alt Hacker News@ozzyphantom: You might consider being more specific about your grievances in the text of your countdown page. As it stands, it's a bit vague, describing the keyboard as "broken" and autocorrect as "nearly useless". Sure, the video you link to is more descriptive, but it's a lot to ask of a visitor to click through and watch a separate video.
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...
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It turns out he posted a better example in his blog post about it - https://thismightnotmatter.com/a-little-website-i-made-for-a... - which is technically linked to in the bottom of the site. I guess if you spend your life learning UX from Apple this is what you get...
I see where you’re coming from, this was an impulsive creation after months/years of frustration without any expectations.
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!
I have autocorrext turned off on my keyboard and typed this without any corrections. These sre the issues i've faced with the stock keyboard:
- 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.
One can also see it like: The grievance is apparent to every iOS user who has used pre-iOS 18 keyboards or any of the major Android keyboards.
It’s also not just one problem, autocorrect and the keyboard combined make for at least a dozen seemly different defects
I understand your point, but for an issue that's been addressed so many times, it doesn't sound necessary to get into details. The issue doesn't seem to be that Apple doesn't know but that they don't care.
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.
I think the point is that the keyboard is so broken the problems should be obvious to the people who work on the iPhone.
The YT video they linked is excessively clear about what the issue is. There's no point in explaining it again.
The article on the average pilot and aircraft cockpit design is fascinating.
Now I’m entirely invested, what was the problem causing the crashes? How did they solve it?
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Why not install an different keyboard app?
The recent changes to the iOS keyboard and text editing in general have been very counter productive for me as well. Tap to select doesn't really work the same way anymore and the logic of it isn't clear to me which makes it unpredictable. Typing accurately itself has gotten really difficult. I used to be a pretty quick typist on the iOS keyboard but now I find myself looking for my Mac to send a message from there or using voice to text more.
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.