iPhone Typos? It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken [video]

I have had this conversation with several people. I feel like I used to be able to type with a fairly low error rate on a smaller screen with old iPhones. Now I feel that it is constant exercise in frustration as I will hit a letter and the keyboard will decide to pick the letter next to it. It is evolving backwards.

Switched from pixels to iphone in the last year or two and the keyboard is the biggest pain point by far. I tend to use swipe, so this particular issue isn't something I've come across. What I do run into is weird censorship issues where I'm trying to type "kill myself" or something similar and the phone will do anything to not provide that as an option. Then, when I try to manually change it, editing is a nightmare. Inevitably trying to change the ending of a word results in the entire word being deleted. It inserts spaces where I don't want them.

Is this some sort of psyop to get me to use siri to send texts?

I’ve been complaining about the iOS Keyboard for years, and the people I’ve been complaining to would act like I’m insane.

I suspect this last iteration broke it just enough for it to impact more people and make some of the problems I’ve been experiencing mainstream.

But yeah things like deleting when I meant to space, putting an “I” instead of “K” and a bunch of other little things like “thinks” instead of “things”, unintended periods; complete failure of spelling just generating gibberish “x” instead of “c” leading to un-autocorrectable failures; and if you want to reference the name of something that doesn’t fit the grammatical structure of the sentence but isn’t a mainstream item, forget about it.

Also “od” instead of “of”.

Seeing this video is super validating. Emotionally, it does a lot to make me feel vindicated.

Someone was telling me you can install 3P keyboards, does anyone have any recommendations?

35m ago edit: Apple uses many predictive systems for typing. My sentiment in pointing out just slide to type might be misguided as it does not exist in a vacuum. I'd love to see these tests redone with slide to type disabled. I'm leaving the original comment below for reference.

Slide to type. This "issue" is at most 6 years old for iOS users.

Turn off slide to type if you do not use it. Slide to type does key resizing logic. This is the direct cause of this issue. Please upvote this comment for visibility.

Please reply if you think I'm wrong. I see this get posted frequently enough I'm actually losing it.

Please refer to https://youtu.be/hksVvXONrIo?si=XD7AKa8gTl85_rJ6&t=72 (timestamp 1:12) to see that slide to type is enabled.

Same here. I even blamed it on switching between Italian and Spanish all the time and thought my brain was short-circuiting. But when you see the right key light up and a different letter shows up, something’s clearly off. Also: with battery saver on it’s basically unusable - the lag makes typing way worse. The video was oddly comforting. Turns out I’m not losing it.

I think the Apple software UI team has cultural problem in adhering to "one source of truth", and that's where most of the problems come from. I've seen this many many times throughout the years, from toggles, to actions, account creation (I have dupes from tapping a button too fast), etc: the UI doesn't match the internal state.

Another example is most any toggle that's linked to Apple cloud stuffs, like settings in your iCloud account or parental controls. You see it toggle immediately, but that's unrelated to the actual state. You can't know the actual state until you exit the page and go back. Meta gets this right with their apps: you toggle, the toggle turns disabled, then the toggle is re-enabled when the state is confirmed remote side.

Is there a trustworthy third-party "Retro" keyboard app - none of the shenanigans that made the default keyboard bad, and also no typing exfiltration to third-party servers?

I imagine the problem could be severe enough to some that they would pay the price of the Apple Developer program just so they may install such a Retro keyboard app from Github - if one exists?

I pranked a friend in college by tricking him into installing a “utility” on his Amiga 1200 that swapped adjacent keys into the key stream as he typed, but only above a certain speed. He called and woke me the next morning in a panic about losing the ability to type. He would type slowly and it would work fine. Then at normal speed and he’d get constant errors. He’d quickly pull his hands up to see what keys they were over. Did he have a brain tumor? How could he be a journalist if he couldn’t type! Did he need to change majors?

Apple is unintentionally pranking the world.

Is software just going to get worse from now on? Was the level of quality and feature improvement we've come to expect an artifact of high levels of investment based on expectations of growth that are no longer seen a valid?

The #1 problem I have typing on my iPhone is that I hit letter keys (mostly 'n') instead of the space bar and the phone just doesn't anticipate this as a possible typo and doesn't offer the right corrections. (I have AutoCorrect off.) It doesn't seem able to learn that this is a common typo, either.

I had an iPhone day 1 in 2007, and my typing on that day was better than it is today.

Once they added the suggestion bar above the keyboard things got noticeably worse. Every time they try to fix it they make it even worse than before.

With the current version, it’s not just the issue in the video I see as an issue. The two big problems I have are 1) repeated words, where I will type a word once, but auto-completion will inject another one. 2) The autocorrect will seemingly look at the whole paragraph I’m typing and change random words I typed several lines up and deemed correct. I will catch it doing this in real time, and sometimes it will flip a word back and forth repeatedly. I find I don’t just need to proofread while I’m typing, but also need to go through and re-read everything. It wasn’t always like this.

Maybe it’s my rose colored glasses, but I often think the iPhone peaked with the 4S.

It’s problems like this that make me wonder what high level leaders do anymore. Do they not use technology? Infinite tolerance for bugs? How is it someone with authority does not make it a mandate to file down some of these regular annoyances in everyday software.

I literally cannot type "its" without iPhone putting an apostrophe into it every goddamned time, even when it's obvious from the beginning of the sentence that the next word must be a verb not a possessive pronoun.

If I ever lose my marbles I know I'm going to accuse iOS of being in on it.

Shameless plug, but back in 2014 trying to play with swift I made Type Nine, and I'm still using it to this day[1]

I also did a few other experiments that I unfortunately haven't had time to explore further[2]

[1] https://www.typenineapp.com

[2] https://medium.com/porsager/a-better-iphone-typing-experienc...

The key that is punched into the input field is based on where your finger lifted up. So if you have slide-to-type on, the pop-up paddle that showed up on key-down won't change to where your finger slid to for key-up. That's why when typing fast with slide-to-type on you can get confusing UI hints like this.

It kind of seems like the grace period for the paddle hiding with slide-to-type needs adjustment. I just leave slide-to-type off.

Well, I’m glad I’m not going crazy and the keyboard does actually suck since the glass update…

Thank You. Keep being told that it was not the new iOS fault.

Not only Alan Dye, Eddy Cue, Craig Federighi also need to go. Bring back Scot Forstall.

I have always used SwiftKey and Android. This year I switched to Apple because Android was being bloated by Samsung etc. I'm shocked by how horrible Apple keypad is. I also feel like the touch sensitivity of iphone is worse than Samsung phones.

I installed SwiftKey on iPhone too but even it seems sluggish.

I actually keep a bluetooth keyboard when I'm at my desk but am forced to use my phone. I really, really dislike touchscreens and touchscreen typing, and it's baffling to me that so many people seem to like it. The bluetooth keyboard is actually a little Logitech K380, and it's quite convenient as I also have it paired with my work laptop and my steam deck. I just push the button to seamlessly swap between pairings.

My backtick muscle memory no longer worked after the update. Feels like someone just rewrote it.

> The best thing we can do is just report it via the feedback app and wait for a bug fix

iOS supports third party keyboards. Surely anybody this bothered by it should investigate those and pick a better option?

There was an absolutely mind-blowing keyboard which supported multi-finger swiping called Nintype, but development on it has stopped.

Worst thing about iOS keyboard is that it corrects the last word when hitting send before even showing what it would change.

When i hit send, i want to send the message that is on my screen, not the message iOS thinks i meant to send.

(And that you cant just click into the middle of a word to edit one letter)

The 3rd letter is the key here. If you are going to look up a possible word that a user is typing, iOS waits until the third letter typed to do the lookup. Too many possibilities before then. So at the third letter typed, in the video it displayed the U, but his finger was low on the button. It displayed, then did the lookup, and while it was doing that lookup the u was still displayed, but the input moved to J without the display being updated. Maybe the lookup being spawned on the background thread caused enough delay on the main thread to not update the highlighted key before the touchUp event fired?

The first iterations of the apple keyboard were perfect. They literally did everything perfectly without any notes.

Then it seems like they’re started teaching to the bottoms of the class and added a bunch of terrible decisions: Substituting touch to select instead of touch to move cursor was a genuinely awful decision that now makes typing a constant chore, and it seems like their autocorrect is overcompensating so hard that it prevents me from writing perfectly good words simply because they’re not common ones.

Side note: anyone else have moments where you can’t press delete once predictive text has shown up?

I literally just had a dream about this. Where I needed to urgently send a message, but I kept messing up the text. Weird. At least now, I know I'm not just fat fingering it.

I know because I hqte iPhone keyboard so much, and the calculator app. I wish there’s an alternative timeline where we still have Palm keyboard with big screen

I guess I'm in an extreme minority here but... it's not broken if autocorrect is off.

I raw dog my typing everywhere. Zero autocorrect. The last time I did use typing assistance was on BB10 with the 'flick to complete' because it was out of my way enough that I could ignore it was there or use it to save a small amount of time. Otherwise I too have the fond memory of Windows Phone's keyboard (I ran it on the HTC HD2), I couldn't tell you why it was good other than it felt good to use, again without autocorrect.

However, I'm CERTAIN there's an ergonomics thing at play, the 'brain calibration' time for me to type accurately on a big screen takes longer. I ran the original iPhone SE's as long as I could and always carried a second android device that was huge by comparison. Today I have the 15 Pro and a OnePlus 11. If I spend a lot of time using the iPhone it takes a little time maybe 20 minutes or so to stop making easy errors on the OnePlus 11. However, going back to the smaller iPhone after being on the OnePlus for awhile, there's not really an adjustment, I can hit all the letters accurately.

I have large hands, I still want the smaller device. There is extra work to need to move your hand and eyes across a larger device. More space to misclick on.

Swipe to type is enabled on android/ios for me. I use it sometimes, if you are hesitant at all on iOS or have a tendency to drag fingers at all don't enable it or it will mess up your typing. It's of course enabled by default like autocorrect. Some people have issues with it.

Dictation is underrated on iOS at least. It just works better and faster than the shitty autocorrect for typing. Obviously not applicable to a lot of situations but when I don't feel like typing it works really well.

EDIT: And I really have to have it off, I switch between devices too much and even with them learning my style of writing, I write differently for different contexts and each OS does its own thing differently. I don't want to spend the extra mental bandwidth correcting the autocorrect or having to think of how that specific autocorrect will behave.

iPhone miscorrects apostrophes between "its" and "it's", and its driving me insane.

sent from my iPhone

I use android (samsung flagship) and have been struggling with accurate typing in recent months

I havent found a root cause yet, tentatively chalked it up to advancing age.

I may have inadvertently selected a different keyboard (Samsung vs Google ) or wrong layout/settings when switching to newer phone.

This has been driving me up a wall. I was seriously considering if I had just gotten 'old' or something. I've had every iPhone since the first one, and suddenly I feel like I'm typing with mittens on.

I am surprised that there isn't a comprehensive test suite of (at least) virtual button presses replaying actual typed sentences for a product used by so many people that apple would run on a daily basis against each device.

Yeah, something happened a few months ago where by iOS I'm now "hitting" the wrong key a lot, words like we'll and we're are constantly being automatically "corrected" to well and were and, most frustrating, it will auto"correct" the last word in a sentence from what is on the screen when you hit send. It went from almost always helpful to often frustrating.

iPhone keyboard is probably one of the several biggest factors I consider when once again I think "hmm, maybe this time I should upgrade to iPhone?". And then I'm confronted with this, ummm... thing, and immediately remember why I ditched iPhones years ago :) . How do you deal with it daily? I'm at a loss really. PS: I've owned 3GS and 4S and a few iPads, so I'm not just baseless here.

I always end up pressing the `.` instead of enter when trying to search somethin on Safari.

I get frustrated by how many real/normal words Apple's macOS and iOS typing dictionaries don't recognize and mark as misspellings.

I haven't been getting notifications from any messaging apps for a few months. I've checked all the relevant settings (do not disturb etc.). I also get random keyboard issues such as this one. This is my first iPhone. I have no idea why I paid premium prices for a premium phone if they can't even get notifications and typing right

The best touch keyboard on a phone for me was always on the Blackberry Z10 phone. The phone UI is also one of the best I used. Unfortunately, Blackberry went to shit.

The iPhones autocorrect is one of my biggest frustrations coming from Android a few years ago. The biggest frustration for me is the tendency to correct the _second to last word_. I have never gotten used to this. I know i can stop it by "clicking" on the word instead of hitting space - but that feels slow and bad.

The most infuriating “feature” of autocorrect is that it includes all your contact names in your dictionary, with no way to opt out of this aside from disabling autocorrect entirely. This can lead to some awkward texts when your innocent typo (or even correctly spelled technical term) turns into a mention of someone’s name who should not be in your phone…

I wonder if this is related to the fact that every Apple app shows up as “recently accessing” contacts in App Privacy Report. And I don’t mean only photos (face recognition), but: Safari, Camera, Shortcuts, Mail, Health… why? I’ve never even configured a Mailbox. Why are these apps all accessing my Contacts?

WTF Apple. And, yes, I've been the same boat. Thank for pinpointing that this is not me but rather another genius Apple design.

The issue is that when you press down, the key you pressed down on first is not the registered character, it's where you release your finger at. When you type fast and you slide your fingers around, it misregisters.

As a bilingual/trilingual user (I have English, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, French and Chinese keyboards enabled, and use the first three on a daily basis), I have had surprisingly few issues with either swiping or pecking at the keyboard, perhaps because I automatically switch to pecking the instant I spot swiping going down the “wrong” decision tree.

But I also think having this many keyboards enabled makes iOS basically throw up its tiny virtual hands in frustration and nullifies most fancy predictions.

(This was mostly swiped in on an iPhone 15 Pro running iOS 26 with very minor hiccups)

After a recent update, my keyboard started typing "and" as "and's". This happens 100% consistently, but only when swiping. I don't understand how such a bug happens. Yes, 's' is next to 'd', but "and's" is not even a word.

while I definitely agree the autocorrect has gotten worse, what I find more of a problem is all the various other pop-ups that occur. For example, they recently added the ability to 'undo' an autocorrect, but this pop up grabs focus, and you can't click on text near this pop up, because the pop up will claim the click.

I've also had trouble getting rid of pop up menus (copy, etc). If I want to click on text, but it has decided to pop up a menu, it can be a real pain to get rid of it. (I had no problem on previous versions of IOS).

There's a fundamental law of features: Every feature you add may may make it better for people who use it, but it makes it worse for everyone else.

If you keep adding features, anything will eventually become unusable.

I have a lot of trouble texting, independent of the issues here. I'm just clumsy and can't seem to do it in any productive way.

I'm working on this keyboard substitute with larger keys and split up keyboards: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/icantext/id6748927092. Give it a try if you want.

I detest Apple's, and Google's, and Amazon's, and nearly every tech company's feedback system.

Apple's is by far the worst. All feedback is private. There is no way to show or advertise support for feature. Like I want to go upvote the feedback from this video, but all I can do is file my own feedback, which is more work, and therefore more people will choose not to give any.

Both Apple and Google and Microsoft have "users help users". These are infuriating as there is no official answer or help. There's just some fan with an often completely wrong or irrelevant answer. There is zero indication that any of these companies look here to see what's broken.

I’m using a 12 mini and I’m running into so many typos since the new iOS. Maybe the combination of buggy software with their smallest screen is making it even worse.

Although I do not use it myself, I had seen that some other people do, and that apparently you cannot disable autocorrect while still having prediction enabled (at least, that is what they told me); I think it might be useful to enable prediction without autocorrect.

I just hope them to provide an option to get rid of all those predictive models and just use a static, consistent layout. At least I can blame myself if my typo is from my own mistake.

We need someone like Steve Jobs to berate the engineers to make these products good again.