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Ask HN: Why has typing on a phone not improved in ~20 years?

15 points by mvkel ↗ HN
Typing on an iPhone today is just as error-prone as it was when the phone launched in 2007.

Next token predictors have largely solved this for day-to-day use.

Swipe + a more modern prediction model would mean we'd be able to type one-handed without looking at the screen at all, and have perfect accuracy.

We have the tech today. For whatever reason, nobody is using it. Why?

15 comments

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k310
Do you want neuralink? I really don't like the invasive aspect of it.

I turned off all assists to typing on this iPhone. They kept giving me maddening substitites for my words.

Going to fire up the computer now. The one with the giant lighted keyboard. And the FORWARD DELETE KEY, the single greatest efficiency booster since the invention of the "vi" editor. The "dot" command alone has saved years of work (slight hyperbole there)

And no AI. EVER. I speak for myself. Otherwise no point in living.

Note to Apple: why can't I get a lighted keyboard from you for any amount of money, unless I buy a laptop, where it drains battery, rather than the power grid?

JohnFen
I just want physical keyboards back.
kristianp
This. Much of my typing speed and accuracy comes from feeling the positions of the keys. I can't do that on a touchscreen phone. They are so error prone and frustrating. Autocorrect is almost useless.
Moomoomoo309
One just came out. Only one on the market I know of. It's called the Unihertz Titan 2, and I'm typing this comment on one. It's got a blackberry style keyboard and runs pretty close to stock android. I recommend swapping their default keyboard out with swiftkey, though the default one isn't terrible - swiftkey just gives me a few conveniences like emoji suggestions. It has play services, so it works.
runjake
iOS already has swipe entry by default. I use it for most of my text entry. It is wonderful.

For me, typing on an iPhone worked well until iOS 26. Now I get jumbled AutoCorrect which acts like it's LLM-driven.

When I turn off Apple Intelligence on iOS 26, I get the old, properly-functioning AutoCorrect back. So that's a potential workaround.

hulitu
> Swipe + a more modern prediction model would mean we'd be able to type one-handed without looking at the screen at all, and have perfect accuracy.

Dream on. The first thing i do is disable prediction so the keyboard sucks less. Swipe makes no sense.

impendia
> type one-handed without looking at the screen at all, and have perfect accuracy.

A computer that can predict what I'm going to write next with perfect accuracy? This is the stuff of dystopian science fiction.

Indeed, along these lines I recommend the movie Minority Report, which shows a society that gained the ability to predict crimes before they happened, and therefore to arrest criminals in advance.

mvkel
I’m tpng ths wth autocrct nd y knw wht th wrds r wtht m hvng t wrt thm ot. Bt autocrct dsnt bcs it scks. Ths s th prt tht cld b bttr. W hv th tchnlgy.
al_borland
I think it’s noticeably worse than in 2007. The update that added a row above the keyboard to predict the next word is when I noticed it be worse, and several updates have made it worse still.
aristofun
Touch screen was and will always be a compromise, a trade off.

Many people forget about it today.

It will always suck in one way or another.

Best UI mankind came up as of today is still buttons and knobs. But it’s not always feasible.

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codegeek
I miss my blackberry when it comes to typing.