched to Everything for search a while ago and haven’t looked back. For the start menu I replace it with Open Shell, which seems to find apps much more reliably.
Good info, I’ll check it out. Thanks!
Always turn off searching the internet as much as possible on both. Helps a ton. I think I set both windows and iOS to only search local applications and settings
I don't find this to be the case at all.
Firefox's "awesome bar" behaves the same way. I guess it's either inherent to the problem somehow, or else everyone is sharing a library (unlikely), or else everyone just makes the same mistakes.
It's worse than this! You Type C-H-E then you go to press enter, and it changes the results as you're pressing it, opening the wrong thing! I've turned off all the search targets, except for applications and folders.
Absolutely. The mac spotlight search / bar was one of my favourite features, maybe 10 years ago? But now it’s useless.
It also has some strange behaviour when it’s not in focus, but hasn’t been closed.
I just leave every application open and command tab to them now.
Changing the results just when you are going to action on them is a fundamental UX sin.
Yes. "UI Speed" should be a configurable thing, so that if the UI changes as you're choosing an item, it acts instead on _what was there_ at a brief moment in the past, e.g. 20-50ms ago.
I'm hit by this problem often. I wonder why UI updates which could well be incremental instead just replace the whole results from under your fingers!
Don't worry, airdrop does it too! I've accidentally sent airdrop requests to strangers from their profile picture moving under my finger as I'm approaching to touch someone else's. The single most idiotic design I've ever seen in UI. I don't use airdrop for anything sensitive anymore, obviously.
I have the same problem when i touch a result and it changes the result line at the exact moment.
This one drives me particularly crazy.
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I really wish apps stopped doing that "search on type" thing in search boxes. You either need to have only a couple miliseconds of response time, or you need to confirm that you want the search process to start. Or maybe at least have some feedback showing "more content is loading, watch out, don't click".
The amount of misclicks daily because of crappy slow-but-should-be-fast search probably offsets by 10x the amount of time required to hit "enter" for the search to start.
For me search has been that way since the first MacOS 26.0 upgrade and apparently never fixed.
But speaking of quality overall (outside of the search glitch) - I use dual 5k LG monitors with my work MacBook and can get the MacOS Display Manager process to crash if I just enable variable rate refresh and put the computer to sleep, then wake it up. Apparently a known issue for a few years, still not fixed.
> I’ll get to the C-H and it’ll show the Chess app, but enter that next -E and it’s totally gone
It "works" exactly the same on Windows. How is that even possible?
It's probably asynchronous reranking doing something weird. My guess is that the underlying ranking algorithms in these desktop search bars are very ropey, and they can't debug or diagnose because privacy reasons means the developers don't get to see what results were generated for different query/index combos. Also search is probably just not staffed most of the time.
So many platforms with search have a variation of this problem now.
The other issue with Mac search is that it never tells you when it’s done, so you can’t tell if it searched and failed to find something or is still searching.
I find this theory pretty compelling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49703471
Maybe they are overthinking it.
Either same guy got promoted over and over again or someone thought we must copy this genius search bar as is
The best part is when you click on or press enter when you see "chess", but this is just as "cheese.com" is appearing so you open that instead.
For me the big one is whenever I type "sys" to get system settings, it pops up for a half second and then for some reason the top result is like "reset some system setting" and then I invariably get flashbanged because it turns off dark mode and there's no confirmation dialogue lmao. Maddening.
Typing “sound” and end up with some obscure sound setting as top option and the general “sound” control panel nowhere to be found. Every time.
I was trying to see what happens here. It does give the Sound settings panel as the first hit. But when I then press Return, it opens System Settings, but does not actually go to the Sound settings, but General.
Also, search inside the Settings app has been broken for many releases now. I always wonder if anyone inside Apple is actually using macOS or iOS.
I've deactivated every single type of data in Spotlight except Applications. It goes out of its way to still suggest files like C system files or header files, like "system_library.c". It didn't wait for AI to turn against us.
I had this problem on Spotlight, I solved it once and never happened to me again, there is a setting to reindex all the files, which solves the issue. On iOS however I still have this problem.
I can't search for Apples own Notes app. I've tried the name in my local language, I've tried the original english name of the app. Nothing. It will show me OneNote which isn't even installed anymore, but not the Notes app. Very strange.
I wish all this shit would just stop trying to search as I’m fucking typing. It’s like that person we all know that can’t hold their tongue for five fucking seconds and let you finish a sentence before the blurt something out.
This seems like a general UI bug.
Q: For those amongst us who are UI experts, what is it called when dynamic lists populate unpredictably while a finger-tap is in-progress?
a) start query and see initial results
b) start finger-navigation, moving finger over initial results
c) start finger-tap descent
d) underlying list is updated, replacing future finger-tap destination's UI element with another
e) finger-tap meets different element than intended
It’s called layout shift.
I feel attacked, but it’s probably the same reason, we both think we know the answer before you finished.
Ah, but hitting enter now takes you to the top result! Therefore it has to search as you type, so there's something to activate as soon as you hit enter! /s
...I've been seeing this search style in more and more places recently, and I hate it. Let me type my search, then hit enter, then you can go find what I asked for. Don't slow everything down by searching on every character I type.
It’s called incremental search and it’s useful, but only when there’s some debouncing involved and the search results is presented at once or the items are sorted by the order they are found.
I always assumed that was intentional to save you arriving through options. I find that behaviour quite useful as I can hit anything beginning with CHE just by typing more letters.
I don’t get it. How is it useful that typing CHE you won’t see Chess even though it was visible before you got to type the E?
Because you watch as you type. You may not find it useful, I very much do for apps with colliding names.
>> the only way around it is to search like “C”…wait for results…”H”…wait for results…
Some people don’t like that. I don’t know why you like having to wait but if they showed Chess for CHE you could still find other apps if you kept typing.
Maybe there are also people who like the lottery of results changing the instant you click on the app you want because it adds excitement to their lives.
'calc' used to bring up calculator, but now it becomes some widget to calculate distance inside the spotlight box. The worst thing is you can't even backspace out of it.
I'd take the widget! For me typing "calc" finds the "com.apple.calculator" folder. If I continue to "calcu" etc, it suggests "com.apple.ncplugin.calculator" instead. Brilliant intelligence right there.
Don't they perform user testing?
- Do "normies" perform better with this behavior?
- Or is the goal to disturb the user and make something impractical like in Google, so that people click on ads? Software has turned into a curse. The machines have risen.
FWIW, I find if I’m pushing the disk limit, Spotlight search becomes unusable. So I free up ~100GB (easy to do with iOS/Android dev artifacts, emulators, etc.) and then force a Spotlight re-index from the command line:
sudo mdutil -E /
You can check indexing status with:
mdutil -s /
After that it’s usually fine again until I start pushing the disk limit.
Every sibling comment's issues I've experienced. But a reindex after freeing enough disk space seems to be a semi-stable solution for me. If only I could write a tool to remind me to free disk space before it screws up spotlight. It would be nice if MacOS put the index on its own partition.
Exactly this. Spotlight remains the best local search but it falls apart with disk space limits.
Spotlight worked best in OS X 10.4. It was near instantaneous on what is now considered ancient hardware. It's been steadily downhill from there.
Mostly because people still expect to use it to find "Recipe for Egg Salad.docx" without searching the entire Internet or executing some bizarre natural language query.
A common one I hit is "blu" showing bluetooth settings, but "blue" does not. Very frustrating to see the thing you are hoping for popup, but then go away as you type more if its name.
Windows does this, too. So I really wonder how come two companies implemented the same borked behavior.
Android keyboard does that too. When I start typing my email address, for example, the keyboard app suggests the correct email after a few characters, but if I keep typing it disappears from the suggestions.
I have to send a daily email that always has the subject starting with "Work Diary". If I type "W", it doesn't come up. If I type "Wo" it comes up as the 3rd auto-complete suggestion. If I type any more characters, I have to type the entire two words. This is on Android, but I have a feeling it's no better on iOS.
I'd love to know the algorithm they're using for this. Fuzzy search seems like it was a mostly solved problem 20 years ago, and it's definitely worse than it was 10 years ago.
It would be interesting to learn what over engineered solution to fuzzy string matching is being used here to exhibit this behavior, so we never make the same mistake.
I bet it's some obscure MIT/BSD-licensed fuzzy matching library that both macOS and Windows uses.
that space is probably sold to the same ad network by both OSs
Not just operating systems. Try the following on the IMDB app or website.
Search 'True', you'll get True Detective and True Blood show up as the top results. That seems to work well.
But then if you add a space making it 'True ', 'Bill Hader' is the top result!
To be fair "Bill Hader" should be the top result no matter what you type.
People still use IMDB after they introduced mandatory account registration to even see user reviews?
Seems like someone got updated KPIs and decided to try the most ham-fisted enshittification move to raise registrations. Oh, it is now possible again to see about five top reviews per item. Seems like loss of traffic was rough.
Just tried this on iOS 27 and both blu and blue showed me bluetooth settings. I saw someone in a different thread of this discussion mention resetting dictionaries helping with autocorrect, I wonder if there is something that would apply to this situation which helps.
Just do a fresh install every two weeks.
Aah those were the days.
These are too, but those were as well.
KDE gets it right, too.
And it offers me THREE different chess games I could install!
I thought i was going to greener pastures when I switched from Windows to Ubuntu but Ubuntu native search is pretty bad too.
I typed "printer" so I can get to my printer settings and the first three are printer icons/emoji. I cant imagine why these would be more important
On my incredibly midrange PC that has a midrange SSD in it, the Linux `find` and `grep` commands usually can find stuff much quicker than any 'accelerated' and 'cached' desktop search, even though the only caching they usually get is when the files are in the page cache because I have interacted with them. Even when that's not the case, it's faster AND more accurate that GNOME search or whatever search is in Windows Explorer.
Windows is the same - searching the fs is faster and more accurate than using these 'quick search' tools, which are borderline broken.
At some point I got the damn Chess app every time I wanted to switch to Chrome. You know, typing cmd-space, ch and enter. I've learned I can't remove Chess from my computer. After numerous incantations of various spells and reboots and updates I think it started working normally again.
Breaking interfaces, Linus Torvalds had something to say about it that Apple should heed.
I struggle daily with Finder's search. It cannot find files in my Downloads folder even if I type the exact name. Do I need to rebuild some index or some other setting?
It couldn't hurt. I don't have problems like that.
mdutil -E -a
That command will erase and rebuild Spotlight index on all volumes.
Since Tahoe, Spotlight has multiple modes. You might have better luck forcing it into folder & files mode. That's command-2. So command-space, spotlight UI appears, keep holding command key, press 2. There's also 1 for applications only, 3 for "actions" and 4 for clipboard history.
The annoying thing with Finder is when you're in a folder, you start to search, and then it defaults to "This Mac" and not the god damn folder you're in.
Bloody daft.
That's because you have that set in your Finder Settings.
With the Finder open, go to Settings > Advanced, and change the drop-down at the bottom to "Search the Current Folder". This is something I do on the first run of every new Mac I set up.
No, that's because it's a default value, so the complain is 100% spot on. Bad defaults should be treated as a bug.
"Search this Mac" should be confined to Spotlight OR as a fallback if the local folder doesn't return anything.
Same example: I search Spotlight for “Voice Memos,” a built-in Apple app. Nothing. Ask Siri? It’s horrible.
Search feels like it used to be much better in finding a balance between showing app vs files vs web - feels really broken somehow and I wonder if there’s any setting I can change.
Spotlight works for me across files and apps on Mac, iOS, visionOS, pretty well - it has failed occasionally but usually it's because my disk is full. I haven't really found anything better (Alfred is good but is just a wrapper around Spotlight)
I did just that. Took me half a day. I haven't used Spotlight since. I did try alternative launchers, but they are all bloated. I just need an app launcher and simple arithmetic - that's all it does.
https://github.com/askielboe/lightning-launcher
Check out TinyStart. It’s 5€, and the best 5€ I’ve spent in ages. It’s super fast, and handles basic math. Even lets you put the results on the pasteboard!
https://tinystart.app/
By default finder search searches all files rather than the current folder. You have to go to finder preferences to change it.
For me it's gotten way better in iOS/macOS 27. It's also way faster. They claim to have rewritten the spotlight index to handle the new Siri integration.
The new Siri UX needs improvement and to match the UX of talking to chatGPT. At least in settings have an option to keep the Siri window always on top (just have a prominent X out to go to the screen below) and always listening ready to continue your conversation like the experience is with chatGPT.
Been running the beta since June -- on the latest beta now and 8 out of ten times to continue the conversation with Siri (most notably in the car with my phone docked) I have to constantly say "Hey Siri."
One thing it's current UX has over chatGPT voice tech as it shows you the text and provides visuals while chatGPT's UI shows no text and or visuals.
This should be the top comment!!!
It is so incredibly bad that for years I have assumed it must be me or my specific laptop. And then the years go by I just accept it.
Anytime Apple is mentioned "comically bad search" should be mentioned. It is the association I have in my mind.
You mean, like this?
https://imgur.com/a/pmtihO1
That's a user error, you simply had "This Mac" selected (preselected) instead of narrowing scope to be Applications.
It works fine for me but my wife has this exact problem. It’s absolutely mystifying how something so basic could get so messed up.
> Apple's search is so comically bad.
There needs to be more rage at search in Mail.app.
It’s quicker to rollback through them all than it is to use search, but when you get tens or hundreds a day it’s excruciating.
Please Apple, fix email search.
I quit Apple Mail (due to its poor handling of Gmail accounts) and started using Mimestream years ago. Truly excellent mail client. Actively and thoughtfully developed.
Paid but worth every penny.
They did fix it (macOS 27, my experience). I have like 600,000 mail messages - there was a period where Mail search was awful but these days it's fast and accurate. It really comes down to whether you need to rebuild your index.
The number one thing I want to use it for is opening folders eg Downloads. It has such a hard time ever recommending the right thing.
I use Raycast and it’s much better than spotlight imo
Raycast2 has its own index and it's way more reliable and fast. I don't understand how Apple does not care about many of the core services of their OS. Searching in Mail is a coinflip
Cmd+space, cmd+1 to search apps only
Use Raycast, and never look back
The first thing I do on any mac is replace the default search, usually with alfred.
Same. But Alfred is not immune to these frustrations.
True, but it's way better in my experience.
Windows 10 start menu is the same way. How is it these things are so bad??
alfred and quicksilver etc. all work surprisingly well.
I got so annoyed at this recently I turned off spotlight entirely and replaced it with 3rd party software. I couldn’t be happier with my choice.
Check out Raycast / Alfred.
Yeah, Alfred is one of the first things I install on a new MacOS install.
Also enjoying Rectangles WM.
Alfred is wonderful for launching applications and custom actions, but it’s actually worse than Spotlight search for searching for files and folders. It finds a lot of results but inexplicably it likes to rank partial matches ahead of exact matches.
i still use alfred. wish it was there for ios
Why vibecode - obsidian
This is why I use Alfred instead of spotlight.
https://www.alfredapp.com/
Alfred afaik uses the spotlight index too, so if that's the problem you're out of luck.
I’ll have it not show Xcode. It’s apples main developer ide. Most of the time it works. Then it gets into some weird loop. Only shows the Xcode website. Very helpful.
Ever since they re-did Spotlight I've had issues. When I type something and press Return it should activate. I shouldn't have to wait for it to populate the results and then press Return a second time. Moreover they've broken the ability for me to use Cmd to locate files quickly. I have to awkwardly Cmd-double-click the result with my cursor because trying to Cmd-Return triggers Ask Siri!
Turn off all the web search and other domains that the index uses. Apple took a really brain dead decision to include web search in the results, and they are the worst. It is completely useless, and even though the recall has expanded, the precision is abysmal.
What makes it amazingly worse is that all of this USED to work SO much better!
Use EasyFind for no-nonsense file search: https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/freeware
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It’s really sad, because they mostly aped search from BeOS and had best in class search for a decade or so. Now indexing frequently breaks or works when an external disk is not attached, but won’t find local files after it’s connected.
It is sad, and as one of the several former BeOS employees who went to Apple to add our experience to OSX, I can say that most of us have moved on. This isn't to say that others can't do what we did; they certainly should be able to. The OSX team back then was much smaller and we all had a maniacal attention to detail. One reason is that we were micromanaged by Steve J. and did lengthy weekly reviews with him and he was direct and brutal. He wasn't always right, but he did have the final say. This is all gone and even though Steve Lemay (now head of UX) was there during this time, he was also present during the overall rot of the user experience.
Hi Pavel. I remember your work on Eddie and Tracker and Queries. Do you still follow the development of Haiku (even if infrequently)?
/meta let me just say how cool it is to cool it is to make a comment on HN and have responses from folks who worked on legendary teams. Thanks for your work on BeOS.
Are you the man who helped work on the new Apple file system / spotlight after working on BeOS' filesystem? If so, thanks!
Dominic Giampaolo may be who you’re thinking of. He’s shown up on HN before, IIRC.
Cool.
Now that we are living in The Future, I am dumbfounded how e.g. dynamically populated lists change their content reliably to something I did not want, during the phase of interaction where my finger is descending onto the target. Click! Not what I want.
Feels like a lost art which will be "discovered" again in the next 15 years.
Why do filesystem indices get stale? The OS can track what files get accessed, isn't inotify watertight?
I know that Windows has some equivalent stuff, that the antivirus uses to disallow opening files before they got scanned, so I'd wager that API is functionally required to not miss any changes.
Yet Windows indexing is one of the worst pieces of software in existence and frequently gets out of sync.
Even with inotify failing, if the system is plugged in and idle, it could quickly do a scan for files with update date > last known indexed time and index those. Like once per day maybe. Wouldn't take much load or memory, IMHO.
Any improvements to voice to text? I use iPhone 13 Mini and so keyboard has always been hard to type on. But voice to text..man..it is an absolutly miserable experience that I wish I could swap out for any other competitor.
I normally don't complain that iOS/MacOS isn't customizable because the defaults are good enough to work for me but that voice to text man its like they completely forgot about it.
There is also a new, larger voice to text model available... but not for an old iPhone like the 13 mini. Only like the iPhone 17 Pro and above.
The best workaround is a third party app that lets you run Parakeet V3 or Whisper on your phone. There are quite a few.
Dictus is one that I’ve been playing around with.
This is GREAT! It’s not possible to enable local-only dictation on iOS with the OS alone. :(
It’s by far the best speech to text I’ve ever used so I’m a fan
Can you clarify, you like third party? Or you like the larger Apple model
Hear hear. The insistence upon prioritizing names in my extensive contacts list as well as certain geographic names leads to so many unnecessary manual edits.
I use it constantly and it mostly works well for me since as long as I can remember. My biggest gripe with it is all the random ass commas it puts.
Have you tried wispr flow?
i’ve been using the beta for a few months now, and the speech to text is significantly better. Put in parentheses using apple speech to text
Some stuff, as you can see, isn’t perfect :-)
I don’t think it is parakeet v2 level, but it’s good enough to not be frustrating
try this: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ghostspeech-agentic-keyboard/i....
> Siri is definitely worth using now
Just tried it this morning after my shower:
- Siri, what's the weather like?
- I don't know where you are
- ... use the the geolocation??
- You need to unlock first
So yeah, still unusable to me even for the most basic shit
This sounds like some kind of conflict with your privacy settings
The first part of this one is more hilarious when you ask "Find me the nearest Starbucks" while CarPlay is actively providing you navigation: "I'm sorry, I don't know your location".
How is the keyboard broken? Maybe I'm so used to whatever it is that I'm blind to it.
They have some nasty "dynamic tap zones" algorithm that dynamically resizes the hitbox for keys based on what it predicts you will type in order to reduce miss-taps. Anecdotally, it has just steadily been getting worse with every update. I swear I can be pressing the center of a key and it will select the next one over and immediately autocorrect to a completely different word than what I typed.
I had the pleasure of typing something on an Android the other day and it was such a breath of fresh air when it actually accepted the keys I was pressing...
In addition to this, there is a delay in the suggested word such that when you see the options above the keyboard, decide you see the word you want, stop typing and move to select it, it changes right as you land your finger.
That drives me crazy. What's crazier happens when the suggested word is the one you are going to type. You hit the next letter in the word, recognize that it has already been suggested, yet right after you hit the letter, it decides to suggest another word.
OMG you're giving me PTSD just reading about it. It happens every single time!!!
This happens everywhere. On menu items to. You would think they would invalidate a click id the item changes in the last 0.1 seconds. But no.
What's hilarious is that typing was nearly perfect on my 3gs (with "iPhone OS 3"--back before it was even "iOS").
That's because it used to be a simple Markov model back then.
Today's implementation is using more advanced ML techniques ;)
Sounds like a third-party keyboard opportunity: “Just like the standard Apple keyboard but not ML”.
Compliments of product managers, engineers, etc making millions and millions of dollars to produce a much worse end user experience, if it wasn’t painful enough
Yes, it was a solved problem. Then they had to figure out how to utilize the ML features of their chips... and fucked it all up.
It's been getting noticeably worse with every update. iOS 26 was a significant step down from whatever version was before that.
Oh wonderful. That’s what’s happening to me. I’m an author and Apple‘s dictionary appears to be missing about half the more uncommon words in the English language. It’ll never recognize “prescient” in dictation for example. Some words it marks in red because it thinks it’s a spelling error. I know it’s not because I’ve used it, read it, and it’s in online dictionaries.
At least I’m macOS I can use Talon instead of the system dictation.
Thank you for putting a name to this phenomenon. I hadn't gone through my yearly attempt to figure out why iOS was terrible for text entry. I figured since I only have an iPad and not an iPhone, and infrequently type in it, that it just hadn't learned my habits or words. It's incredible that they've developed these kinds of algorithms that have made every facet of text entry from speech to text to spell checking to typing itself such a miserable experience.
Try turning off slide to type. It's under Settings > General > Keyboard.
I did it earlier this year. It seems to be much more accurate and confident with which key it thinks I want. I do occasionally miss the sliding but it's worth it overall.
If you turn off swipe or whatever the hell they call it the keyboard is a lot better.
Gboard on Android though is way better
Interesting. Because I have a much harder time typing on my Pixel. In fact, I hate it. I wish I had a blackberry.
When I use iOS devices, it feels better but I don't use them enough to have used them in anger. Ok, well, yes they have made me angry but for other reasons than the keyboard hence why I'm on Android lol.
I used a Clicks keyboard with a folded Moto Razr for a while and it was Blackberry-esque. The keyboard is a little narrow compared to the Blackberries of yore, though. I'm somewhat hopeful about the Clicks Communicator which is wider, but sadly still only a four row keyboard.
http://clicks.tech/
To be clear, I only kind of recommend the keyboard. I stopped using mine after a while because of how awkward it was with the Razr unfolded and never actually found it faster or more accurate than the on screen keyboard.
Ah, so that’s why that happens? I was gaslighting myself.
someone posted high speed videos a few months ago where the keyboard will popup the key you thought you pressed (therefore did press, as far as the UI is concerned) but iOS will insert a different character anyway.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45662685
Some of those videos are misleading. They sometimes slide a finger off one key onto another: taps need to not move.
Personally, I use the slyde to type rather than tapping to type and have gboard installed for when slyde doesn't work (I think the Apple algos are not quite as good as Google's).
Yep; this has been the case since the very first iPhone, it can't be disabled, and there is no feedback it happens other than the typos. It is very crazy making and mind boggling.
Same. Glad to know I'm not alone
I had a second gen iPod Touch and from what I can remember the keyboard experience was vastly superior than the iPhone now
Yeah, I’m not a dedicated iPhone user and my personal phones are androids so my iOS experience has been iPod Touch 2G -> employer owned iPhone 8 -> employer owned iPhone XR -> iPad Air M3. Each of those big gaps have seen the UI shift and the keyboard decline.
JFC I hate this so much. Why can't they simply add a setting to disable this.
This explains so much... Never knew, just constantly gets frustrated because even if my thumbs are big, no way I press wrong that often...
The best way to put it is it really wants to type what it wants to type, and if you deviate from that it will often end up just ignoring it. Whether it's the dynamic tap zones as mentioned elsewhere, or just auto correcting backwards and changing words you've already typed. Also when you go back and change a word it will also often insert additional spaces around the changed word. Or worse still if you mistype a word like say banana then backspan to ban and retype ana, it will display banana... Until you hit space and it turns it into "ban ana".
Try an android keyboard and go back to an iphone. Having switched back and forth between both systems it’s quite remarkable how bad the iphone keyboard is. In practice , typing on an iphone means constant typos, bad autofix, and bad suggestions.
Completely agree. I switched from Android to iOS... 6 years ago now? and the keyboard immediately felt off. I thought it was just something related to needing to adjust, but I reused my old Android (Pixel 3a) for the first time a few days ago (cuz I'm working on an Android app and wanted to try it on an actual phone) and the keyboard just works. No typo, no ass completions, I can actually type fast as I feel it and the text ends up mostly (99%) correct on the first try. On iOS I sometimes really struggle writing exactly what I want (the worst offending situation is iOS "correcting" a word when I hit send, so what's sent is literally not what I typed)
As someone who has had an iPhone since the 3GS (I'm so old), but tries Android out every now and then - I can wholeheartedly agree.
The only real advantages iOS have left are not being run by an advertising/tracking company (which is reducing as Apple looks for services revenue) and the quality and variety of indie iPhone and iPad apps (yet Apple are happy to make those same devs extremely unhappy).
I would actually go one step further and claim that typing has not come back to the speed and accuracy of Blackberry and Nokia phones with physical keyboard. It's taking so long that we may actually destroy humanity with AI before we have fast and accurate keyboards again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45662685
I used to have galaxy S phones with some aftermarket keyboard whose name I forget. It was quite popular at the time, and was fairly happy with it.
When I moved from a gs5 to an iPhone 7, I was amazed at how much better the typing experience was. But it has now gotten to a point where I feel like a drunk monkey would type better than I do.
Yay, I found my people…
I switch between Android and iPhone every few cycles, and I really do miss my swipe keyboard on Android.
iPhone swipe and tap keyboard always gives me trouble. I hate that it keeps trying to type my contacts’ names.
Also, text selection OSS frequently maddening. Yes, I swiped “is” and it decided I’m a fan of open source software… When I try to select some words or position my cursor, iOS always wants to put the cursor far away from where I held my finger. Doesn’t make a lick of sense.
I personally use the swiping keyboard on ios and it seems to detect the wrong word with an almost malicious frequency. It also randomly Capitalizes things.
Unfortunately for us swipers, disabling slide to type on an iPhone makes typing significantly more accurate. I can only guess as to why, but after seeing anecdotal reports over the last year or so from people raving about how much better typing was with swiping disabled I finally got fed up enough to give it a shot myself. It is much, much better, to the point where I'd never re-enable slide to type until Apple finally fixes this.
Sometimes I swipe the same word 5 times in a row and it gets it wrong every time, despite me being slower and more precise each time. I give up and type it by hand. Note: this is NOT the censorship issue, that's separate (where it will not allow you to swipe certain words or phrases AT ALL, no matter how hard you try. Like if you type "kill" it won't let you swipe "him" or "her" after it, though some other words work. There are many instances of this)
For some reason, the one word that it just will not let me swipe is “and”. Which is, you know, somewhat common. I get all kinds of random things instead.
I can't do "is". I get "OSS" instead. I'm not even that into open source.
I get “is” more often than “and”, though nowhere near what I got with Swype on Android ten years ago.
Considering that Microsoft bought Swype, I have no idea why SwiftKey isn’t absolutely amazing, but it isn’t.
Yes! It will give me Andy, ABE! abs, and's, anything but friggen "and"!
And’s! Fucking and’s! Every goddamned time, regardless of the fact that I have never once intentionally typed and’s (until now, which probably means that it’ll now either appear constantly or never again).
This drives me crazy. Sometimes I'll just put the phone down and move to a proper keyboard to type what I want. It definitely makes me use my phone less, maybe that's a good thing overall.
and -> Abe for me for some reason.
you most likely have an Abe in your contacts, I don’t have an Abe but have a similar issue with a last name from mine. the behavior sort of makes sense if I squint and crane my neck around a bit but I have no idea how the weightings are so bad.
"ABs"
That is common. The one that I haven’t seen lately is “Abbas”, like the Palestinian politician. Except, I don’t ever write about Middle Eastern politics. At all.
But it was a favorite for a while.
It's intriguing. Danny! Infuriating.
I think it's slightly worded if you swore. No. Slightly worded. No. Slightly worse if you swipe left handed. Yes. At last.
I also use it all the time and I hate it very much. It almost never works right on the first try.
Each time you type the wrong letter there’s a big chance you didn’t miss but the keyboard typed the wrong key anyway.
Have to wonder how often you hit the wrong letter and the keyboard corrects it to what you actually wanted though.
Would have been totally gaslit by my iPad on this only I have an android phone to compare my typing accuracy on.
I am so very glad to see all of my complaints with ios text entry so thoroughly articulated in this thread. My first thought with the iphone duo is "how many people are going to develop a repetitive stress injury with these awful text entry interfaces and giant heavy devices?"
Typing is more important than ever. We're a ways off from BCIs and there should be responsible and serious consideration for this problem.
I know the autocorrect is broken -- I consistently hit a bottom row character like "n" instead of spacebar, and it's simply unable to comprehend that you might have hit a letter instead of space. It comes up with all kinds of insane, implausible suggestions for the autocorrect, but never the obvious one that's 1 character from what i typed.
Oooh that's what's happening! I sometimes end up with garbage like "so ' I'll" instead of, say, "someone" and I wondered how it happened.
Yes! The way it tries to be smart about what you actually wanted to press but has certain areas that are exceptions to that rule — like space bar — drives me crazy.
I have an English/Italian bilingual keyboard set up as my default.
Every single f**n time I begin a sentence with "È" (Italian for "she/he/it is") - which is an extremely deliberate gesture - you have to keep the E tapped until the accents pop up - it will immediately correct it back to an unaccented "E". It's nuts.
There is a metric ton of intent behind my selecting, keeping tapped, waiting for the accents, picking one - it's so obviously NOT accidental, and this utterly cretinous piece of junk changes it .
I have French / English and every time I start my sentence with "The" (obviously the start of an English sentence), it autocorrects as "Thé" (tea). There's veeeery few situations in French where a sentence can start with "Thé".
Can't "autocorrect" be replaced to "autosuggest" instead like on android devices?
I have never been fan of autocorrection tools (especially as I am regularly writing in 4 different languages) regardless of the OS but definitely use autosuggestions to correct potential spelling errors.
It can. I don’t understand how anyone willingly keeps autocorrect enabled on iOS. The autosuggestions are nevertheless still bad.
The iPhone keyboard "intelligent" tap target size is independent of autocorrect, however, and you can't turn it off or adjust it's behavior.
Yes, the keyboard is pretty bad in various ways. I’m still surprised how many comments in this thread (and similar threads in the past) are mentioning the autocorrection, implying that they haven’t turned it off.
Largely because the auto correction is needed to undo the damage caused by the tap target shenanigans.
"O can" instead of "I can" on the iPhone is the one which has been driving me bonkers for at least a couple of years now.
Typing German and Swiss German is entirely broken while English is fine on the Swiss German keyboard layout. It very often registers the wrong key even though a slow motion video shows very clearly that the finger hits the correct key initially.
I really need the spacebar to expand slightly more on the right so my thumb doesn't miss it while typing. Wish it were customizable.
This is the “dynamic key area” in action
This! So many times have I hit one of the keys in the row above space. I think this might actually be caused by them resizing the hitbox because I am not that fat-fingered.
1. Auto-correct inserts the wrong words into my sentences despite correct spelling and grammar. Think, "what a ducking joke". This has suddenly gotten better recently when it comes to typos, though.
2. The keyboard's AI will also helpfully misinterpret key presses and sub the wrong letter, which doesn't get corrected. For example, common acronyms get corrected to other acronyms I _never_ use. FFS turns into FFA regularly.
It's unclear to me if they're alleging that it's recently broken. I switched to iPhone at my wife's insistence 3-4 years ago and I have pined for Swype the entire time. It's so bad and I was spoiled by Android.
You can install a different keyboard if you want. I used 3rd party swiping keyboards but ended up using the system one for the last few years because it doesn't bother me.
I tried SwiftKey but decided it was worse
What do you find lacking in iOS’s swipe keyboard implementation?
I can't comment knowledgeably. I just regularly have to try over and over again to get it to produce the word I want, and my memory is that this happened rarely on Android.
Wait! I do have a specific criticism!
There are certain two-word sequences it will not produce ("kill myself", "white women") and I could do without that little bit of editorial oversight thank you very much.
And expletives. If I want to say fuck, that's my business, I don't need my phone refusing to allow it. If not for how embedded I am right now in the ecosystem, this keyboard & vocabulary behavior they force on me might be enough to make me switch.
Swipe keyboard has given up and let’s me type fuck now
Yep, there's a whole set of censored phrases. Kill won't let you type a lot of things after it, including "him" and "her" (well, I haven't tested on iOS 27 yet). I haven't tried the white woman one though, that is cracking me up.
update: Okay I tried and sure enough, I'm laughing even harder now. The closest I could get it to swipe was "womanhood". Lots of Wohan's though.
Who’re women
Blank women
Chinese women
Indian women
Jewish women
Black men love Chinese women
Black woken live Ellie men
Kill your
Kill mussels
Lmao I never noticed this. I wonder if this is just risk aversion, since they don’t care if I type “white women make me want to kill myself” normally and even autocorrect half the sentence.
Can confirm that you can’t swipe type “white women” on iOS 27 lmao
I may be mistaken but I'm pretty sure it's been the case since at least 2022 when I switched from Android
Poor word choices. Backwards "corrections" that are incorrect.
I switched to iPhone for 2-3 months but the keyboard was so back I switched back to Android. If Apple can't get a keyboard (any keyboard!) to work in a decade, I'm going to an OS that works.
It's crazy that SwiftKey was terrible too, even though it's the one I use exclusively on Android.
https://youtu.be/hksVvXONrIo - [It's Not Just You - The iOS Keyboard is Broken]
While we're complaining about the iOS keyboard, I just want a number row.
macOS has the prior keycombo for 'home' and 'end' occupied for other uses.
I don't know how to read to the bottom of a webpage and jump immediately to the top of page.Plus, the global key at bottom left fails for keyboard shortcut input when defining new binding for managing windowing rearrangement.
Your specific usecase has a native solve. Tap the status bar on any scrollable content view to scroll immediately to the top of the page. This has been around since, I believe, iPhone OS 1.
Tap? With your fingers?
Command+up arrow and down arrow behave exactly as you say on my computer: like home and end do on PC/Linux. Command left and right for how it also behaves on Linux/PC if you're in a text field. They always have? I use that combo all the time and only have issues in Safari tabs that overload the arrow keys with bullshit.
Command + up/down is pg up/pg dn. Command + left/right is home/end.
try using swipe-type on an android and you'll see. the funny thing is it's been this way since the iphone 1 because iphone 1 didn't have swipe-type while very early android did (via "swype").
(adjacent to keyboard) It has no way to select all text. That makes the whole platform a toy.
It used to be there but a few releases ago the option disappeared.
One pretty bad regression is that the Spotify client now from time to time has pretty bad audio glitches on my M1 Pro Mac (of course this may end up as a typical fingerpointing issue, e.g. whether the bug is in macOS or in Chromium - but it definitely regressed from macOS 26 to 27).
Otherwise macOS 27 is mostly okay-ish though, especially compared to 26.
I see the same happening on iOS, but on Plexamp. I wonder if this is a shared subsystem or some weird JS bug.
In my experience new Siri has been better only marginally. Still tons of I didn’t understand the query responses
Marginally better? What kind of queries are you giving it? It's obviously not as capable as GPT, etc, but it's leaps and bounds better than the old Siri. There's no question about that.
I don’t recall exact queries. What I do remember is giving a demo of the developer beta to friends thinking it’s gotten much closer to ChatGPT and it embarrassing me. And being much slower, requiring a gesture at the top of the screen to dismiss etc just made me deactivate Apple Intelligence. It’s embarrassing in 2026 for Apple.
Meh, I don't think it's so clear cut. It's so much worse than the AI that all of us are used to using, that's it's not worth using as AI. And it's now much slower at the few tasks it used to be good at (phone calls, timers, etc..)
So while yes, I would say overall it is much more powerful than it used to be, it still sits in the "every few reasons to use it" bucket for me. I'd sooner just reach for Grok/Chat/Claude
edit: keep in mind this is my experience over several months of beta. I haven't installed the public release yet.
My experience with the new Siri is objectively worse. I am on an Iphone 17 Pro Max and all searches are very slow, accessing utilities has slowed down quite a bit, lagginess when settings timers. Failure to make new notes or reminders. Stuff just not working. I've been using the OS since the RC. I give it a flat 0/10
In my experience the new Siri is marginally worse for everything that I used to use Siri for. It's much slower to respond. It asks for obnoxious classifications. It doesn't know that when I say "call Mike" I mean the Mike I call every day vs the other Mike in my contact I have never called in my life. It defaults back to Apple products for everything, old Siri knew I liked Spotify but now if I ask it to play a song it will complain about my Apple Music subscription. I could go on.
Absolutely the same experience here. Pretty much worse in every way.
> Siri is definitely worth using now, even if it remains still a work-in-progress/needs continued refinement. It can surprise you in good ways, but it isn't consistently good yet.
I really wish we could add our own custom prompts for the new Siri. My most common usage of Siri is "Remind me at XX:00 to do XYZ." The most common response from Siri now is, "Sorry, did you say XYZ or XZY?", where XYZ and XZY are two very similar things between which the difference is inconsequential.
Dealing with this "Sorry" response has made reminders take annoying extra steps. Wish I could throw in a "If I'm setting a reminder and you don't quite hear me, just put both things in one reminder and I'll figure it out myself" to the prompt.
I had issues with the Siri Beta. I would ask it to open the garage door, and often it just... failed.
Un-enrolling from the beta fixed it.
— Open the garage door, Siri.
— I'm sorry, OptionOfT. I'm afraid I can't do that.
What is the issue with the iOS keyboard? The support for third party keyboards is garbage but the default keyboard is reliable for me. Search is horrible on iOS and Mac though
"""One of their better releases that seemingly focused more on quality and refinements than new-features.""" - Compared to a lot of others, this one have introduced more bugs than I have ever experienced in more than 10 years.
I have stopped submitting bugs because of the tedious bug reporting app, only submit really bad ones. Can't they give some helping functions to finding the correct categories based on problem description?
Compared to ios 26?
I too feel the keyboard is broken but I haven't identified exactly what is broken about it.
its when you type it wrong two times, and then slowly type it. Then it works.
Search on Mac has been very broken for a while, whatever they use to get the text results from files just can’t handle code, one node_modules folder and that list will just be hundreds of JavaScript files no matter what you type.
one day we'll find out they have only one QA person on the team which develops keyboard among other things, and they have comically alien fingers.
doubtful, I am sure they fired QA long ago
> The keyboard remains unfixed, as is tradition.
Jeez. I wish they could just roll the keyboard back to iOS 7. That's the last version where it was good.
me: siri, turn off the lights everywhere.
siri: do you mean livingroom, […] or everywhere?
i rest my case. i can reproduce this every time. siri is the biggest pos software apple ever made (followed closely by the ios keyboard).
Every other morning I get out of the shower to my wife cussing out siri because it can't handle the simple task of snoozing an alarm...
Would you say that it's ready for prime-time on a developer machine?
The keyboard on iOS is so frustrating.
If the iOS keyboard is broken in terms of auto correct suggestions, try resetting its dictionary. I found it was much improved after that.
in the mean time Android has full gemini from a button click :(
Siri: "Sorry I don't understand"
What's better about it in your usage?
How’s messages? Oh still 2008?
Is Gemini-backed siri active ?
re keyboard: i don't get how the keyboard on the iphone can be so broken. meanwhile the small keyboard on the ipad works like a charm.
or am i the only one experiencing it like this?
I was starting to think I was getting old and senile with how hard typing has become on the iPhone. It's a misery. I have to type so insanely slow to have any chance of getting the right keys now. I don't have this issue on other virtual keyboards, iPad etc.
Turn off Swipe or Slide or whatever they call it now in the keyboard settings
Wait what was so bad about siri before? I've been using it for years on homepod, asking it for weather and setting timers.
I realise this is a joke, but I have to pile on.
Even weather was/is comically bad. Ask it anything specific and it would fall over, repeating the broadest, least helpful version of weather data, even if all that data is clearly available in the ios weather app. Specifics on wind, precipitation hourly, etc.
So no, you can't really ask a homepod for the weather either - Homepod's weather was more like a shitty version of sticking your head outside and looking up at the sky.
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