He sure showed them. The people I know using super old iphones are doing more than their public commitment to buy more apple products as often as they can -- after a brief tolerance break, of course.
Eventually found two simple but effective ways to improve autocorrect/typing performance. First build a personalized and adaptive touch model trained on the device itself, mainly to fix simple typos. Second to fix low end screen limitations, use simple heuristics based on touchstart, touchmove and touchend [1].
Anyways, I'm no iPhone user but interesting to read. It would drive me nuts.
[0]: https://www.brianweet.com/2015/03/24/implement-touch-model.h... [1]: https://www.brianweet.com/2015/04/08/low-end-touchscreen-lim...
> Around iOS 17 (Sept. 2023) Apple updated their autocorrect to use a transformer model which should've been awesome and brought it closer to Gboard (Gboard is a privacy terror but honestly, worth it).
> What it actually did/failed to improve is make your phone keyboard:
> Suck at suggesting accurate corrections to misspelled words
> "Correct" misspelled words with an even worse misspelling
> "Correct" your correctly spelled word with an incorrectly spelled word
Which makes me wonder: is Transformer model good with manipulating short texts and texts with errors at all ? It's kind of known that open weight LLMs don't perform well for CJK conversion tasks[2], and I've also been disappointed by their general lack of typo tolerances myself as well. They're BAD for translating ultrashort sentences and singled out words as well[3]. They're great for vibecoding, though.
Which makes me think, are they usable for anything under <100 bytes at all? Does it seem like they have a minimum usable input entropy or something?
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006171
1: https://thismightnotmatter.com/a-little-website-i-made-for-a...
2: The process of yielding "㍑" from "rittoru"
3: No human can translate, e.g. "translate left" in isolation correctly as "move left arm", but LLMs seem to be more all over the place than humans
Anyway, they know things we don’t, for both good (real constraints that users don’t see) and bad (fake constraints from bad internal decisions).
But dear Apple employee reading this: if you have fought the good fight, I appreciate your attempt, please keep it up. If you didn’t, we’re having a keyboard experience that you shouldn’t be proud of, no matter what the internal corporate logic maze you are caught up in.
I love how diverse humans are, this is literally an alien sentence to me, it's actually impossible for me to conceptualize. I'm here with my Pixel 7 mourning my Pixel 4a, which was exactly the same to me as every other phone but had the fingerprint unlock sensor on the back which is the only meaningfully differentiating feature. I guess can imagine a non-boring phone like one of those gamer phones, but I can't imaging wanting one, and I can't imagine a phone that's exciting in a way I care about. The idea of finding a phone boring enough to want to switch from it though is just crazy to me. Is scrolling instagram and texting people and googling directions somehow different and exciting on iOS?
(save i guess i'd probably be pretty excited if a company was giving me root by default and not having banking apps break because of it)
If your decision-making is this poor, you cannot say for sure that you're leaving iPhone.
> Worse, it seems that proprietary means you can't do anything to fix them yourself.
We can install third-party keyboards on iOS, so I'm not sure why that's not being considered here.
This had me simultaneously chuckling and sad, because it feels very true.
Apple: Father knows best (but Father is getting old and sometimes forgets things)
Windows: If only we understood what the ancestors knew
And then it was all removed in a software update.
As for the underlying issue, I have experienced similar typing issues on my iPhone in recent months. It feels like someone changed the keyboard to optimize for some typing behavior that doesn't match my own, so the "optimizations" work against me. It's reminiscent of when the US Air Force redesigned their cockpits to match pilots' average measurements, only to discover that using averages just made the cockpits bad for everybody.[1]
[1] https://noblestatman.com/uploads/6/6/7/3/66731677/cockpit.fl...
Just like Windows 11, I get ads whether I want them or not - just got a push notification for a new financial product (!!!) despite going out of my way to opt out.
iOS 26 made my 16 Pro, practically brand new, feel slow. I upgraded because my 13 mini was slow, and I chose Apple in the first place because they had some of the best performing phones (especially cpu/gpu; they always had less ram but before llm it didn’t matter).
The keyboard is horrible, but I don’t trust Google or Microsoft keyboards either; I think my next phone will be graphene; just waiting to see who their new hardware partner is.
I loved Apple TV because it was fast; under 26 it is slow.
I chose Mac for best in class hardware. That is unfortunately unchanged; really hoping snapdragon X 2 elite has good Linux support.
My Apple Watch, despite doing nothing new it didn’t used to do, has also become slow and annoying, and its battery was never as good as it should have been. When I jump to Android I think garmin is probably the best choice, but maybe there are good wearables now. Unfortunately Android doesn’t have its act together re:built in health data database.
Replacing Athlytic and keeping my history will be one of the biggest challenges in the transition.
Competitors unfortunately still have huge blind spots even if some of the core experiences are better.
Does anyone have an explanation for how something like this passes QC at a company with the resources of Apple? Is this video misrepresenting something?
Imagine your an exec or manager on the team for keyboard development. You read this, get to the end to discover the user is gonna switch devices for... 2 whole calander years?
What's that amount to? Maybe 2 device upgrades on If your a die hard gotta have the newest latest model phone each year. Then what? you'll be back?
The threat doesnt even carry the weight losing a user for a 2 year blip, registers more as a dropped ping request then a drop in revenue.
If meant to be whimsical sure nailed it. To be fair I mean any boycot with a large scale mfg carries about the same weight. just thought it fell flat as much as anything.
Recently I said "I ran into this too earlier on the project" and it wrote "I run into this tube earlier on the project." So now I'm running into a tube... because this makes more sense than "too"? And it can never write the names of immediately family members I text about every single day, and it has 5th grade vocabulary so if I said I demurred or that something was germane or any other word beyond the 500 most common words it butchers it.
What I want: 1. let me handle the punctuation manually 2. assume a broader vocabulary 3. let me specify how people's names are pronounced!! How are we this many years in and it still misinterprets my wife's name on a daily basis?
I guess this is really important to people.
One time I broke an Android, which happened to be white, and spoke to the insurer for a replacement. The agent insisted she find me another white phone, not another Android, and though an iPhone was suitable. She couldn't grok how the OS and phone specs were more important than the color.
Do however note that it is possible to install another keyboard on iOS, which may alleviate your suffering before you switch to Android in about 120 days.
Personally I rely on Gboard [0] every day for the simple reason that it auto-detects several (more than two) languages, and of course it has the added benefit of not having this crazy bug. Gboard is google software however, so it does come with huge privacy issues, and others will hopefully point out better alternatives.
So the keyboard has been broken since iOS 17 (>2 years [1]), and to show your displeasure, you bought an iPhone Pro?
Your threat of leaving in 3 months rings hollow. All Apple has to do is verbally say things will get better and, if they can't even do that, you only commit to leaving for two years.
If you want to leave, just leave. I am confident that blue bubble pressure will exist in 3 months. I am also confident that the iPhone 18 Pro will be pretty. If a nice color and blue bubbles are enough to keep you in the iOS ecosystem today, why should anyone believe you will leave tomorrow?
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/06/ios-17-makes-iphone-m...
The keyboard animation happens on the touchdown event, whereas the letter is entered into the text box on the touchup event.
Between the two, more information might emerge about the touch - for example the exact shape of the touched area, and movement during the touch, etc.
I would guess the keyboard sees a down in one spot, and an up in a slightly different spot which falls into another letter.
Ha! I feel this. I was a long time Android user since the original G1 (aka HTC Dream). Was a strictly Pixel phone user for my last 4 phones. Recently jumped over to iPhone. For the most part I’m enjoying it.
There are minor things, like the keyboard being annoying to type with. For instance, when I’m typing something into the URL bar of Safari, for some reason, I’m constantly hitting the period key next to the space bar, and I feel like I’m not anywhere close to it.
I also find it confusing how to dismiss the keyboard. Android had a very clear icon for this, on iOS it’s just a checkmark which is a little misleading in my opinion.
On iOS, speech to text is pretty good, but I have to annunciate clearly, where I felt that android was a little bit more forgiving.
Another issue I’ve noticed is that I don’t think the GPS (or maybe it’s just Google maps) is as accurate as it is on android. On iOS, if I’m on a highway it sometimes thinks I’m on the shoulder road next to the highway. So I’m constantly being rerouted to get back on the highway. I felt like I didn’t have that on android.
Back to the blue bubble thing though. Being the one and only android user amongst my friends and even my wife, I was always hearing about how I ruined the chat. I didn’t realize until switching over to iOS just how integrated everything is and what you can do in the chat when everybody else is on iOS, like editing previous messages, being able to answer messages via your Messages app on your laptop, and of course, not having images and videos getting compressed terribly. Although RCS chat improved that more recently.
One thing I do love is that automation and shortcuts is something that’s natively part of the system and that I don’t to install some app like Tasker or whatever the more modern version of that is.
At this point, I really like both of the OSes. What made me actually finally switch over was that everyone I knew who had an iPhone would have it for like five or more years and I was going through pixel phones every two years. I got tired of spending all that money.
In safari browser, if you want to go to the menu where you can favorite/bookmark a page, the tiles on the menu are literally different and in different order every time. Sometimes you might need to press an additional button to find what you're looking for, sometimes it's there, sometimes clicking "favorite" will just go "ok, favorited" message, other times it asks for an extra prompt. Like, why? Just be consistent, I can adjust to all the "PM trying to save their role by reinventing something that isn't needed" like liquid glass, but the usability itself suffers all over the place in the latest ios releases. It's very difficult to understand, because up until a little while ago it had been consistently very good.
Other comments here say Predictive Text is the culprit, but I already had that off. I also turned off Slide to Type. Same result.
Most of those problems aren't solved by software. You are using your phone as a fashion item.
The fact that this is a real thing is ridiculous. Say no and move on with life. This is the type of freedom that is actually freeing.
It makes me want to create a similar landing page for Apple to fix Spotlight Search. I remember when I used to be able to just find and launch apps on my Mac.
The project is abandoned but it still works well. I hope someone sees this and gets inspired to build something to replace it. If you do you can have my money!
"Use it or your social group will not want to interact with you"
option.
Outside of tech circles (where apparently people easily get their entire family and friend network on signal), people want to use imessage and only want to use imessage. Android phones can't support imessage because they are poor low quality phones that cannot handle imessage. So you need a high quality phone like iphone so you can use imessage and easily communicate with your friends and family.
This strategy of leveraging friends and family to pressure people into getting iPhones was intentional and came out in the Epic trial lawsuit.
I shit you not there is a large percentage of people in the US that think Android phones are not capable of sending pcitures and videos.
wow, such a commitment. Not only it's as said only one customer but it is a customer who thinks "for good" is just skipping one phone. Which means she/he usually buys phone every single year.
What a bold and committed move. It's astonishing...
That means that all of the polish work is shoved to the bottom of the stack until it reaches sufficient critical mass that someone finally makes time for engineers to pick some of it back out.
That, I think, is the critical failure of modern Apple. The company used to understand that polish could be more important than something new and flashy, and they've forgotten that in favor of marketing and Liquid Glass.
Yeah he's right - my Pixel 10 is not as sexy as an iPhone but not only is the keyboard great but the AI integration is first class citizen.
iOS will never have first class citizen AI even if Apple finally develop their own model because Apple doesn't control the user's data.
My Pixel 10 is in a pretty orange case. Furthermore, if I get sick of it, it's not too big of a deal to change. Maybe I'll even figure out how to 3d print one!
FWIW: Pretty much everyone keeps their phone in a case today. Seems to make a lot more sense to focus on the case instead of the aesthetics of the phone.
Second most egregious issue is how every space becomes a period when typing in the Safari url/search bar. I’m using it for search 90% of the time, and directly entering URLs 10%, but Apple must think those proportions are flipped.
Free the space!
Finally - could we have a simple gesture that toggles words between lowercase, first letter capital, and all caps? Highlight a word and swipe up or something? So much needless input to make a word capitalized.
Over the course of each year-long iOS version life, I've become used to it sucking for a bit, either at the beginning (with bug fixes improving things) or towards the end (where, I assume, accumulated learning diverges from clean slate behavior.)
I suspect that the keyboard team is pegged with using new features on the silicon (Neural processing in earlier processors, then Neural Engine with newer processors) and they're doing what they can when tasked with new code.
But man, iOS4 didn't have all that and the keyboard was GREAT.
If Apple is getting occasional feedback about a mysterious bug, but it's near impossible to reproduce, what can they do?
Especially around text editing. It seems like they made some fundamental mistakes with their text inputs that they are playing hard defense on. I never know if a given field is going to respond to long-press, double tap, or what context menu I will get if any.
Samsung and LG make high-end phones, and there are plenty of good personal computer vendors. And Windows is certainly a desktop OS that some people choose.
Apple doesn't offer any services unique to itself. It does offer a slick-looking and well-marketed "ecosystem" which is really just a bunch of different things that you could get from other vendors.
Possibly re-tuning of some LLM parameters? Or forgetting some bad learnings... sounds like it's specific to a small-ish percent of users.
Apple employees reading this right now: "IDGAF about the keyboard, I made 500k in TC last year."
It’s also not just one problem, autocorrect and the keyboard combined make for at least a dozen seemly different defects
I have a Garmin Fenix 8 - the latest flagship. I love the look of the watch but it does not feel snappy to use in any way- significant lag after each button press. Not enough to make me immediately go back to an Apple Watch but I do miss the snappiness.
But the Connect app is actually pretty good in terms of a central place to look at the stats.
Apple is more "here's this refined product which we designated as refined after a heavy session snooting cocaine off a toilet seat"
Course, I can switch to a different launcher, but it makes it much less of a "batteries included" sort of product.
Disabling 'Predictive Text' seems to correct the bug; however, there must be something in the algorithm that's causing this that Apple does need to fix.
:(
Folks can thumb their noses at Reddit but the top comment in every post about iOS updates since 26.0 was released is some variation of "fix the keyboard." The problem seems very real for a lot of users.
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!
- accidental periods when typing URLs in Safari
- key target inaccuracy (though turning off swipe-to-tect gas ikproved this a little, though not enough)
- key latnecy which causes letters innsome words to get swapped or extra unwated letters to appear (this could be a me-getting-older prblem, howeverg
- autocorrect suggesting words that I've never typed before (I turned on autocorrect for this list item to make sure i gave it a fair shake; it didn't suggest anything crazy this time, but the number of times it has in the past has led me to turning it off, even after iOS 18 wherein the keyboard supposedly used a small language model to improve suggestions)
I also type longform on my phone sometimes; the keyboard makes this much more exhausting than it needs to be.
However, if I, as the author cared to justify that "it's not only me", I would have listed more posts and feedback. I feel like I have read at least 4 times about the broken keyboard, it should not be hard to find a few other links.
It reminds me of Apple's 1984 commercial, except that Apple users are the ones sitting down, all looking identical, drinking the Kool-Aid from Big Brother.
I do the same, and I find it way better.
I do not expect someone to be a “single issue voter” with regards to any one bug. There is significant friction in switching platforms and you are just as likely to be annoyed by something else in the competition.
If I don't have slide-to-type enabled, then only the letter I press down on will highlight, and what shows up in the text input box is pretty inconsistent for horizontally adjacent letters.
First notepad.exe gets a rce then this, is it the bottom, sadly I think not…
Little people can’t get the attention of large organizations without literally setting themselves on fire. Voting with your feet isn’t going to affect a trillion dollar company at all. Unless maybe you’re Dame Judy Dench.
The main benefit I've found with Gboard is a larger vocabulary, and perhaps a less aggressive autocorrect that doesn't constantly try to correct technical terms into similar common words.
They should stick to Claude Code, like everyone else.
I had to downgrade to Mojave so the wheels likely came off internally around then.
Apple has shifted from working to produce quality to working to maximize profit ... when it comes to software.
The only thing that would change this would be a new CEO or Apple hemorrhaging money with more people buy alternative solutions.
To be fair ... Microsoft is in the same down hill spiral in quality and the IT industry staying with them allows form the to do this.
The hard to tell part is I'm also crossing carriers to message them, so that might have been the issue as well.
I see this in middle and lower-middle class people.
But in the upper-middle class, this is a non issue. We know how Apple manipulates people who struggle to spend $50/mo on a phone.
I begrudgingly accept autocorrect on iOS however. On a real computer, I turn that off too. I have learned since a long time ago that writing and editing should be two separate activities.
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.
Deadline: end of WWDC 2026. The exact dates haven't been announced yet and this timer is based on the estimated schedule (June 9–13). I'll update it when Apple confirms the dates. They have until the conference ends.
Time's up.
The iOS keyboard has been broken since at least iOS 17 and it's somehow only gotten worse. iOS 26 has been my breaking point. Autocorrect is nearly useless and often hostile, that part I'm used to. But now the correctly tapped letters aren't even registering correctly. This isn't just me.
iOS has bugs across the whole ecosystem. But having the keyboard, the thing I interact with hundreds of times a day on my primary device, get progressively worse with every update is absolutely maddening.
I randomly tried Android again for a few months last spring. Using a functioning keyboard was revelatory. But I came crawling back to iOS because I'm weak and the orange iPhone was pretty and the Pixel 10 was boring and I caved to the blue bubble pressure. But the keyboard on this beautiful phone is worse than ever.
So here's the deal, Apple, if that's even your real name: fix this broken keyboard, or at the very least publicly acknowledge it's broken and commit to fixing it in iOS 27 or earlier. If that countdown hits zero without either of those things happening, I'm switching to Android for good. (Good = at least 2 calendar years)
I know losing one customer means absolutely nothing to your bottom line. But I'd like to think it should mean something to the engineers, UX designers, product people, and whoever else had a hand in building this thing.
You were the "it just works" company. Now you're just a fruit that I used to know.
As for names, I an also baffled. Most people in my family have either a Brazilian Portuguese or German name, but my work life is in English, so guess what, no getting anyone’s name right!
It can't go viral until you actually make a post for people to find and promote. Step one has now been completed. Step two is gaining traction.
I have a similar countdown of my own but is less specific. I’m on iPhone 15 (coming from android) and I know for certain that the next time I’m on the market for a new phone it won’t be an iPhone. I also don’t need a new phone, but the intrusive thoughts to buy a new one are always caused by the faulty keyboard
It was never about loosing one single customer, it's about getting a bad reputation and loosing many more undecided potential customers.
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.
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.
- Clicks on buttons and links not registering, and needing to click multiple times, sometime to no effect.
- Safari not suggesting the website you visit multiple time a day, and points you a random website you have never visited before.
Settings -> System -> Notifications. Scroll to the bottom, expand Additional settings. Uncheck "Suggest ways to get the most out of Windows and finish setting up this device" and "Get tips and suggestions when using Windows".
I get more prompts from macOS about Apple products than I get from Windows about Microsoft products after unchecking those two settings.
I did uninstall all of the weird apps like "News" "Weather" etc.
There are some Apple folks here who keep gaslighting users with their iOS 26 concerns and every other issue by calling them weird names and asking them to not complain.
The damn keyboard is broken, one would've known that if they used it more than a few minutes a day in real life examples. Stop shutting people off and use your own damn products instead of getting them all made in China and sell them.
My iPhone seamlessly adapts to my working context using focus modes automation - Android still doesn’t do that; maybe they have launchers with equivalent features.
Android makes it easy to customize the things I don’t want to customize, and hard to customize the things I do.
https://qskinz.com/en-us/collections/google-pixel-10-skins/p...
My personal devices are usually Apple products and they all work together pretty seamlessly. Then I have all my other Linux servers, Windows desktops, random tablets, etc. for my hobby projects which generally require more manual configuration to work together.
I just like having my “personal” things within an aesthetically pleasing, relatively privacy preserving ecosystem but I get my kicks outside of that ecosystem aplenty.
Please correct me if I'm wrong - it is after all just a feeling.
They have been last to get Widgets. They don't have apps I use (terminals, emulators, pulse wave generators). Not to mention Gemini AI is actually really nice for scanning a screen and doing actions with it.
Apple is always 2nd place or worse. Except marketing, they are #1.
This is a bad way to go through life with this reasoning. It is pretty well understood that in normal situations the vast majority of people are not vocal even if they feel the same way about things the vocal people are saying. As an example I use a lot, congress critters use a formula to get the pulse of the constituents. If they receive a hand written letter (yes, I learned about the formula when people did that), they'd multiply that by some factor knowing that if one person felt strongly enough to send in a letter that others also felt that way. Phone calls were the same, but with a smaller multiplier as it was easier to make a call that write a letter followed by emails with yet a smaller mult. This was all well before social media, but I'd imagine searching tweets would give a pretty good indicator as well now. A single tweet would be worth something, but tweets with lots of retweets and heavy comment activity would be something else. Even if a tweet is something done pretty much on a whim with little thought behind it like that letter.
The silent majority is called that for a reason. It doesn't mean they are happy or content. Ignore that reality at your own peril.
…or with Siri mishearing…
I just want a small set of commands that are easy to differentiate from each other, and a readback before executing the command. This is what phones did back in the days of Symbian, and I could reliably use one from a motorcycle helmet intercom without ever touching my phone. It's what air traffic controllers do, because even people can't reliably understand each other.
We've had decades of Apple and Google pretending that their voice recognition is so flawless it can understand anything and execute it immediately, but for petty much everyone except yourself they can't, so I can no longer use a hands-free phone. I'm glad I'm not blind.
So consider the possibility that many people are affected but haven't reached the threshold of writing something about it.
Even siri got worse, when I say call <nickname of my gitfriend> now it does some location based search, and calls sonebody, when near home it is a doctor, when on the other side of the river it is a flower shop, at othe rplaces other random non-contacts, with a contact having the sting it used for search, as her nickname is always part of the called person… It used to work flawlessly as expected…
I would be fine with Siri actually if if could handle simple fixed phrase based task, no AI, as it could a few years ago.
Android phones can't use iMessage because Apple never opened it up, contrary to what Steve Jobs was hinting at back when it was released.
Nowadays I believe you can get a blue bubble when chatting from an Android with an iPhone user by using RCS / JOYN.
You are missing the /s right?
Maybe your "social group". If your friends refuse to talk to you because of the cell phone brand you use, I have bad news for you: They might not really be great friends.
Source? Would love to read this one lol
Example but the issue not limited to web browsing; Safari will do nothing, I tap again, it does the thing, then it does the thing again due to the second tap. I have to tap back to get to where I really wanted to go.
Be glad you only type in one language and that it is US English (probably) ;)
It’s not about the one person, it’s about that person representing tens/hundreds/thousands of customers. This feedback is a gift to a product manager that listens.
> The threat doesnt even carry the weight losing a user for a 2 year blip
Agreed, but it may be different if there would be more people feeling in a similar way.
> If meant to be whimsical sure nailed it.
It's a bit strange though because there are many things one can critisize Apple for. My main gripe is still Steve Jobs underpaying developers via illegal agreements. Yet people praise him as if he would have been a god. I am not saying he had bad ideas or was a bad designer per se, but some people never even mention criminal activities for their heroes. The court case was mega-clear; that is undeniable. If he would still be alive I'd love to hear what people would say now.
Me: Hey Siri, set the living room lights to 100%.
Siri: 100% = 1
This has been working for 6-7 years without any issues, and suddenly Siri is giving me math lessons. What the hell is happening in this company?
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.
Also typed without any maual fixes. My typingwas mucu better before glass.
It just seems like, you could stop any iPhone user in the street and ask them "How do you find the keyboard?" And get a consistently negative response, but yet nobody within Apple seemingly has noticed for YEARS.
Everyone says iOS 26 did it, but I strongly disagree, I disabled most options in General -> Keyboard like three major iOS versions ago, and moved to Swiftkey* in iOS 18 (although iOS keeps changing my keyboard preferences back to the default).
*SwiftKey is also a shit-show with the "Your Tap Map" crap you cannot disable, where it moves the keys and makes the thing inconsistent. Just goes to show how bad Apple's keyboard is, when I'll put up with it.
Besides, users and developers don't always use software the same way, have the same settings, follow the same forums.
SMS and as a result iMessage is the dominant text based chat.
iPhones have become the default smartphone, and is a status symbol compared to Android.
Mac vs Windows is similar on the laptop front.
Which means if your an Android user in a relatively average social group:
* You will get left out of group messages
* You will be starting on a back foot in the dating scene
On top of you wont be able to answer messages from friends on your laptop, because again, sms is dominant, not whatsapp.
Now don't shoot the messenger here. I don't like it either, but this is the social/technical reality in NA at the moment.
(sigh: receiving downvotes)
I think I'm just #blessed with the specific American accent (or "no accent") they must have trained it on lol. On the other hand, Siri frequently mishears my wife who's from California but doesn't have what I would call an accent any different from mine, so who knows.
Sidenote: please Apple, if I type the same misspelled (but not) thing two times in a row, just leave it be. And no, I did not mean "what the he'll". And why is selecting text so hard.
Dear Tim Apple, I meant exactly what I typed please stop changing it because your product manager doesn't think I know English.
Sure, Jan. Next you'll tell me that Google isn't evil and Apple truly does care about human rights.
I mean, I'd agree with her. But it's hardly Joanna Lumley championing the gurkhas, when she's been saying for years that she can no longer recognise even loved ones standing right in front of her. Apple could do a lot better, but I'm not sure they could improve the keyboard that much.
If it's 1st or 2nd, then it's ok.
Other times were not so bad.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1l2gg3r/thirdparty_ios...
tl;dr: gatekeeping by Apple. Yes, it would probably be embarassing to Apple if someone built a way better touch keyboard.
This is an extremely popular bit of apocrypha that's repeated ad nauseam across reddit. It's more like a political truism than an observation on the behaviors of the silent majority re: Apple users.
> The silent majority is called that for a reason. It doesn't mean they are happy or content. Ignore that reality at your own peril.
It doesn't mean they're discontent either.
I’m lonely and really want a gitfriend to push and merge with! Please tell the story of how you got one!
/s for the /s impaired
Agree at this point that I would disable it (in its current state) if I could, but when it worked correctly it was a huge boon to typing.
Not sure if Google just gave up on updating the iOS variant or if Apple holds it back intentionally (probably a bit of both) but they pale in comparison to their Android counterparts.
I’d prefer a useable stock keyboard but I take your point.
It's kind of a paradox, but in many cases you need to actually discard touch inputs until your UI state has transitioned as a result of previous inputs. This gets extremely nuanced and it's hard to write straightforward rules about when you should and shouldn't do this. Some situations I can think of:
- Navigation: User taps a button that pushes a screen on your nav stack. You need to discard or prevent inputs while the transition animation is happening, otherwise you can push multiple copies of that screen.
- Async tasks: User taps a button that kicks off an HTTP request or similar, and you need to wait on the result before doing something else like navigation or entering some other state. Absolutely you will need to prevent inputs that would submit that request twice. You will also need some idempotency in your API design to handle failure/retries. A fun example from the 1990s is the "are you sure you want to make this POST request again" dialog that Web browsers still show by default.
- Typing: You should never discard keystrokes that insert/delete characters while a text input field is focused, but you may have to handle a state like the above if "Enter" (or whatever "done" button is displayed in the case of a software keyboard) does something like submit a form or do navigation.
Essentially we're all still riding on stuff that the original Mac OS codified in the 1980s (and some of it was stolen from Xerox, yes), so the actual interaction model of UIs is a mess of modal state that we hardly ever actually want to fully realize in code. UI is a hard problem!
I remember seeing the videos about cpu usage spiking over 40% just to show the control center.
And similarly, even on a Mac I find myself clicking on links and button multiple times, just for things to work. It has a dedicated keyboard, how is it that they messed it up so much that a physical keyboard stops working. It's an interrupt based interface, it takes less than a millisecond to process things, how can someone mess things up so freaking stupidly.
During my last weeks on the iPhone, I reached out to various Apple discussion spaces on the web for help with some problems I was having.
I was met not with assistance, but ridicule. The majority of the people "helping" were saying some variation of "you're holding it wrong" or "I personally don't have that problem" (which is such a funny quirk of the Apple fandom - I didn't ask if you are having that problem, I'm asking for help achieving a specific outcome).
You can even see examples of this sort of behavior in that post about the window resize handles for the latest version of macOS. There were Apple fans saying some variation of it's not an actual problem, that they don't have that problem, that they don't use the window resize handles anyway, or that the post was an exaggeration. Turns out it was an actual problem that Apple addressed with a bug fix. Of course, Apple fans, being shameless, will jump to reframing the discussion from "Apple can do no wrong" to "See, Apple listens! You know who doesn't listen? Microsoft!!" I get it, not a monolith, but recognizing Apple fans aren't a monolith doesn't make them less off-putting.
The final nail in the coffin for me for the ecosystem was getting called a child for *checks notes* making the adult decision to move to Android to have a phone that did the things I needed (with much fewer annoying, uncritical fans and a lot more people who genuinely want to help).
So, yes, there is a danger in letting the fandom do all the work and laughing off "threats" of user exoduses. The conduct of Apple fans coupled with Apple's ignorance to regular users' feedback soured me to the ecosystem. It would take a lot to bring me back. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.
Sure, but this is a duopoly and it's not as if the competition is perfect. A lot of issues like this simply don't matter because of that. The response that goes through the PM's head is likely to be along the lines of, "What you gonna do, switch to Android? Ha!"
> This is the same reason your toothpaste has a phone number on the back - that one random person who cares deeply calls the number and provides invaluable feedback on the product.
You'll notice that tech companies go out of their way to avoid offering that option.
I'm blown away by Apple building their own stores in competition with the franchisees who carried them those lean years.
and i also never give feedback. there's probably hundreds of millions of iOS users out there who agree with me. so maybe don't change the behaviour just because this guy is mad?
Siri: Shows the literal text “Hey Siri, turn on the [such and such] light” on the screen and does absolutely nothing. It’s an edit box. Pressing enter has no effect.
For years, I've said "Hey Siri, turn on Bright" because I have a "Bright" Home scene configured. About 2 months ago, the HomePod updated and now responds consistently with "Pause in the bedroom?"
Nothing is playing in the Bedroom. Nothing CAN play in the bedroom, there's just lights in the Bedroom. No speakers. What the heck is it even _trying_ to pause.
It's infuriating.
Who is "they"? The employees at Apple when the HIG was first published in 1986, 40 years ago? That Apple is dead, what you see before you is an empty and rotted husk.
Introduced a concept decades ago in no way implies that their current implementation of the concept is at all ideal or market leading.
Perhaps you shouldn't encourage them. Based on recent software releases from Apple they might see it as a challenge.
There’s obviously new talent coming in to the industry but the attitudes are different, and talented people like to make new things not work on someone else’s legacy code.
So yeah I think it’ll continue to get worse until something new replaces iOS/Android/macOs/Windows hegemony.
This is so tiring of a lame excuse. I don't use reddit, so I don't know what that has to do with anything. As a high school kid, I volunteered with my congressman in his office and heard this directly from people working in the office. You can try to snipe anonymously from the internet, but it doesn't make me wrong.
On desktop? Uh... There is a reason Nvidia is #1. Wake me up when I can get Nvidia on Apple.
I'm regularly sending/receiving gifs and decent quality short videos between iOS and Android these days.
Hard deal breaker. And alternative keyboards in iOS feel second class in some ways, so we really rely on Apple to get it right.
The recent kerfluffle has been all the Liquid Glass stuff, I hear lots of people in my offline circle who aren’t reading every phone UI review who are trying various schemes to avoid or mitigate this update. It’s pretty bad! (The keyboard sucking is water under the bridge at this point, I think).
I legit feel like Apple should actually make a public statement like "we hear you, we're working on it!" because it is actually bad PR at this point.
This is one of the emptiest threats I’ve ever seen. This is about as effective as having a madman inside your house destroying your property with a baseball bat and saying “if you don’t stop smashing my stuff in the next 72 hours, I’ll consider writing mean things about you in my diary”.
No need to get specific. Write a blog post about how the keyboard is broken and say you’re leaving for another platform because of it. It’s not like Apple is going to check when you did it or for how long (or care). The theatrics are unnecessary and laughable, they undermine the whole message. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone inside Apple is sharing this with their colleagues and laughing.
Then I watched Tim Cook have trouble with tapping the screen multiple times for one action at one of the older WWDCs pre-COVID.
I felt validated and exasperated. Does Tim just put up with this?
I'm always mistyping and I don't know how to fix it to do what they want.
So it’s not like some longstanding industry-wide UI issues they’ve ignored forever, it’s that Apple has introduced new tradeoffs or lowered their quality standards to the point that some users feel their experience has worsened.
Sounds like Apple management enabled a quality assurance failure that is fostering so many distractions for users it's turning people against Apple.
Tim Cook handing his replacement a dumpster fire.
Kind of a big deal that something you'll likely use every time you pick up your device has been broken now for going on years, with no real movement on the issue.
That is assuming the user doesn’t first have to offer incense and whisper a fervent prayer to the Omniscient Deity of USB Devices to seize control of the mouse and click the link in divine intervention.
However for most of us that is uncessary and clicking a link to a video requires no effort at all.
What drives me insane though, is double tapping a word is supposed to select that word. But I think starting in iOS 18 it started selecting the word and a random amount of surrounding words, but only about half the time. I couldn't tell you what it could possibly be trying to do but it's maddening.
If you tap while a word is selected, it won’t appear. If you tap on the cursor while a word isn’t selected, it will appear.
And in the meantime, they did use those first two years of Skylake for the 12" MacBook; the next update to the MacBook Air was after the last update the 12" MacBook ever got. For a while, the 12" MacBook was the more premium, thinner and lighter alternative to the MacBook Air with more advanced technology (and could plausibly have been construed as the intended successor to the MacBook Air), then in 2018 they merged back together with the introduction of the first MacBook Air with a Retina Display.
She has only been complaining since iOS 26, though.
In the case of the iOS keyboard, I remember one bug that made the rounds (in the popular press!) after somebody recorded their typing in slow motion to validate it [0]. Once they documented it, everybody recognized the feeling and felt vindicated; but it took actual work to substantiate.
That’s the work it seems that Apple engineers should be doing. They have the telemetry, the source access, the design documents, the labs, and the time in their day to make a comprehensive study of it. Just as I can say “my car is handling funny around turns” and let it be the mechanic’s job to diagnose what’s wrong in mechanical terms.
There was a time when this humane aspect was Apple’s particular magic: engineering beyond technical requirements to the point of simplicity, ergonomics, “it just works”…
[0] https://www.macworld.com/article/2952872/heres-proof-that-th...
Reminder: we are asking users to give us money in exchange for software.
It’s our job to deliver that working software. It’s not the user’s job to hold our hands and pep talk us into fixing problems. Users can and should find another product that will just do it for them without the whining.
I think the real point of the website, besides joking around, is poking fun at the broke state of the software industry where a bunch of whiny developers and managers will make a million tired excuses for why their software doesn’t just work.
Highlighting bug report and bureaucratic process in response to “your keyboard is jank” is exactly the mindset we need to change.
The point isn’t to start a forum or technical conversation with Apple devs. The point is to laugh at them because their software sucks and “just one more Jira ticket” isn’t going to fix it.
It's not hypothetical if you are here, in the current tense, arguing that. I've mostly cured myself of the habit, but its tough.
But the correction offers are still okay for me, I can mash keys around my email username and one of the corrections offered will be my username...
Arguably:
- used to say that a statement is very possibly true even if it is not certain (merriam-webster)
- in a way that can be shown to be true (cambridge)
ie. you can be prove it through argument, not “you can make the argument”
The quick explainer is phones send a user agent with the request to fetch a media message, this user agent contains a link to a file that describes what the device can handle. Apple and Blackberry hosted these files themselves, Verizon hosted most of the android ones on its network itself. They decommissioned the server hosting them a few years ago which made it so all affected devices pulled the lowest potato quality image down for compatibility. Huge number of complaints.
It does not function as a status symbol in the west. It's not a big deal to get one if you really want to and live in a developed country. People in asian countries making 1/8th of their american counterparts can afford iPhones. Someone making minimum wage in Germany can buy one using about 3-4 months worth of saved disposable income. In the states they'll throw one after you on credit without looking at you twice. It's only a status symbol if you want to set yourself apart from someone living in Zimbabwe... oh wait they also have lots of iPhone users. From who exactly? Afghanis?
Honestly if the bar for status symbol's is that low, you should sooner consider excercise and good dietary habits. These days in many western counties that will do many orders of magnitude more for how people perceive you and your dating life. Certainly more than what flavour of annoying chiming piece of shit you bought.
Do you honestly think that the developers working for apple looks at the "keyboard experience" and thinks "yeah this is good"? Of course, not. They are competent developers.
Perhaps you should be focusing on losing weight instead of blaming the color of your text messages, lmao.
I'm pretty sure the author realized that Tim Apple isn't shaking in his boots, looking at the numbers going down. That's not the point, the point is that it's funny and interesting and thus getting attention.
Fingernails won't trigger a touchscreen. They do matter, though - as your fingernails get longer, you're forced to tap the phone with the side of your fingertip (so the nail doesn't block you) instead of the front.
They sold old hardware for the same price 3 years later as if it was a premium product. They didn't really have an excuse, they've been the most valuable public company on earth since like 2010.
Anyway, my point regarding the UX still stands. Apple's UX is barely as good as other major player's - not great, not terrible. Mediocrity isn't what Apple should be aiming at.
That's just how software works. People also care that the windows taskbar just kills itself sometimes. But they feel powerless, stupid even, so they just work around it every day forever and never say anything.
At this point, I assume 90% of complaints about the apple keyboard are either tongue in cheek, explicitly humorous, a detailed, qualitative study with new information, or written by someone who is very new to apple, the internet, and technology in general.
I don't see how else anybody could seriously think 'The apple keyboard is bad, and the world needs to know about it! I'll make my opinion known, and surely that will solve the issue', let alone following it with 'no more Mr Nice Guy: I'm going to threaten Apple, the company, with consequences that will force them to act. It's high time somebody held these mega-corps to account and I'm willing to put myself on the line!'
Like, even if the article was written by the United Nations or the EU, there are very few actual threats they could include that might realistically spur apple to finally sort out the keyboard.
'If Apple don't sort it out, I'm going to fine them 75% of their revenue,' might be logical but seems a little deluded: terrorism or personal violence would be... unadvisable... and 'I'll switch to android' is also comically unthreatening, while also being hugely overplayed and almost always played straight, empty, and uninspired.
Everyone knows the keyboard sucks. Everyone knows that's not going to stop people buying iOS devices. It's the equivalent of 'fast food isn't nutritious but companies pretend it is' - in the year of our lord 2026, a multi paragraph article to that effect can probably be assumed to be numerous, new, surprising, ironic, or insanely naive.
The fact that a realistic, honest assessment of one's probable future purchasing decisions reads as a joke is maybe a little dark, but hey. It's a dark world, and it won't be lightened by yet another 'I'm totally gonna boycott if they don't stop!'
For a long time, if you were on iOS and added a android user to your group chat. All threading was broken. It was no longer a group chat just a bunch of out of band messages.
So iOS users naturally started leaving the android user out of the chat. They would text their 5 friends on iOS in one group to make plans, then text their Android friend separately to update them when plans were made.
I believe this is relatively fixed in latest iOS, but that habit is still very much their in iOS users today.
Anecdotally I did just experience a group chat of 4 iOS users this year that was very active, then died when one person switched to Android.
I don't watch video complaints. I don't watch most YT videos except at 2x because by time the person who made the video got started saying what they're trying to say, I could have finished a text article version of the same thing.
Most people speak way too slowly for me to be interested in what they're saying, especially when they could have written an article that is more information dense and it typically shorter in any case.
Videos have value for enhancing reports, but are mostly useless as reports themselves.
So yeah, it's too damned much to ask to watch a video.
It was pretty hilarious to me that for so many years the keyboard on iOS only had CAPITAL letters. No matter the state of the shift key, the letters on the keyboard just stayed the same. After many years they finally figured it out, but it's one example of many about how Apple just doesn't have the great UX people claim they do.
I have seen, far too many times, naive approaches like wrapping all click handlers in a "debounce" function cause additional issues and not actually solve the underlying problem.
The three-year gap in processor updates you're complaining about disappears when you recognize the 12" MacBook as an attempt to move the product line in a different direction, which Apple partially backtracked on after a few years. That course correction was quite a bit quicker than for the Touch Bar MBPs and the trash can Mac Pro.
Heres some examples
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1nt7czg/do_iphone_...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/14rhes2/friends_in...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Nicegirls/comments/1ja3iy4/green_bu...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/OnlineDating/comments/17xrue5/are_y...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/datingoverthirty/comments/b6w9iu/oh...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/f1i3q8/this_is_why_...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/rz4wlp/why_apples_...
----
One more:
https://mashable.com/article/iphone-users-think-less-of-andr...
Nonsense. Complaints about Apple’s declining software quality get a lot of traction on HN. Here’s another example from today:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46997008
And lookie here, what was submitted within one hour of that post?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46996575
This exact same submission! Which didn’t get any traction then. The traction this is getting has little to do with the quality of the post, it’s popular because it’s another thread where we can air our grievances.
and if my grandma had wheels she'd be a bicycle. As far as I can glean this was never something that they intended to do.
Jokes aside, that video is 2:23 long and it gets to the point within the first 33 seconds, at which point they have demonstrated the issue.
You're being beyond incredibly silly right now.
So yeah, a video that precisely reproduces a UI/UX bug is worth more than anything you can write about it.
Showing exactly what the problem was is much better than describing the problem. It's a lossy conversion that adds noise.
Saying this as someone who doesn't watch videos normally.
But I swear if that's what they're trying to do here, I've never seen it work properly once. It's always just a random substring of the sentence.
Also for some reason autocorrect seems to have gotten a lot worse. It has become nearly impossible to type a grocery list without all kinds of annoying wrong corrections.
Works better with an em-dash to make it feel more like today's default ChatGPT style.
What says a lot is that you had to dredge up some up to 7 years old posts on reddit, on which replies still overwhelmingly call the idea silly. This smells like an attempt to manufacture consent, but it'd be pretty low effort for even that.
As a rule, if something sounds stupid to you, it will probably be just as silly to most people you should give a damn about. Certainly don't let some posts that look like the lowest-effort FUD imaginable tell you what other people think.
Anyway, why are you so upset about this? Why are you calling my comment "nonsense" and obsessing over this counter? It's clearly having an effect on you, which was its purpose. Realistically, another post about Apple's borked keyboard should create zero emotional response, yet here we are.
<BFINN/#debian> ALL BIG LETTER ON KEYBOARD HERE!!
<CosmicRay/#debian> haha
<BFINN/#debian> TO NO LITTLE LETTER!
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.misc/c/7AdXvE7KQz...
We're not debating majority opinion here. Just that people exist who have that bias / perception and what it leads to.
People exist that judge and exclude based on if you have have an Android.
Im sure the reverse exits too.
Im also sure the former is more common than the later.
But I have no idea how large that population is.
Just like Im not in that population.
The post you're replying to is hardly being aggressive.
Did you ever notice that "About this software" is the first thing on the first menu of every application? Is that because people have to know what version of the software they are using every time they start it? It's still like that today, and it's very very stupid. Other OSs get it right and put the version information on the last menu, where it doesn't clutter up the most prominent area in the most used menus.
Finder was crap in the 1980s. Still is crap, but it used to be crap too.
The window system in the 80s and 90s was also crap. Could not resize a window from any side or corner of the window except the lower right. Windows has had resizing from any edge or corner since forever.
Apple "design" is just not as good as people seem to think it is.
They've also had plenty of weird and unloved hardware designs... the infamous trash can, the clamshell laptop, the weird anniversary macs, a mouse with a charging port on the bottom so that you can't use the mouse while it's charging, and the list goes on and on and on.
That’s not what I said. Upvoting one post has nothing to do with upvoting the other. They’re two wholly separate posts, the one thing they have in common is (rightfully) criticising Apple for declining software quality. The point is that this submission isn’t special, as the person I replied to suggested. These types of posts are a dime a dozen (which I approve of, I think Apple should be getting criticised for what they do wrong) and they get traction on HN all the time.
I upvoted this submission too, it’s not wrong. But I agree with the comment up the chain that it makes its point as a pretty weak threat, and that doing so undermines the message.
> Realistically, another post about Apple's borked keyboard should create zero emotional response
Of course that is not true. That is trivial to disprove.
And its Windows competition Windows Explorer has likewise gotten worse and worse each revision of Windows.
There's no reason a senior at undergrad level shouldn't be able to write an efficient, fast, deterministic, precomputed search function.
... and yet, professional developers at major companies seem completely incapable.
Minimum acceptance criteria for any proposed shipping search feature should be "There is no file / object in the local system that fails to show up if you type its visible name" ffs.