Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?
In the last year or so I feel that typing using the touch keyboard has become unbearable. I constantly make typos, and even with auto correction turned on, the corrections don't usually make sense and I am forced to delete and retype.
I believe that the major change had something to do with the text selection and cursor placement change that was made somewhere between iOS 14 and 15 (or 13 -14, or whatever, who can remember).
Nothing feels intuitive anymore: trying to select a word rarely works, and selection ends up being snapped on to unrelated stuff. There are at least three different types of displays falling under the category of "suggestions": auto-complete (three words above keyboard), spelling suggestions (red wiggly line+tooltip), and another kind of tooltip that sometimes appears but I still haven't figured out.
And above all, cursor scrolling using either the spacebar trick or a hard press on screen is a complete mess and usually snaps to some random part of the text, and it is apparently variable and depends on the UI context (behaves differently within URL bars vs. multiline text).
I find myself more and more often preferring not to use the phone and waiting to get to an actual computer with a keyboard to type anything beyond a few words.
Am I just getting older/going through some cognitive decline or is the mobile typing experience actually getting worse?
421 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 328 ms ] threaduse glide typing or install gboard
Thanks for putting words to it and posting it.
Apple's knockoff is nowhere near as good, and routinely "forgets" custom words including curses. My text language is often not PG-rated, let alone G-rated.
I still remember - November 2013, I was interviewing for some jobs in Boulder CO, and was invited to dinner by a tech entrepreneur. I showed him how good Swype was. Back then I had a tiny-weenie Xperia (S, or SL or U??). I remember clearly how blown away he was. And I remember clearly how enjoyable it was to actually be able to swype one handed. I did not even ever had a case protector for this phone, and managed to never break it because I would not drop it!
I can't remember which of the phones I had after that with which I was so sad when i realized Swype had disappeared when I could not reinstall it :(I had tried Swift key, the Stock google, and I think another one, but none never came close to Swype learning algorithm :(
One of the key reasons i still hold on to my 8 Plus... but i suppose iOS 16 will probably the last release they'll support on it so i better get used to the thought my next phone won't have it :(
Personally, I still use the BlackBerry keyboard on my Samsung phone because it has features that no other keyboard has. Namely:
- Word predictions are on the keys themselves, and you select them by "throwing" them onto the page (see [screenshot 1]). This means there can be 6+ predictions on screen at any time, and since they're literally on the key you're about to press anyway it is so quick to just select the prediction instead of typing it out fully. On other keyboards the predictions are above the keyboard and using them means taking your eyes away from what you're typing.
- Autocorrections are shown on the space key before you actually hit it, and if you don't want the autocorrection you can swipe up on the space key to select what you actually typed (see [screenshot 2]).
- You can backspace a word with a left swipe across the keyboard. This is HUGE. When backspacing is this easy, when you make a mistake it's almost always faster to delete the entire word and retype it again from the beginning than it is to move the cursor. You can also backspace multiple words at a time by swiping with multiple fingers (great for editing URLs).
- Swiping down across the keyboard cycles through the various symbol layers (you can create a custom layer), and selecting a symbol automatically moves back to the letter layer (you can sticky the symbol layer by opening it normally with the ?123 key).
- The ?123 also acts as a Control key, so you can use common keyboard shortcuts like cut, copy, paste, undo, and select all.
[screenshot 1] https://ibb.co/jVTPg7Q
[screenshot 2] https://ibb.co/p1PTM1S
On non-BlackBerry Android phones the BB keyboard was never officially available, but someone made a cracked version that still works great even though it hasn't been updated in years. But you have to dig around to find the APKs ever since the website got taken down.
• 1. Turning ON haptics in the keyboard section
• 2. Turn OFF the “suggestions”
• 3. Teach the autocorrect what I want to type. (Correct the same word a few times and you will trigger machine learning)
• 4. Turn keyboard sound OFF
• 5. Grab the cursor directly, don’t use the “spacebar trick” unless you’re going to move to the front or end of an input box (treat it like PGUP/PGDWN)
For instance I fed so much French vocabulary to autocorrect, at this point it's convenient. But some other person in this thread was reporting failing to have autocorrect memorise his/her foreign name.
https://technicallychallenged.substack.com/p/my-favorite-iph...
Since I discovered Apple’s slide-to-type[0], I rarely have to key the letters, since the algo guesses more accurately than when I actually use individual keystrokes.
Also, with stt, the delete erases the whole word, so corrections are faster, too.
[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/how-to-use-the-iphones-new-...
the URL/address bar on mobile is a perfect case in point. or any single-line text box for that matter. as it is, this is a useless widget because of scrolling and text selection. we need a shift of paradigm here.
the text box is not working on mobile.
Doesn’t Tim Cook ever use cursor scrolling? It’s damned near useless. I usually wind up just backspacing from the end to get to where I need to edit.
Reading a lot of the complaints here, they really need to create some sort of onboarding for the keyboard and make it more transparent what the switches do in the settings menu.
I was pretty pissed when they launched slide to type, until I played with these and found that turning predictive off feels waaay better. It took me a little bit to get used to, but I’m much happier now and can type multiple words with out looking at the keyboard. My settings:
Auto Capitalization: On
*Auto-Correction: Off
Check Spelling: On
Enable Caps Lock: On
*Predictive: Off
Smart Punctuation: On[1]
*Slide to Type: Off
Character Preview: On
“.” Shortcut: On
Some of these are personal preference, but the ones I put with a star greatly effect the way the keyboard types. I’ve been using iPhones since 2011, so I’m used to the last two for example, but if you don’t use slide to type it screws with the touch targets big time, and the Predictive setting is the one most people here are frustrated with.
That said, I think the keyboard was better about 10 years ago when it had some slight prediction baked in.
[1] I think smart punctuation only really applies in english to "" -> “”, I think it looks nicer, but can be a nightmare if you are trying to type a sting literal on the phone and don’t realize it’s a thing, definitely something to be aware of, lol.
Getting into the weeds here a bit but you can create a Text Replacement so that “i” gets expanded to “I”. That said, I don’t use it, when I first changed it took me a few painful weeks to get used to a new dumber keyboard, but in the end it is just so much less frustrating not using a “smart” input device. I can stand making a typo, I mean I even make them on a proper keyboard! But I am absolutely infuriated by having my correct word get replaced with the wrong one.
now it's competing with droid, and most droid devices are lower-end so whatever the experience on flagship devices, it's going to be much worse on average
not what you asked but:
I recently booted an android 10 pixel 1, 5ish years old, 3 OS versions behind current, and keyboard input was starkly better than my normal droid 12 device (both tap keyboard + swipe keyboard)
This sounds a lot like Android, so welcome to the party.
On the other hand, swipe typing has been the bomb for over a decade. Since it's now available on iOS, give it a chance. Maybe you'll find it makes up for the iPhone's recent declines.
As for phone keyboards, I've never been great with them but typing on a glass screen is a bundle of compromises anyway, and I haven't noticed them any worse lately. I remember reading that the touch spots for the keys are actually dynamically changing under your fingers as you type based on context, so I wouldn't be surprised if something changed and bit you though.
But my 2016 Iphone SE "learned" french. I text in French and English on a 40/60 split. Auto-correct will feed me results in both language. I assumed that every time I was correcting autocorrect to be able to type a french words, that was going to a small DB somewhere on the phone.
It's not the case? Like.. then where are those french autocorrected words coming from?
And to your original point : why the hell is not name not memorized by now?
Or why proper nouns from Contacts aren't included in the typing dictionary.