alt Hacker NewsiPhone Typos? It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken [video]
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Touchscreens are an awful user interface. You'll never change my mind.
I want an iPhone but without a touch screen. Give me a damn real physical keyboard.
Any one know why the iPhone will put a random v or similar letter in the text by itself? It’s a really annoying bug.
We need someone like Steve Jobs to berate the engineers to make these products good again.
This is a big issue and I’ve noticed I significant decline in my accuracy. Would love to hear a response to this from Apple with proper fix.
My son has an Apple Watch SE 3 and it doesn't feature the keyboard and you literally cannot type a lower case 'n'. The only hack was putting in a space and then it will sometimes do an n (or multiple characters). It's bonkers bad.
I have found myself doing a lot more voice typing lately.
My biggest gripe is that when I say "want to" it replaces it with "wanna" unless I specifically enunciate "want to".
"Wanna" is NOT a word in english but there is no way to exclude it.
Frustrating.
There's another issue that's much more infuriating IMO:
- You're in the middle of writing a sentence.
- The phone is trying to guess how that sentence will eventually be constructed.
- It goes back 3 words and changes one to match its guess.
- Its guess is @)%(*%@ WRONG
Swiftkey on Android does this also and it's a very nice feature. I sometimes see a key lighting up that I didn't mean to press. I was just barely on that key, and it figured out that I didn't mean to press it
Not sure how it works. Maybe it looks at touch surface area movements during the couple milliseconds that I'm pressing down for? Or dynamically adjusts hitboxes as this video says iOS does? Whatever the method, it works very well after like fifteen years of training (I copy the data folder between devices and never update it or let it access the internet, so I'm sure it's just me training it and not anything else, nor incompatible versions ever throwing data away)
Note that this is different from the context-based autocorrect since that only triggers on spacebar or suggestion selection
Also wth happened to the alarms page. Feels like they made the clickable area of the toggle 1/4 the size just to annoy me. Usually takes a couple tries to hit them when sleepy in morning
I assumed it was just me getting worse at typing but combined with aggressively wrong autocorrect and mysterious blue lines under everything I type they seem to have ruined yet another perfectly good UX.
all.my.google.searches.look.like.this
Another long running one is duplicateduplicate words: https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/mpo20r/iphone_will_occ... .. been happening for me for years and still does from time to time, but it's only once every few days so I just let it bebe.
I've wondered for a while whether it's a dark pattern where they're trying to optimize for more text to speech in this post-literate world.
The iOS keyboard "just not working" is something I gripe about pretty much every day as a symptom of the world getting quantifiably worse than even five if not ten years ago, alongside a whole laundry list of enshittification transgressions.
oh dear god, tears of joy…they told me I was crazy. this is so validating
That learned helplessness at the 2-minute mark... Install a different program if you don't like this one. There are options beyond "submitting a bug report and hoping for the best". The video makes it sound like Apple is some kind of holy spirit to which you can only pray. If there's no good options, and you can't code, you can even get together and fund someone to fix an open source keyboard if it's bothersome enough. There's always more options, especially in software
If OS developers lack QA processes and resources, can they offer usability bounties?
LLM HUD displays can annotate ads, marketing copy and shopping carts with customer usability feedback.
I've been suffering from de quervain tenosynovitis for the last 6 months or so. I thought it was the cause I can't type anymore.
Another problem I'm having is.. with the latest iOS public betas, when you swipe down to bring up Siri search, it takes 2-4 seconds for the keyboard to show up. Every time. Went to an Apple store and they said, "re-install from scratch". Which isn't really easy these days, given work MFA accounts etc.
My goodness. I honestly believed I was experiencing a decline in finger dexterity due to age, given the sudden increase in typing mistakes on my iPhone (I have been an iPhone user since the OG iPhone).
Tim Apple really needs to let go the clowns who managed to regress the keyboard input functionality.
that to me looks like a error in whatever logic is behind the positional error code. You'd think they would have transformer models based on different layouts but maybe some weighting issues going on.. ie I would have thought its a model that is altering based on likelihood weights and maybe something up with that..
I have benn beating ths drum for yrs
Well, possibly unrelated to all of this, but in my experience, multilingual spell-checking has gotten noticeably worse on both iOS and Windows, to the point where I had to disable auto-correct wherever that's possible (and that's, unfortunately, pretty far from everywhere!).
This particular problem manifests as: you're conversing in one language (say, French) and then use a single English word, at which point the spell-check and auto-correct permanently switches to that language, mis-correcting pretty much everything from that point onward.
(Classic) Outlook on Windows is pretty much entirely broken for me these days (even if I repeatedly mark the entire message as being in the majority language), as is Safari on MacOS: even in a completely-Dutch conversation, it always insists on auto-completing 'lang' ('long' but can also be 'tall') to 'language' and it's absolutely infuriating, and with no apparent way to disable the madness... (and, interestingly, no mechanism to detect that I dismissed the auto-complete for the 100th consecutive time, and that it's possibly not a desirable substitution)
I’m so glad other people are having this problem too. The keyboard is just so bad now.
The autocorrect does help sometimes. But it fucks things up that were previously fine just as much as it helps so overall it’s probably worse than it used to be. Now You need to constantly monitor every key pressed to make sure it hasn’t screed it up later.
There's a slightly different (I think) bug which I've been hitting since the update with URLs. The URL keyboard allows long-pressing on the . to open various TLDs, speeding how long it takes to write a URL.
In prior versions, you could long press to open the choices, then letting go would insert the default (eg .com)
With iOS 26, the touch target seems to be slightly different for triggering the options vs selecting them. I now frequently long-press, see the TLD choices with the default selected, and then releasing incorrectly inserts a single . instead of the TLD. This is infuriating when typing fast.
Dude - crazy. When I saw this post I was like - finally someone said it. But it isn't just "iPhone". Why is spell check so bad EVERYWHERE..... still?. Like, how is it I am still even able to share texts, emails, etc that have mistakes at all? I feel like "spell check" is so old school. Intent, and matching intent, without typos is way over due. A bit meta: but, I am going to have to re-read this post - why? I still send texts that say "What re you doing?" - hwy?
Thank you!! How can one of the biggest tech company be blind to such a basic thing ? It enrages me whenever I type.
Does no engineer at Apple use iOS or they never face this problem ?
My theory is that the keyboard team is composed of sadists that enjoy making us all ducking suffer.
And it's possessed a random, multi-second lag ever since ~2012, even with spell check, replacements, and prediction turned off.
What.are.you.talking.about.the.iOS.keyboard.is.just.fine
Maybe it’s just me, but it’s not just typing - I’ve found that after I type a message in iMessage, it takes SEVERAL pressed to acknowledge a send?!
I don’t know wtf it thinks I’m doing because it doesn’t do any other action.
My english keyboard is broken but the two international keyboards that I have installed are borderline unusable. The keyboard situation has been atrocious for the past couple of versions of iOS but OS26 send it over the cliff.
Does anyone know an Android keyboard that uses local LLM with all you typed ever before as a context?
The best part about this is it's not your phone so there's no way to fix it
THIS. I'm constantly sending typos in texts now even when typing slower on purpose. The software is clearly making choices for me that are wrong and I can't do anything about it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Wow, I thought I was the only one. I too can confirm that my typing has gotten more error prone since the ios 26 update.
And liquid glass is still ugly and buggy. Apple has become enshitified.
iOS and macOS have been broken in so many small death-by-a-thousand-cuts kind of ways that it's frustrating to even write a comment about how broken.
I swear I have felt like I have dealt with this for the last few years on iPhone. So frustrating. It has forced me to use the the dictation feature.
I'm gonna be that guy and say that this has never occured on Android. And if it did, I can install any keyboard I want and the issue would likely be gone (I use FUTO keyboard). Apple is ridiculously controlling and anti-hacking I still have no idea why hackers use it
It's Not Just You https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Love the sick burn at the end:
>Who knows? Maybe they're just trying to simulate the butterfly keyboard in software.
Apple truly has some incredibly incompetent people working for it, obsessively focused on cosmetic style instead of substance and usability.
Alan Dye voluntarily leaving certainly won't solve the root problem that they didn't fire him years ago.
Bad Dye Job:
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
Gruber: Apple employees ‘giddy’ about Alan Dye’s departure:
https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/04/gruber-apple-employees-giddy-...
Many things are broken on iOS. Apple, please get your shit together.
- Random invisible touches and phone calls - BUggy Glass UI - Stupid battery management ..to say the least.
Even if they fix the keyboard, iOS as a whole can't really be fixed. This is a single symptom of a much larger problem. So much is broken, poorly implemented, or so laughably tasteless that it hurts my head to think about how it's positioned and accepted as a "premium" product. I understand that most people notice so little about the design of their surroundings that it's basically impossible for them to understand that this junk is inflicting thousands of tiny psychological cuts daily, but it makes me so very very sad that this is acceptable to so many people.
- As mentioned, keyboard input is offensively broken. Whiffed inputs, the entire text selection/cursor manipulation model sucks (not being able to select in the middle of a word is inexcusable unless you have Stockholm syndrome for the bandaids), the cursor manipulation is broken, keyboard gets stuck open or closed, etc. etc. I'm convinced the input design for this phone is a CIA psyop designed to drive you to madness so they can recruit you as a sleeper cell.
- Passcode inputs are also broken. Trying to enter your passcode at easily achievable speeds results in dropped inputs.
- Above point wouldn't be a big deal if it weren't for fingerprint scanning being given up for Face ID, which is complete dogshit that constantly fails-to-passcode trying and failing to scan my ceiling, or my face when it's against a pillow in the morning. It's also completely worthless when I'm unable to fully point my face at the phone (working on vehicles or in some other enclosed area) or am trying to use the phone completely off of muscle memory.
- The gesture navigation system is a fundamentally bad idea. I'm an average-sized man and reaching over to the left hand side of the screen to make back inputs requires me to shift my fingers on the back of the phone just to make the reach for the input. This is on a base-model iPhone 16, which is already a touch too large for many hands to deal with this input system. The hitboxes for navigation inputs are too small and many of the inputs are often shared with actions in apps, resulting in taking all sorts of actions you didn't want to. Android style 3-button navigation at the bottom of the screen solved this many years ago. As an aside, the 60 FPS screen on an $800 phone as a "fuck you" push to upgrade to an even fatter pig of a phone that suffers even more from the bad navigation is funny.
- The GPS is fucked up, at least on the iPhone 16. It takes forever to find its bearing, after which it usually holds onto it until losing its mind again at the most inconvenient time. The only phone I've seen with a worse GPS is a Unihertz Jelly. Being in the same league as a $150 niche night market special is shameful.
- I have a frustrating number of calls get dropped. I don't know exactly where this issue comes from but it's noticeable, I run into it a couple times a week. My previous S24 on the same carrier never dropped calls under the same circumstances, so I know not having this issue is possible.
- The flashlight implementation sucks. Being able to tap it off with screen input is incredibly frustrating when I'm fumbling around trying to do something in the dark. And of course, it turns the screen on so you can make this accidental input every time you turn the flashlight on with the assignable side button. Being able to adjust the brightness is something I've never found any use for and mostly just serves to annoy me when I accidentally turn it down with another unintended input, but maybe somebody somewhere gives a shit about this, I guess.
- The split notification/settings menu is incredibly annoying. The settings menu is already a reach on the smallest mainline models, the notifications menu basically requires whole-hand movement. 20% of the space in the notifications menu is taken up by a fuckoff huge clock that you can't configure the size of. The lack of notification icons results in me having to actually unlock the phone and check things instead of just being able to know at a glance (I know they wanted to distance themselves from the roached Android notification tray look but I don't care).
- Liquid Glass looks like shit. So does a lot of the rest of the phone but I don't really hold some moron designer's bad visual taste against a product unless it affects the usability of the product. And of course, it affects the usability of the product. I actually laughed out loud having a literally unreadable lockscreen clock after the iOS 26 update, with the factory-provided moon background to add a little more salt to the wound. It reads poorly and is tacky to boot.
- This is pretty minor but the constant nags about iCloud are very funny. These assholes just couldn't resist hounding you for 99 cents more after you bought their $800 fuckup. It's like getting nagged about a Sirius XM subscription in a Lamborghini.
Individual points may be taken care of, but the disease is terminal. The iPhone's success at this point is driven by network effects, marketing, and its posturing as a premium product. Grown adults have an emotional attachment to the brand and the lifestyle statement. Android vendors are aping this stuff now. The memories of quality software and the ability to recognize it is being actively erased from the collective memory. Hoping that any of this is going to change at this point is just pissing in the wind.
"You are using it wrong"™
If the UI registers the characters, but the system inputs something else, how is this even possible?
The most annoying to me is how close they put "enter" or "@" to space on the right side, so when you type with both hands you keep hitting those when you want to type a space
the iphone keyboard words prediction is the dumbest in this era of AI tech. It very consistently and focused on predicting the wrong word i'm after.
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I type in Dvorak and frequently the iOS keyboard's swipe typing bugs out and acts as if the layout is in QWERTY. I kind of don't believe it will ever be fixed...