The thing I still feel is missing from the iPhone keyboard design is some concept of clear intention from the user: it doesn't just correct near misses, it will also do ridiculous autocorrections where a few characters will somehow autocorrect--and to be clear for people who don't use it (or people who do but don't spend any time configuring it): I do NOT mean the autocomplete nonsense that I always have turned off--into giant words. I clearly didn't try to type a ten character word if I only hit the screen four times, right? It also should calm down if I start actively typing slower and with clear intention: if I'm suddenly typing at one character per second when I'm usually typing at five characters per second, it should probably just trust that I'm looking at the keyboard and tighten the bounds on its attempt to fix my mistakes.
It’s become more powerful, which means it can correct things in ways it previously couldn’t, but it can also screw things up in new ways.
For example, autocorrect used to be limited to words with the same number of chars, and with letters in the same order. Now it can autocorrect to a word with more or fewer chars, and with some transpositions. It’s good this is now possible, since people do make mistakes like this. But it opens the door for new types of errors.
One issue I find to be annoying is that it gives too much weight to the first char in a word when making its guess. I’ve learned that if it gets the first char wrong I should probably go back and correct it, unless it’s a very long word that will become apparent over time.
Agree; this was great at the time, but I feel like they’ve barely updated it since then. At least they finally added a somewhat useable swipe mode, but it’s still far behind what Google has done.
I think their swipe input is only a little behind. FWIW I also think that Google's has become worse for me. Maybe because I don't let it use the internet.
I recently built a prototype of this style of keyboard for Android for Latin and Cyrillic alphabets because of how frustrated I am with any form of input that involves dictionaries, guesswork, and tiny buttons. I then used it for half a day. It works, I can type words on it, but at least for as much time as I used it, it was slower for me than Gboard because I had to make a mental effort to remember which gesture from which button types which letter. Typos were almost nonexistent though. Now, I arranged the letters very naively, I simply took the T9 layout and adapted it for these directional swipes. It might work better if I arrange letters by frequency. For example, such that typing the most common letters would always only require a tap, the less common ones would be a swipe down (which is easier for me than other directions), and so on.
It's not a real product, at least not yet. It's not up to my standards, so I haven't published it anywhere. It will be open source if I decide to polish and publish it.
Wow, I came to say the same thing; surprised to see this as the first comment!
As far as I know, this keyboard was pioneered by Apple; I wonder if they were inspired by or reused the “blob” experiment? It’s not necessarily that novel though; seems to a a natural evolution of the Japanese syllabary and the old multi-tap physical “10-key” keyboards.
The physical ones (on flip phones) were also 12-key (0-9, *, and #), so I suppose it was just swiping on the keys that was novel. It definitely does leave one to wonder whether that innovation was inspired by this prototype.
Since we’re on the topic of input methods: I’ve always found the 8pen [1] fascinating. I sadly never had the opportunity to try it for myself, since I was using an iPhone rather than Android at the time (and it’s since been delisted).
I can't believe you also mentioned 8pen! I almost made a comment about that as well, but had to run earlier. I was also fascinated by the idea when that launched and really wanted it to be successful. I also had an iPhone, but I convinced my Android friend to buy it and try it out. He gave it a good shot, but it's just so hard to build fluency with, it never really stood a chance. I still wonder if the idea is sound if it were possible for people to learn more fluently in a reasonable timeframe.
The alphabet also works really well in about 10 groups. T9 dictionary of the dumbphone era worked really well and would have 3-4 letters assigned to a number.
The one thing that still annoys me about the iPhone keyboard that I think Android does better is correcting mistakes. Apple expects you to correct your mistake before you finish a word by selecting the right suggestion. On Android typing backspace after a word undoes the suggestion so you can quickly correct a wrong suggestion. Instead of having to erase the whole word and trying again.
I have been using iPhones for almost a decade. It still can’t predict my first name. It will suggest everything else but not my name. Even a typo word that, I chose not to use, I can’t make iOS un-remember for the life of me. It suggests words that I used maybe 3-4 times few years ago. But not the name that’s right there as part of my bloody Apple ID, my name in my contact book. Everywhere!
Edit: I just installed Gboard and tried. My full name was the first thing it predicted after few characters. No Google login, no full access.
I wish there was a way to remove that Google logo from GBoard and if only iOS allowed disabling network calls for individual apps (which is bothersome on
iOS).
If you misspell a word, it will auto correct. If you press backspace, the autocorrected word will still be there, but you can also tap to choose what you actually typed or a different suggestion.
And if you backspace again, autocorrect will temporarily disable itself so you can fix minor typos.
iPhone keyboard has had a bug since its inception that I'm surprised they never fixed. If you type "hippopotamus hippopotamus hippopotamus hippopotamus hippopotamus hippopotamus" (or copy paste it), then on the last letter, hold backspace until there are only 3 hippopotamuses left, you will almost assuredly fail and delete too much. This is because, midway through deleting the second hippopotamus, iPhone switches to word deletion mode (which is fine), and first thing it does is "delete the remainder of the second hippopotamus" (still fine) and then with the same key repeat delay, delete the third hippopotamus (this is where you need to let go of the backspace key), and then the forth.
The effective deletion speed goes from "5 letters per second" to "5 words per second" without any chance for the meager human on the other end to adjust their expectations.
I have a personal Android phone and a work iPhone. They both have their pros and cons. But when it comes to keyboards, the iPhone typing experience is far worse than Android for me.
It’s so bad. I switched from Pixel to iPhone and the main gripe I have is the keyboard. It’s the worst autocorrect experience ever. It constantly gets words wrong. The word “and” is constantly replaced with Abe, abs, or something else. Funny enough, just now when I was trying to type those words, it actually replaced them with “and”! Seriously, the developers of this keyboard soils be ashamed.
With both French and English enabled, it sometimes randomly "corrects" the English word "the" to the French word "thé" (meaning "tea" in English), despite every other word so far being English and despite the fact it would make no grammatical sense.
Most infuriating of all though is when it lets you think you've got through the gauntlet of perfectly valid words being replaced with nonsensical ones, only for it to swap out the last _two words_ you've typed!
I've had that replacement (the -> thé) and have never even enabled or used a French language keyboard on my device. At this point I disable autocomplete and autocorrect completely, on macOS and iOS.
I switched from Pixel to iPhone and lasted a week, the keyboard, among many things - was a real deal breaker. MS SwiftKey is a notch better than the rest (even GBoard) on iPhones, but nothing holds a candle to just typing on a stock Pixel's keyboard.
It used to be a lot better. Around iOS 13 (I think?) they moved from a heuristics-based model to a machine learning-based model and it's never been the same since. It's just frustrating now.
I love these types of stories because they show that, no matter how much people protest, few designs which make their way to the public are the "only obvious way to do it". They're only obvious after you see them, and only if they work well.
I really miss physical keyboards on phones. The last pre-iPhone I had was some Samsung slider phone -- intensity maybe? Anyway it was cheap and not so impressive but it blew the iPhone typing experience out of the water.
A weird UI design bug is, If you type different languages on the phone you have different keyboard layouts for each language. The key to switch language has swapped location with the shift key for the iPad OS compared to iOS. So I am always hitting the wrong key when switching device. Such a weird thing for them not to fix.
I’m not 100% sure what you mean and am wondering wether setting the keyboard layouts to QWERTY in all languages is a solution for you. That’s the way I handle three different languages on iOS but of course long presses are required then to get at characters with diacritics.
I’ve never seen anyone detail it, but from usage it seems clear that behind the graphical presentation of the keyboard there are touch zones for each key that are bigger or smaller than the actual key and probably grow and shrink depending on the previous letter(s) typed.
Maybe newer versions don’t do it (or as much) but I actually thought the direction of the article was that he would hide the fact that 2-3 letters were on the same key.
The iPhone keyboard was definitely better than any other full qwerty smartphone keyboard of its time back then, but it felt so wrong to throw out the Baby with the Bath water. A whole generation had learned the T9 solution (not talking about the older multi tap). more people than ever had actually switched to something else than qwerty, and loved it. I think there is still plenty of great solutions to discover - I've explored some of them after building Type Nine (T9 for iPhone)[1], and I'm so sad time hasn't allowed me to explore further, but try to check out the option at the bottom of my post "A better iPhone typing experience" here [2]
I grew up with T9 feature phones and even though I am the typical tweaker (who once tried to learn Dvorak as well) I never managed to get good at typing with those phones. But that’s just an anecdotal view point :)
The hardest challenge is knowing how much to integrate the correction.
You can do some really magical things by laying on hard to the auto correct but it comes subtly at the cost of making some rare words really hard to type.
Forget listening to feedback from consumers. How about all the Apple employees who use iPhones? I don’t understand why most of them haven’t spammed Tim Cook about how awful the iPhone keyboard prediction/autocorrect is. Is Tim Cook not doing his job as a CEO by refusing to properly fund and focus on AI and crippling the iPhone in the process?
honestly I think because they're all forced to live on the devices they develop they simply haven't had a need to be exposed to competitors and assume no one else has solved the problem to a high degree of satisfaction. When I worked there folks thought I was crazy for wanting to keep my android device around even when I just used it for email and browsing. Android keyboard was a magically intelligent thing with all sorts of forward and backward typo clustering and tries all working in concert in this very smooth operation that could get itself out of a deep typo run and come out very correct. The android keyboard seemed to be aware of key proximity in 2D space on the keyboard, dictionary words, words I frequently typed, words I frequently blunder on, words that pair frequently with each other, etc etc. The sheer number of dimensions the android keyboard considers is impressive, iOS keyboard feels like a simpleton by comparison.
You don’t understand because you’re blowing this way out of proportion. Most people can use the keyboard just fine with no problems at all and it keeps improving. Nobody is ‘crippling’ anything and nothing is ‘awful’.
It’s okay, it’s good enough, it’s much better than what preceded it, it looks like magic and it’s here, in a device you can hold in your hand.
> Kocienda’s first prototype was a ‘blob’ keyboard... [snip]… It was terrible
No it wasn’t! Or rather, the idea wasn’t. CooTek made the TouchPal keyboard for Windows Mobile with the same idea (ish), slide left for Q slide right for W slide down for a symbol (and slide left and up for a capital letter)
I always wondered why interfaces are terrible, so so terrible and why frontend designers are underpaid. And somehow good innovations like this falls to the bottom every time.
Also, the dominant input method for phones used in Japan uses this concept with the old-school numpad layout (substituting repeated presses with flicks)
Reading through the below blurb (and the rest of the article), I couldn't help but wonder how this would've panned out in today's world with UX professionals and processes.
"Nobody on the 15-engineer team quite knew what the ideal software keyboard would look like. Over the next few weeks, the engineers developed a wide variety of prototypes. ... The remaining prototypes downsized the usual QWERTY keyboard, but these came with their own set of problems. The buttons were too small and there was no tactile feedback to tell the user whether they had hit or missed the button."
I use odd words. I wish there were an accumulating score where, if I type something, then undo the autocorrect, then NOT correct my typing, that the iPhone would just let me use my odd words.
Also: I've never ended an SMS with \nb\n...quit adding a B to my texts!
There has to be a massive population of usability folks (or maybe not, Apple seems to be big, but the number of times they sweep engineering attention from topic to topic makes me think the ones that DO the stuff are much smaller.) I'd LOVE to be able give feedback to Apple in a way that wasn't just 'throw a suggestion down a hole, we won't reply to you.'
I suspect there are some emergent behaviors that aren't immediately obvious as they continue to 'improve' the keyboard (for the first XX years I had an iPhone, it never added a 'B' to texts) and I suspect there was a push to go from a really stable, really well behaving keyboard to one that used the neural engine, because over the past two three years, the keyboard started to make language based suggestions/corrections rather than letter based suggestions. It's better, but it's still nowhere near as good as it was three or so major iOS versions ago.
> I use odd words. I wish […] the iPhone would just let me use my odd words
You’re describing the exact behaviour of the iPhone keyboard. Give it a try. I have all sorts of weird words that it has learned after I intervene a few times.
Nooo, I’m describing the behavior I _experience_ with that keyboard. The number of times I type something, it messes it up, I back up, and the first option is the word I typed…
And the iPhone typing gets worse - I thought that I was getting worse at typing until helping a relative with their older iPhone (I have an XR). Typing on theirs was a breath of fresh air. I remember it being like that on my previous phones. My wife's iPhone pro max types just like mine. They are actually making it worse...
The two most accurate keyboards i used were the old Fleksy before it was bought and the BlackBerry Virtual Keyboard on Android.
The Blackberry had the most interesting autocomplete / suggestion feature by putting the words on top of each letter. Typing “Example” can be as simple as typing “e” “x” then swiping up on the “a” if it had the word example on it. This allows more room for suggestions.
Wish there were apps like that on IOS
There's quite a few people struggling with the iOS keyboard - someone posted here a few months ago that if you turn off "Predictive" and "Slide to Type" in your keyboard settings - it goes back to behaving more like it used to.
I've found it made a massive difference for me, give it a shot and pass the word along.
What a great read. Can anyone recommend any further reading that delves into this period of iPhone development? I vaguely remember reading a similar post some time ago, although regarding iOS development during that period.
iPhone keyboard started going downhill roughly around when the iPhone 5S came out I think, had one since the first edition and I remember it being so much more awesome around model 4.
My iPhone keyboard is the single most annoying thing about my phone. It hasn’t improved - and potentially is worse - that it was at launch - despite my phone being considerably bigger.
One thing that frustrates me is it doesn’t seem to take into account how precisely I hit a key - if I type really slowly, hitting the centre of each key - that should count for something. It should trust that I put more. But it doesn’t seem to.
It also replaces works with completely random things I’ve never typed ever before. While at the same time missing really obvious corrections, and not taking context into account at all.
The keyboard is probably apple’s current product, after Siri of course.
It’s also aggravating if you commonly type across two languages. I sometimes forget to change to thé fr_CA keyboard and type a French word with thé en_CA keyboard and vice versa. But now that word is permanently locked in its respective dictionary forever. This is thé reason typing THE takes about 3 tries now. (As you can see…)
The only option is to nuke all thé auto correct dictionaries in settings. Eye-twitchingly aggravating.
You must have very good reasons for keeping AutoCorrect on. I’d really like to “hear” them as I’m feeling that I did not get the point and am missing out by turning it off.
And with it off, I can still manually select valid corrections pretty quickly by tapping suggestions.
Not OP but my reason is handling of diacritics on iOS.
Typing “e” is a baseline but typing “é” feels like it’s 1.5s: hold “e” wait for diacritics to appear, choose one, continue.
Not only this breaks flow but is slow as hell. Word with 4 letters with diacritics takes around 5-6 seconds and it feels slow. Autocorrect fixes most of those quite often.
If language is widely supported (English/Spanish/French) it’s easy and there are other methods of typing (swipe, text prediction) but leave that area and typing on iPhone is painful. Use more than 1 language and it’s even more painful. It almost requires setting the stage to be able to type in selected language and is still janky.
I don’t understand why it is like that. If I’m writing in context of website it should assume that I’m using language of that website and allow me to break out if I really need. There should be API that allows third party apps (chat apps, note apps) to set language by context (like recipient in chat, note in note talking etc.) so that I shouldn’t have need to switch languages at all.
As I’m typing this comment autocorrect is “finding” corrections in 3 languages. I feel like I spent more time removing it than typing.
And yet “languabes” is perfectly good and I had to fix it manually. There is context, I used this word more than once and it’s in the most supported language on the platform.
Come on Apple, this is core user experience. This should be better!
Being multilingual is the bane of the Apple input experience. My day-to-day interactions are in English, but I speak with family members in Russian.
Whenever a Russian text comes through, English Siri will be sure to mangle it, like Mojibake of the mid-90s and early-200s.
There is also no way to ask English Siri to play a song with a non-English title. There actually seems to be a cottage industry of Russian songs on Apple Music with literal translations for this reason.
Russian Siri has a pretty good success rate at picking up English speech but I just don’t want Russian Siri for the rest of the day.
Don’t get me started if you have a multi-language household and want to have HomeKit and Siri.
I think the solution would be to have a UI for picking primary, secondary and tertiary languages for voice interactions. Sadly, I think there won’t be any work done because it’s not perceived as a priority, despite Apple’s messaging at inclusivity and diversity.
On Android I'm using the Microsoft SwiftKey keyboard and I feel that they have solved this quite well.
If you use the same layout (for me AZERTY) on the English keyboard and the French one, it will merge them and automatically try to predict the language you're using.
I also type multiple languages, and I make more typing efforts than average, in which case autocorrect really goes nuts. I turned autocorrect off a long time ago. Slower but at least I have control over what I write.
The iPhone autocorrect has got noticeably worse over the last 4 years or so. I’ve been an iPhone user since 2012 and I’m sure it used to be so much easier to type on despite having a significantly smaller screen.
The thing that grinds my gears most is if something happens to be an apple trademark, it will auto capitalise it. For example “power nap” (the name of a feature on macs) becomes “Power Nap”.
I’ve seen a few people saying that the iPhone typing experience has gotten worse lately. I wonder if there’s any analysis to back this up or if Apple are aware?
Well it has. I’d love for an option to go back. I like swipe typing and turning that off seems to be the only way to dial down some of the atrocities the “intelligent” keyboard commits.
I've also had a similar one, typing in French. In my case, it's "c'est chiant" (that's shitty / tough / etc). I usually use it at the beginning of a phrase, so the first C is capitalized.
Now the autocorrect learned that, and offers to fix it if I misspell.
But the funny thing is that it doesn't realize that the capital C is not part of the phrase, even though "c'est", by itself, exists and is often used (meaning "it is"). It typically appears because the auto-capitalize is on, I don't voluntarily type uppercase.
So now, if I want to type that in the middle of a sentence, it will helpfully capitalize the C...
The very first thing I do when I set up a new iPhone is to turn of all auto suggestions, auto spelling, and yes, even the auto capitalization. I’ve become so used to it that I’m almost unable to use other people’s phones…
I recently turned off Slide to Type and enabled the new iOS 16 Haptic feedback for keyboard setting under ‘Sounds and Haptics’. My typing accuracy has improved a lot with these changes.
Why would enabling keyboard haptics improve typing accuracy? I'm just now trying them myself, not having known about the setting before, and it doesn't seem to have any effect other than causing an unpleasant sensation in my fingers as I type.
Wow, thanks for this. I’m loving the haptic feedback. I’m not sure if this is just a placebo effect, but typing feels more precise. Is there anything in “Slide to type” that makes typing less precise?
Yeah the iPhone kb is just plain terrible. And typing accented characters are even worse. Especially because there are several accented characters you don't even use, ever. Wonder why?
The slow animation you can’t disable easily cuts my typing speed in half too. The keyboard experience on Android is so much better it’s almost enough to keep me on that platform alone.
I had to reactivate autocorrect to understand what you meant. I still struggle to understand your pain. You can easily disable individual assist feature in keyboard settings.
I’ve an old iPod touch from 2010 knocking about still. The kids play local music on it and mess about with its camera. It’s not connected to the internet. The battery is not up to much anymore but it works incredibly well still.
I’m shocked by how much better the keyboard experience is on it compared to my iPhone 11 Pro. Typing just feels accurate. I’m constantly mistyping on my iPhone and it always autocorrects the most basic typos to some random capitalised name or bizzare word. It’s infuriating.
You’re not alone. I am utterly baffled and infuriated with typing on my iPhone 12 Pro.
I used to think typing on old iPhones was amazing. But over the past several years there is a noticeable decline. It constantly makes the most bizarre and unhelpful corrections.
Perhaps the reason they keyboard feels worse is the keyboard getting too “smart” already rather than being too dumb. But could also be an uncanny valley style curve, where “a little bit smart” is worse than both dumb and very smart.
And you know what, it was great! It worked incredibly well.
Until Apple decided to switch from this system of 'this word the user is typing kinda matches this word' to some form of AI / ML system. It's just worse.
Is this the reason why my typing skills on iOS have deteriorated over the last few years? I have zero problems on keyboard but I noticed I make sooo many more mistakes on iOS now and almost always due to typing the next letter over. It happened 4 times in writing this comment and it’s infuriating enough that I rarely comment on my phone now.
I feel it started with messing with the space bar but I may just be angry. When searching in the search bar I often search for.things.like.this which is annoying.
The thing I still feel is missing from the iPhone keyboard design is some concept of clear intention from the user: it doesn't just correct near misses, it will also do ridiculous autocorrections where a few characters will somehow autocorrect--and to be clear for people who don't use it (or people who do but don't spend any time configuring it): I do NOT mean the autocomplete nonsense that I always have turned off--into giant words. I clearly didn't try to type a ten character word if I only hit the screen four times, right? It also should calm down if I start actively typing slower and with clear intention: if I'm suddenly typing at one character per second when I'm usually typing at five characters per second, it should probably just trust that I'm looking at the keyboard and tighten the bounds on its attempt to fix my mistakes.
It’s become more powerful, which means it can correct things in ways it previously couldn’t, but it can also screw things up in new ways.
For example, autocorrect used to be limited to words with the same number of chars, and with letters in the same order. Now it can autocorrect to a word with more or fewer chars, and with some transpositions. It’s good this is now possible, since people do make mistakes like this. But it opens the door for new types of errors.
One issue I find to be annoying is that it gives too much weight to the first char in a word when making its guess. I’ve learned that if it gets the first char wrong I should probably go back and correct it, unless it’s a very long word that will become apparent over time.
Agree; this was great at the time, but I feel like they’ve barely updated it since then. At least they finally added a somewhat useable swipe mode, but it’s still far behind what Google has done.
I use the one-handed keyboard[1] sometimes and swipe has always been great on that one. not so much on the main keyboard though.
[1] https://www.iphonelife.com/content/how-to-enable-one-handed-...
I think their swipe input is only a little behind. FWIW I also think that Google's has become worse for me. Maybe because I don't let it use the internet.
The “complicated” blob input method looks remarkably similar to the Japanese 12-key input method https://global.discourse-cdn.com/wanikanicommunity/original/...
(This works because the Japanese ‘hiragana’ syllabary is naturally ordered in 10 groups of 5 characters each.)
I recently built a prototype of this style of keyboard for Android for Latin and Cyrillic alphabets because of how frustrated I am with any form of input that involves dictionaries, guesswork, and tiny buttons. I then used it for half a day. It works, I can type words on it, but at least for as much time as I used it, it was slower for me than Gboard because I had to make a mental effort to remember which gesture from which button types which letter. Typos were almost nonexistent though. Now, I arranged the letters very naively, I simply took the T9 layout and adapted it for these directional swipes. It might work better if I arrange letters by frequency. For example, such that typing the most common letters would always only require a tap, the less common ones would be a swipe down (which is easier for me than other directions), and so on.
Here's a thread about it at the time: https://twitter.com/grishka11/status/1517431598857302019
Wow, this is fascinating. Is the code open source? I'd love to try it out.
It's not a real product, at least not yet. It's not up to my standards, so I haven't published it anywhere. It will be open source if I decide to polish and publish it.
Wow, I came to say the same thing; surprised to see this as the first comment!
As far as I know, this keyboard was pioneered by Apple; I wonder if they were inspired by or reused the “blob” experiment? It’s not necessarily that novel though; seems to a a natural evolution of the Japanese syllabary and the old multi-tap physical “10-key” keyboards.
The physical ones (on flip phones) were also 12-key (0-9, *, and #), so I suppose it was just swiping on the keys that was novel. It definitely does leave one to wonder whether that innovation was inspired by this prototype.
Since we’re on the topic of input methods: I’ve always found the 8pen [1] fascinating. I sadly never had the opportunity to try it for myself, since I was using an iPhone rather than Android at the time (and it’s since been delisted).
[1] https://youtu.be/q3OuCR0EpGo
I can't believe you also mentioned 8pen! I almost made a comment about that as well, but had to run earlier. I was also fascinated by the idea when that launched and really wanted it to be successful. I also had an iPhone, but I convinced my Android friend to buy it and try it out. He gave it a good shot, but it's just so hard to build fluency with, it never really stood a chance. I still wonder if the idea is sound if it were possible for people to learn more fluently in a reasonable timeframe.
There seems to be an alternative in 8vim keyboard (haven't used it though): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=inc.flide.vi8 with the code available at https://github.com/flide/8VIM
Wow, that’s interesting. Looks like the links on their GitHub page are dead, though, but I’ll give it a try anyway.
The alphabet also works really well in about 10 groups. T9 dictionary of the dumbphone era worked really well and would have 3-4 letters assigned to a number.
T9 still works pretty well. Samsung phones have it available as an alternative layout and it's shockingly accurate.
If you like T9, you might enjoy MessagEase. It's IMO just a natural improvement on the concept translated to touchscreens.
It's also similar to MessagEase, which is what I use.
and I just typed Japanese words romanized. The 12-key system is just slow to use anyway
The one thing that still annoys me about the iPhone keyboard that I think Android does better is correcting mistakes. Apple expects you to correct your mistake before you finish a word by selecting the right suggestion. On Android typing backspace after a word undoes the suggestion so you can quickly correct a wrong suggestion. Instead of having to erase the whole word and trying again.
I have been using iPhones for almost a decade. It still can’t predict my first name. It will suggest everything else but not my name. Even a typo word that, I chose not to use, I can’t make iOS un-remember for the life of me. It suggests words that I used maybe 3-4 times few years ago. But not the name that’s right there as part of my bloody Apple ID, my name in my contact book. Everywhere!
Edit: I just installed Gboard and tried. My full name was the first thing it predicted after few characters. No Google login, no full access.
I wish there was a way to remove that Google logo from GBoard and if only iOS allowed disabling network calls for individual apps (which is bothersome on iOS).
This is partially true.
If you misspell a word, it will auto correct. If you press backspace, the autocorrected word will still be there, but you can also tap to choose what you actually typed or a different suggestion.
And if you backspace again, autocorrect will temporarily disable itself so you can fix minor typos.
Thx for this hint. I just tried this but it shows that suggestion at the cursor. Not above the keyboard. So it’s not as fast or useful :(
iPhone keyboard has had a bug since its inception that I'm surprised they never fixed. If you type "hippopotamus hippopotamus hippopotamus hippopotamus hippopotamus hippopotamus" (or copy paste it), then on the last letter, hold backspace until there are only 3 hippopotamuses left, you will almost assuredly fail and delete too much. This is because, midway through deleting the second hippopotamus, iPhone switches to word deletion mode (which is fine), and first thing it does is "delete the remainder of the second hippopotamus" (still fine) and then with the same key repeat delay, delete the third hippopotamus (this is where you need to let go of the backspace key), and then the forth.
The effective deletion speed goes from "5 letters per second" to "5 words per second" without any chance for the meager human on the other end to adjust their expectations.
I have a personal Android phone and a work iPhone. They both have their pros and cons. But when it comes to keyboards, the iPhone typing experience is far worse than Android for me.
It’s so bad. I switched from Pixel to iPhone and the main gripe I have is the keyboard. It’s the worst autocorrect experience ever. It constantly gets words wrong. The word “and” is constantly replaced with Abe, abs, or something else. Funny enough, just now when I was trying to type those words, it actually replaced them with “and”! Seriously, the developers of this keyboard soils be ashamed.
With both French and English enabled, it sometimes randomly "corrects" the English word "the" to the French word "thé" (meaning "tea" in English), despite every other word so far being English and despite the fact it would make no grammatical sense.
Most infuriating of all though is when it lets you think you've got through the gauntlet of perfectly valid words being replaced with nonsensical ones, only for it to swap out the last _two words_ you've typed!
I've had that replacement (the -> thé) and have never even enabled or used a French language keyboard on my device. At this point I disable autocomplete and autocorrect completely, on macOS and iOS.
I switched from Pixel to iPhone and lasted a week, the keyboard, among many things - was a real deal breaker. MS SwiftKey is a notch better than the rest (even GBoard) on iPhones, but nothing holds a candle to just typing on a stock Pixel's keyboard.
Swiftkey doesn't enable swiping unless you give it full access which is worse than gboard.
> Seriously, the developers of this keyboard soils be ashamed. [emphasis added]
It must have autocorrected your attempt to write "should"?!
Yep. Didn’t even notice.
Kocienda has a twitter thread on this matter (modern iPhone keyboard): https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1565341723860971520
It used to be a lot better. Around iOS 13 (I think?) they moved from a heuristics-based model to a machine learning-based model and it's never been the same since. It's just frustrating now.
And it used to be the other way around. Infuriating.
I love these types of stories because they show that, no matter how much people protest, few designs which make their way to the public are the "only obvious way to do it". They're only obvious after you see them, and only if they work well.
I really miss physical keyboards on phones. The last pre-iPhone I had was some Samsung slider phone -- intensity maybe? Anyway it was cheap and not so impressive but it blew the iPhone typing experience out of the water.
Some of us still use them, on the Android side there have been at least a couple ok to decent options.
A weird UI design bug is, If you type different languages on the phone you have different keyboard layouts for each language. The key to switch language has swapped location with the shift key for the iPad OS compared to iOS. So I am always hitting the wrong key when switching device. Such a weird thing for them not to fix.
I’m not 100% sure what you mean and am wondering wether setting the keyboard layouts to QWERTY in all languages is a solution for you. That’s the way I handle three different languages on iOS but of course long presses are required then to get at characters with diacritics.
Thanks. It is qwerty in both.
Sounds like Ctrl and Fn keys between my Thinkpad and every other laptop in my house.
The initial version with smart-grouped keys reminds me of the MacBook Wheel[0].
[0] https://youtu.be/9BnLbv6QYcA
I’ve never seen anyone detail it, but from usage it seems clear that behind the graphical presentation of the keyboard there are touch zones for each key that are bigger or smaller than the actual key and probably grow and shrink depending on the previous letter(s) typed.
Maybe newer versions don’t do it (or as much) but I actually thought the direction of the article was that he would hide the fact that 2-3 letters were on the same key.
The iPhone keyboard was definitely better than any other full qwerty smartphone keyboard of its time back then, but it felt so wrong to throw out the Baby with the Bath water. A whole generation had learned the T9 solution (not talking about the older multi tap). more people than ever had actually switched to something else than qwerty, and loved it. I think there is still plenty of great solutions to discover - I've explored some of them after building Type Nine (T9 for iPhone)[1], and I'm so sad time hasn't allowed me to explore further, but try to check out the option at the bottom of my post "A better iPhone typing experience" here [2]
[1]: https://typenineapp.com [2]: https://medium.com/porsager/a-better-iphone-typing-experienc...
I grew up with T9 feature phones and even though I am the typical tweaker (who once tried to learn Dvorak as well) I never managed to get good at typing with those phones. But that’s just an anecdotal view point :)
BlackBerry keyboards were miles ahead when the iPhone first came out.
The hardest challenge is knowing how much to integrate the correction.
You can do some really magical things by laying on hard to the auto correct but it comes subtly at the cost of making some rare words really hard to type.
Recent HN discussion on how bad the current iPhone keyboard is:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33256168
Forget listening to feedback from consumers. How about all the Apple employees who use iPhones? I don’t understand why most of them haven’t spammed Tim Cook about how awful the iPhone keyboard prediction/autocorrect is. Is Tim Cook not doing his job as a CEO by refusing to properly fund and focus on AI and crippling the iPhone in the process?
honestly I think because they're all forced to live on the devices they develop they simply haven't had a need to be exposed to competitors and assume no one else has solved the problem to a high degree of satisfaction. When I worked there folks thought I was crazy for wanting to keep my android device around even when I just used it for email and browsing. Android keyboard was a magically intelligent thing with all sorts of forward and backward typo clustering and tries all working in concert in this very smooth operation that could get itself out of a deep typo run and come out very correct. The android keyboard seemed to be aware of key proximity in 2D space on the keyboard, dictionary words, words I frequently typed, words I frequently blunder on, words that pair frequently with each other, etc etc. The sheer number of dimensions the android keyboard considers is impressive, iOS keyboard feels like a simpleton by comparison.
You don’t understand because you’re blowing this way out of proportion. Most people can use the keyboard just fine with no problems at all and it keeps improving. Nobody is ‘crippling’ anything and nothing is ‘awful’.
It’s okay, it’s good enough, it’s much better than what preceded it, it looks like magic and it’s here, in a device you can hold in your hand.
> Kocienda’s first prototype was a ‘blob’ keyboard... [snip]… It was terrible
No it wasn’t! Or rather, the idea wasn’t. CooTek made the TouchPal keyboard for Windows Mobile with the same idea (ish), slide left for Q slide right for W slide down for a symbol (and slide left and up for a capital letter)
https://www.engadget.com/2007-10-12-cooteks-touchpal-brings-...
It was fantastic!
Edit: and this was on crappy 2.8” resistive touch screens too
I always wondered why interfaces are terrible, so so terrible and why frontend designers are underpaid. And somehow good innovations like this falls to the bottom every time.
Also, the dominant input method for phones used in Japan uses this concept with the old-school numpad layout (substituting repeated presses with flicks)
Yeah it’s the flick that made it work (and fast), so I’m not surprised others have found similar solutions.
I wish this keyboard existed on modern phones today. TouchPal does but it’s just some emoji keyboard now as far as I can tell.
A modern dictionary/autocorrect with the “T+” style key level swipe would be amazing.
I kind of want to try and build it now!
The software apple uses internally to flash igadgets is still called PurpleRestore...
Reading through the below blurb (and the rest of the article), I couldn't help but wonder how this would've panned out in today's world with UX professionals and processes.
"Nobody on the 15-engineer team quite knew what the ideal software keyboard would look like. Over the next few weeks, the engineers developed a wide variety of prototypes. ... The remaining prototypes downsized the usual QWERTY keyboard, but these came with their own set of problems. The buttons were too small and there was no tactile feedback to tell the user whether they had hit or missed the button."
In the article they do mention that the design team was involved, so I’m not sure it’s any different really.
Many companies of this size have product ideation come from both ends of the aisle and then tighten things up as they approach market.
> this would've panned out in today's world with UX professionals and processes.
It would be completely unusable. Because modern-day "professionals" optimize for nice screenshots on Dribbble, not for UX
I use odd words. I wish there were an accumulating score where, if I type something, then undo the autocorrect, then NOT correct my typing, that the iPhone would just let me use my odd words.
Also: I've never ended an SMS with \nb\n...quit adding a B to my texts!
There has to be a massive population of usability folks (or maybe not, Apple seems to be big, but the number of times they sweep engineering attention from topic to topic makes me think the ones that DO the stuff are much smaller.) I'd LOVE to be able give feedback to Apple in a way that wasn't just 'throw a suggestion down a hole, we won't reply to you.'
I suspect there are some emergent behaviors that aren't immediately obvious as they continue to 'improve' the keyboard (for the first XX years I had an iPhone, it never added a 'B' to texts) and I suspect there was a push to go from a really stable, really well behaving keyboard to one that used the neural engine, because over the past two three years, the keyboard started to make language based suggestions/corrections rather than letter based suggestions. It's better, but it's still nowhere near as good as it was three or so major iOS versions ago.
Random Ls throughout and Bs at the end of my messages in the last year or two have been driving me insane! Glad to know I'm not the only one.
> I use odd words. I wish […] the iPhone would just let me use my odd words
You’re describing the exact behaviour of the iPhone keyboard. Give it a try. I have all sorts of weird words that it has learned after I intervene a few times.
Nooo, I’m describing the behavior I _experience_ with that keyboard. The number of times I type something, it messes it up, I back up, and the first option is the word I typed…
The iOS auto correct is skewed toward verbal spoken errors not finger typos (as with t9). Apple would prefer users to dictate, for obvious reasons.
And the iPhone typing gets worse - I thought that I was getting worse at typing until helping a relative with their older iPhone (I have an XR). Typing on theirs was a breath of fresh air. I remember it being like that on my previous phones. My wife's iPhone pro max types just like mine. They are actually making it worse...
Yes, they have broken it with some kind of machine learning bullshit.
The two most accurate keyboards i used were the old Fleksy before it was bought and the BlackBerry Virtual Keyboard on Android. The Blackberry had the most interesting autocomplete / suggestion feature by putting the words on top of each letter. Typing “Example” can be as simple as typing “e” “x” then swiping up on the “a” if it had the word example on it. This allows more room for suggestions. Wish there were apps like that on IOS
There's quite a few people struggling with the iOS keyboard - someone posted here a few months ago that if you turn off "Predictive" and "Slide to Type" in your keyboard settings - it goes back to behaving more like it used to.
I've found it made a massive difference for me, give it a shot and pass the word along.
What a great read. Can anyone recommend any further reading that delves into this period of iPhone development? I vaguely remember reading a similar post some time ago, although regarding iOS development during that period.
Completely off topic; why can this article not be saved to my Instapaper queue?
The amount of times it corrects slight mistypings of “everything” to “berthing” makes me want to dock my rage directly to their spaceship campus.
As a former windows phone user, there is nothing I hate more than the keyboard in iPhone.
But… I have found it very accurate in “swype” mode.
iPhone keyboard started going downhill roughly around when the iPhone 5S came out I think, had one since the first edition and I remember it being so much more awesome around model 4.
iOS allows third party keyboards to be installed. Are none better?
Installing software that functionally doubles as a keystroke logger has always sketched me out enough to never try.
This is ignorant of how keyboard apps work on iOS. By default, they do not get internet or even network access, unless you explicitly permit it.
Can you prove that?
If you don't trust Apple to enforce that, can you even prove that Apple won't act as a key logger too?
If you are that suspicious of Apple you should not be using iOS at all.
The Talk Show interview
https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2022/02/28/ep-339
My iPhone keyboard is the single most annoying thing about my phone. It hasn’t improved - and potentially is worse - that it was at launch - despite my phone being considerably bigger.
One thing that frustrates me is it doesn’t seem to take into account how precisely I hit a key - if I type really slowly, hitting the centre of each key - that should count for something. It should trust that I put more. But it doesn’t seem to.
It also replaces works with completely random things I’ve never typed ever before. While at the same time missing really obvious corrections, and not taking context into account at all.
The keyboard is probably apple’s current product, after Siri of course.
It’s also aggravating if you commonly type across two languages. I sometimes forget to change to thé fr_CA keyboard and type a French word with thé en_CA keyboard and vice versa. But now that word is permanently locked in its respective dictionary forever. This is thé reason typing THE takes about 3 tries now. (As you can see…)
The only option is to nuke all thé auto correct dictionaries in settings. Eye-twitchingly aggravating.
You must have very good reasons for keeping AutoCorrect on. I’d really like to “hear” them as I’m feeling that I did not get the point and am missing out by turning it off.
And with it off, I can still manually select valid corrections pretty quickly by tapping suggestions.
Not OP but my reason is handling of diacritics on iOS.
Typing “e” is a baseline but typing “é” feels like it’s 1.5s: hold “e” wait for diacritics to appear, choose one, continue.
Not only this breaks flow but is slow as hell. Word with 4 letters with diacritics takes around 5-6 seconds and it feels slow. Autocorrect fixes most of those quite often.
If language is widely supported (English/Spanish/French) it’s easy and there are other methods of typing (swipe, text prediction) but leave that area and typing on iPhone is painful. Use more than 1 language and it’s even more painful. It almost requires setting the stage to be able to type in selected language and is still janky.
I don’t understand why it is like that. If I’m writing in context of website it should assume that I’m using language of that website and allow me to break out if I really need. There should be API that allows third party apps (chat apps, note apps) to set language by context (like recipient in chat, note in note talking etc.) so that I shouldn’t have need to switch languages at all.
As I’m typing this comment autocorrect is “finding” corrections in 3 languages. I feel like I spent more time removing it than typing.
And yet “languabes” is perfectly good and I had to fix it manually. There is context, I used this word more than once and it’s in the most supported language on the platform.
Come on Apple, this is core user experience. This should be better!
Being multilingual is the bane of the Apple input experience. My day-to-day interactions are in English, but I speak with family members in Russian.
Whenever a Russian text comes through, English Siri will be sure to mangle it, like Mojibake of the mid-90s and early-200s.
There is also no way to ask English Siri to play a song with a non-English title. There actually seems to be a cottage industry of Russian songs on Apple Music with literal translations for this reason.
Russian Siri has a pretty good success rate at picking up English speech but I just don’t want Russian Siri for the rest of the day.
Don’t get me started if you have a multi-language household and want to have HomeKit and Siri.
I think the solution would be to have a UI for picking primary, secondary and tertiary languages for voice interactions. Sadly, I think there won’t be any work done because it’s not perceived as a priority, despite Apple’s messaging at inclusivity and diversity.
Your post is beautiful. It conveys the frustration so well. It would be funny if it wasn't for that.
On Android I'm using the Microsoft SwiftKey keyboard and I feel that they have solved this quite well.
If you use the same layout (for me AZERTY) on the English keyboard and the French one, it will merge them and automatically try to predict the language you're using.
I also type multiple languages, and I make more typing efforts than average, in which case autocorrect really goes nuts. I turned autocorrect off a long time ago. Slower but at least I have control over what I write.
The iPhone autocorrect has got noticeably worse over the last 4 years or so. I’ve been an iPhone user since 2012 and I’m sure it used to be so much easier to type on despite having a significantly smaller screen.
The thing that grinds my gears most is if something happens to be an apple trademark, it will auto capitalise it. For example “power nap” (the name of a feature on macs) becomes “Power Nap”.
I’ve seen a few people saying that the iPhone typing experience has gotten worse lately. I wonder if there’s any analysis to back this up or if Apple are aware?
Well it has. I’d love for an option to go back. I like swipe typing and turning that off seems to be the only way to dial down some of the atrocities the “intelligent” keyboard commits.
https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1565341723860971520
And the childish profanity filter. God beware, someone wants to type "shit". We can’t suggest this word and maybe autocorrect it to something else.
I've also had a similar one, typing in French. In my case, it's "c'est chiant" (that's shitty / tough / etc). I usually use it at the beginning of a phrase, so the first C is capitalized.
Now the autocorrect learned that, and offers to fix it if I misspell.
But the funny thing is that it doesn't realize that the capital C is not part of the phrase, even though "c'est", by itself, exists and is often used (meaning "it is"). It typically appears because the auto-capitalize is on, I don't voluntarily type uppercase.
So now, if I want to type that in the middle of a sentence, it will helpfully capitalize the C...
I think they should stop taking input from the keyboard literally, and process it in a similar way to swipe typing which is usually pretty accurate.
Heh, that’s what they did! Sort of.
Turning off “Slide To Type” and “Predictive” returns a normal ios 5 keyboard where you don’t make five typos per word.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33257455
The very first thing I do when I set up a new iPhone is to turn of all auto suggestions, auto spelling, and yes, even the auto capitalization. I’ve become so used to it that I’m almost unable to use other people’s phones…
I recently turned off Slide to Type and enabled the new iOS 16 Haptic feedback for keyboard setting under ‘Sounds and Haptics’. My typing accuracy has improved a lot with these changes.
Why would enabling keyboard haptics improve typing accuracy? I'm just now trying them myself, not having known about the setting before, and it doesn't seem to have any effect other than causing an unpleasant sensation in my fingers as I type.
I've always turned it off on account of desiring battery over sensation feedback.
You are likely extending a battery life by about a minute per day by saving like this.
Interesting. How’d you come to that conclusion?
"Haptic technologies consume minimal power in smartphones" [0]
[0]: https://www.immersion.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/haptic-...
Aha. That would be cool to see an independent reproduction of those experiments. Good stuff.
Wow, thanks for this. I’m loving the haptic feedback. I’m not sure if this is just a placebo effect, but typing feels more precise. Is there anything in “Slide to type” that makes typing less precise?
Yeah the iPhone kb is just plain terrible. And typing accented characters are even worse. Especially because there are several accented characters you don't even use, ever. Wonder why?
The slow animation you can’t disable easily cuts my typing speed in half too. The keyboard experience on Android is so much better it’s almost enough to keep me on that platform alone.
Seriously what the hell are you talking about? Beside you can disable almost all animations if needed through accessibility features.
Yeah you can disable all animations system wide but not selectively just the dumb autocorrect animations.
I had to reactivate autocorrect to understand what you meant. I still struggle to understand your pain. You can easily disable individual assist feature in keyboard settings.
I’ve an old iPod touch from 2010 knocking about still. The kids play local music on it and mess about with its camera. It’s not connected to the internet. The battery is not up to much anymore but it works incredibly well still.
I’m shocked by how much better the keyboard experience is on it compared to my iPhone 11 Pro. Typing just feels accurate. I’m constantly mistyping on my iPhone and it always autocorrects the most basic typos to some random capitalised name or bizzare word. It’s infuriating.
You’re not alone. I am utterly baffled and infuriated with typing on my iPhone 12 Pro.
I used to think typing on old iPhones was amazing. But over the past several years there is a noticeable decline. It constantly makes the most bizarre and unhelpful corrections.
The situation should improve, now that ChatGPT has been released.
It's only a matter of time until it gets integrated with the keyboard.
Perhaps the reason they keyboard feels worse is the keyboard getting too “smart” already rather than being too dumb. But could also be an uncanny valley style curve, where “a little bit smart” is worse than both dumb and very smart.
Can you not install alternative keyboard apps on iPhones?
Yes. Search T9.
Yes you can
But they’re glitchy and sometimes slow to open (I presume because they’re trying to access the network)
I was glad to read this, I feel the same. Deep down I’ve been dreading that the cause is just me getting old…
I'm glad I'm not alone in that perception
And you know what, it was great! It worked incredibly well.
Until Apple decided to switch from this system of 'this word the user is typing kinda matches this word' to some form of AI / ML system. It's just worse.
https://venturebeat.com/business/apple-debuts-core-ml-3-with...
Is this the reason why my typing skills on iOS have deteriorated over the last few years? I have zero problems on keyboard but I noticed I make sooo many more mistakes on iOS now and almost always due to typing the next letter over. It happened 4 times in writing this comment and it’s infuriating enough that I rarely comment on my phone now.
They did something at some point that makes it feel like I’m typing on a keyboard that is offset about five pixels down and the left.
Fbaz jz fdhs. Sorry, I mean, that is true. I've just assumed that my thumbs have deformed as I've grown older.
Maybe an adaption for lefties and/or taller phones?
I am a lefty and always used the largest phones.
I feel it started with messing with the space bar but I may just be angry. When searching in the search bar I often search for.things.like.this which is annoying.
I’ve watched it change correctly spelled intentionally used words to other words. Infuriating.
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