alt Hacker NewsApple’s grey list: Words and phrases your iPhone won’t help you spell
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And that's just the tip of the iceberg for the iOS Keyboard's issues. They've tried to fix it multiple times, and while it is undeniably better than its lowest point - it is still staggeringly worse than Google's native offering on the Pixel range. Swiping is just so painful, and Microsoft's Swiftkey keyboard is on life support.
Considering arguably the keyboard itself is one of the most common "touch surfaces" on iOS, the level of neglect and level of overall quality is staggering. There's some serious incentive problems at Apple if nobody is tasked with making one of the best digital keyboards in the world.
PS - Whoever came up with the concept, on swipe-style touch keyboards, of the "Tap Map"/Heatmap wherein keys visible location doesn't match their touch area - so that BY DESIGN it always provides an inconsistent user experience needs to be fired into the sun. You literally cannot disable it on most mobile keyboards. It is on iOS's native keyboard AND Microsoft's Swiftkey.
Not predicting to something controversial when doing predictive text isn't censorship. You can still type any of these things. When I swing my finger around wildly it's making a best guess; not jumping to a phrase that makes me look bad or get arrested (in some countries) isn't an awful design choice.
I'm surprised by the people here who think this is some way unique to Apple. I'm 99% sure Gboard on Android does the same thing. It seems to be implemented differently and to be a bit more responsive to learning my behavior over time, but I've highly suspected it's been there for years. And I'm surprised no one has noticed this until now?
I'd have tried to work out more detailed behavior but I'm poor enough at swiping (at least with Gboard) that there's little point in trying to pin it down that well, at least for me.
They hate backlash. Autocompleting might make it seem like they're suggesting those phrases to you
Direct link to project and discussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50394070
I can swipe some of these words just fine. European iPhone in Poland, region = pl, phone language = US English, keyboard is en/pl.
To clarify, you can type these out, but you need to manually do it. If you try to use swipe typing, it won't work if it's in the blacklist.
This seems entirely reasonable to me. And to people complaining that this is censorship, it is absolutely not. You can still type these words just fine, it's just not going to interpret swipes that are inherently probabilistic and often ambiguous as potentially risky terms.
This seems like a feature, because I swipe all the time and send messages without realizing I got a word wrong, especially because the word it chooses is usually with the same first letter and approximately same length.
All this is doing is avoiding high-risk words and terms, and making you type them out letter by letter to ensure you aren't sending an accidentally sexual/swear/political message to your Mom/boss/colleague.
This would be problematic and censorship if it were preventing you from typing the phrases at all. It's clearly a helpful feature, however, to prevent you from accidentally typing risky phrases when using something as error-prone as swipe typing.
I really don't understand how people can buy hardware from a company that thinks like this ...
They should just roll back the keyboard 5 to 10 years. Lately the keyboard is super temperamental. Sometimes it works pretty good and sometimes I have to retry multiple times until I get a simple sentence completed. It's really frustrating and it seems to be getting worse.
Anybody who’s ever used it has known this for years.
Reminds me of "System Update" in https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/16/letters-from-t... (on invisible updating of Apple’s macOS dictionary)
Ad-riddled website that doesn’t contain the actual list. Recommend changing to direct link to the researcher’s site:
Or the list itself:
so, does this still happen if you have assistive technologies turned on? Because that might also be illegal.
I suppose it must be region bound, with different phrases per region?
There truly is an XKCD for everything. https://www.xkcd.com/2015/
Censorship like this isn’t really decided to by one particular person or team of people deciding what to censor.
It’s mostly automated, controversial phrases or topics are detected by analyzing various data sources and getting sentiment analysis from interactions that people have in response. Anything that causes overwhelming polarization or negative reactions or meets other criteria gets blocked. There is no agenda.
> Santa isn’t real
Well I just swyped it into this comment, and double checked in iMessage, although hilariously, it types “isn’t” correctly, but then when I type “real” it “corrects” it by removing the apostrophe.
and all I wanted to do was make a bad joke about how I’m thankful Apple won’t let me ruin my five-year-old’s dreams by sending her an accidental soul crushing text.
On a real note, though, if they could just find a way to fix the issue where every time I type an “i” to say “I“ it instead types an “o” all by itself like I’m some kind of 17th century bard, and then anytime I want to type “a“ as an indefinite article, it will type a single “s” by itself, which almost never makes any grammatical sense in the English language unless you’re talking about the letter “s” itself.
> Apple’s iPhone will not autocomplete references to drugs, sexual acts and, perhaps in the spirit of corporate protection, “iMessage isn’t working”.
It will be interesting as corporate predictive text generators take over the world and companies like Apple will literally build the Jobsian reality distortion field into their products to portray their services as working better than they are.
> Apple’s iPhone will not autocomplete references to drugs, sexual acts and, perhaps in the spirit of corporate protection, “iMessage isn’t working”.
I suppose ditching Apple is "two birds with one stone" :)
Words and phrases your iPhone won’t make you spell: all of them. Lol the autocowreck experience gets worse every day.
None of Apple’s operating systems help autocomplete or spell correct the word “God” either
I don't want a faster iPhone; I just want to be able to ducking swear when I text.
Author is very opinionated about Australia :o
Why does it automistake its to it's? Even when it's intuition is wrong?
funny to think about the guy who thinks his keyboard is broken because he uses so many slurs day to day. the volume of words seems a touch excessive
Any company that is concerned about their PR image has to do some filtering of this sort, otherwise they get hit pieces like [1][2] though in both cases, it was (aggregate) human behaviour that was beneath said issue.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/google-autocomplete-vile-suggest...
How the hell can they defend banning “Trayvon Martin” of all things. Are they now the arbiters responsible for quashing social movements?
This is an _insane_ lever for censorship. Does Israel pay them to omit “the occupied territories”? Is that internal Apple policy irrespective of nation state pressure?
It's not just madness that these exist, but that they are hidden, unexposed to the user, and have no justification or rationale.
Skip the article.
Swipeblocked: The phrases your iPhone won't suggest
When you ask me, thats a kind of good. When I see how people use autocorrect and autocomplete without thinking, I wouldn't wonder when someone is put into jail because a sentence that he never planned to type but send it without knowing because autocorrect has changed it. This feature protects people that mindlessly use autocorrect/complete from jail, bad discussions with their employer or political correct 'friends'.
if apple suggest it, they predict gov't would come at them anyways. So they just preempt all that.
Related:
Apple's predictive text restrictions include 'Dictator Trump' and 'Sleepy Joe'
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50391486
I dumped Apple's word list
Ah yet another "nudge" type behavioral psychology intervention. I'd say these technology companies should be strictly regulated, but they're doing Uncle Sam's propaganda so I doubt that alone would help.
It would be nice certain companies could be chartered by the U.N. I think it would be much more difficult for them to do evil stuff if the majority of states had to agree on their charter. Not that there isn't a subset of things that all states want that sucks ass, but it's much less.
Do you enjoy the feeling of a stranger's fingers poking around in your brain? I sure don't. So don't buy Apple products.
For every trick you catch them at there are a thousand you didn't
I wonder what the boardroom meeting for this was like. Despite the outcome, I doubt the devs were pitching censorship as the reason for implementing this.
To the shocking number of people here who are justifying this or explaining how it only affect swipe input as if that makes it better: soft coercion is still coercion. If I made a physical keyboard that stops keys from working when you're about to finish typing something I don't want you to type, but you can still circumvent it, I still made a censorship keyboard. It's a sign of the times with how used tech companies are to 'softly' moderating societal trends by unilaterally tweaking the software that everyone uses.