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.

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.

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.

   command + up/down arrow
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.

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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.