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@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...

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.

Also why did they get rid of select all? Is there any excuse for that?

Select all always appears if you have no text selected and never appears if you have some text selected. Insane UI decision by apple but that's how it is.

Which means you can't select all on text which isn't editable - insane!

I have a JavaScript share sheet shortcut that forces a select all on any page. Really useful.

Something like this:

var result = [];

body = document.body;

sel = window.getSelection(); range = document.createRange(); range.selectNodeContents(body); sel.removeAllRanges(); sel.addRange(range);

selString = sel.toString();

// Call completion to finish completion(selString);

It honestly doesn't surprise me. Apple is not some bastion of good design. They are mediocre at best, always have been.

It was pretty hilarious to me that for so many years the keyboard on iOS only had CAPITAL letters. No matter the state of the shift key, the letters on the keyboard just stayed the same. After many years they finally figured it out, but it's one example of many about how Apple just doesn't have the great UX people claim they do.

I have some kind of mental block that prevents me from figuring out the state of touchscreen controls.

"Is that a Play button because it's currently playing, or because it is paused/stopped, and will play when I tap it?"

"Is Bluetooth on or off? That depends if Dark Mode on?"

I end up tapping the control 3 times or so. The latter dilemma could sometimes be worked out by surveying the state of every surrounding control, but tunnel vision and impatience keep winning.

Apple has fantastic UX people. Also really bad ones. It’s a mistake to think a company that size is homogenuous.

In general, IMO they are better than most companies but far from perfect. Maybe 80th percentile. I’m hard pressed to think of a top 10 tech company that’s better. Lots of smaller companies are.

I actually prefer the all caps keyboard and switch it on on iOS. It looks like a physical keyboard and the constant flicking between upper/lowercase is distracting and annoying

As bfinn once said on IRC, as he wrote in caps:

<BFINN/#debian> ALL BIG LETTER ON KEYBOARD HERE!!

<CosmicRay/#debian> haha

<BFINN/#debian> TO NO LITTLE LETTER!

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.misc/c/7AdXvE7KQz...

There are dozens of us!

Well good for you, I guess?

This was not poor design, but a decision to restrict the user from copy pasting entire articles and the like. Most unfair and this iPhone 3G to iPhone 17 Pro user is seriously considering ditching them over select all

Yeah that doesn’t surprise me. You can’t copy magnet links either.

where did you hear this?

I’m reading between the lines

they are not bastion of good design. they are the bastion of intentional opinionated design. Meaning they don't listen to feedback. ("we don't have focus groups" - Steve Jobs).

Looking at every UI/UX implementation around be and on my devices... I'm not sure anyone does anymore. Not in a haha way, I actually see so many trivial issues all around, I don't understand how they passed any contact with testing and user feedback.

Not always, if we go back to the 1980s. But in very modern times, they've lost all the learnings from back then.

old school apple design stubborness: I remember they insisted on putting the grooves on the "D" and "K" keys instead of the "F" and "J" keys. So you had to find home base on the keyboard with your middle fingers on an apple rather than index fingers like on everything else. No, that place has always been a design shop run amok.

It made sense because the numeric keypad had the dot on the 5. Early IBM keyboards (Model F) didn't have home markers, IIRC. But the PC world standardized on F and J, and eventually everyone else, too.

echo "It made sense because the numeric keypad had the dot on the 5." | sed 's/had/has/'

lol, no, they sucked even more in the 1980s.

Did you ever notice that "About this software" is the first thing on the first menu of every application? Is that because people have to know what version of the software they are using every time they start it? It's still like that today, and it's very very stupid. Other OSs get it right and put the version information on the last menu, where it doesn't clutter up the most prominent area in the most used menus.

Finder was crap in the 1980s. Still is crap, but it used to be crap too.

The window system in the 80s and 90s was also crap. Could not resize a window from any side or corner of the window except the lower right. Windows has had resizing from any edge or corner since forever.

Apple "design" is just not as good as people seem to think it is.

They've also had plenty of weird and unloved hardware designs... the infamous trash can, the clamshell laptop, the weird anniversary macs, a mouse with a charging port on the bottom so that you can't use the mouse while it's charging, and the list goes on and on and on.

The whole window management system is an exercise in contrarianism. They basically chose to do things in the opposite manner of their competitor and mostly against what intuition would dictate for the sole reason of being different.

macOS is very frustrating to use without utility apps that provide the necessary improvements. But they are never as well integrated, cost money or are a hassle to set up.

Apple just wins because they make good-looking, well-built hardware, and sometimes they win on some performance metrics (in the Apple Silicon era, it's mostly about efficiency and single-core speed, which is not as useful as some like to believe).

Apple only "wins" by charging exorbitant prices that idiots are willing to pay to have a digital status symbol. What they have not "won" is market share. They have always been an "also-ran" in market share.

Android (70%) beats iOS (30%). Windows (68%) beats MacOS (13%).

As someone who has switched from Windows to Apple recently, my God the Finder is terrible. I can't understand how people aren't flipping tables over how bad it is.

Finder has to be used with the Miller columns; otherwise, it doesn't make sense.

But since the switch to the new filesystem, it's kinda slow and annoying.

They have built some proprietary stuff around their filesystem to increase their walled garden height. Which is kind of stupid in the era of cloud computing, because you cannot use any of it if you share files/directories with other people who don't use Macs.

Because Mac OS X Finder has always been kinda terrible. There was a lot of talk about this in the early 2000s and it's just faded away since the people using macOS now probably never experienced the good old Mac OS 9 Finder.

And its Windows competition Windows Explorer has likewise gotten worse and worse each revision of Windows.

Oh... Finder is the name of the default file browser? I always thought it was the search results that popped down from the top right search area.

Last Mac I was on still had OSX on it.

Thank goodness for Dopus.

lol, directory opus? I was using that on the Amiga way back in the day. I tried it like a decade ago, but it didn't stick for me. It doesn't seem to run on Linux, and it costs $$$, so no chance I'll try it again.

I can't think of a better rationale for the ubiquitous worsening of local search than increasing ignorance of comp sci fundamentals.

There's no reason a senior at undergrad level shouldn't be able to write an efficient, fast, deterministic, precomputed search function.

... and yet, professional developers at major companies seem completely incapable.

Minimum acceptance criteria for any proposed shipping search feature should be "There is no file / object in the local system that fails to show up if you type its visible name" ffs.

What makes you think the first menu is one of the most used menus?

Well it probably isn't because Apple doesn't put useful things there, which is completely stupid from a UX perspective.

Heh, you're going to mention a mouse without bringing up the puck?!

I'm a little surprised they never came out with some oversized mouse pad and a mouse that charges from it.

Always seemed like an apple sort of idea.

> a mouse with a charging port on the bottom so that you can't use the mouse while it's charging

I'm surprised you went for that over the puck. At least when you unplugged it, you could use it. The puck was just terrible. And old.

The physical keyboard on your computer is also always in capital letters. Is that bad design too?

The advantage of software is the 'soft' part i.e. it's much easier to change than hardware.

Unless physical keyboards had mini displays for every key, they're a good design given the 'physical' limitation of their design.

A touchscreen displays 'soft'ware that's easy to change and make smarter than physical items.

>This was not poor design, but a decision to restrict the user from copy pasting entire articles

do you have a source for that?

> They are mediocre at best, always have been.

Come on. OSX was a paradigm shift in desktop usability and intuitive design.

My 85 year old grandpa asked me about 20 years ago how he should go about learning how to use computers. We were a windows family at home but I was using Macs in school and OSX was relatively new and I thought it blew Windows out of the water as far as usability.

Didn’t take long for my grandpa to be sending me emails and news links, and becoming an overall competent and comfortable computer user, in his late 80s, and I credit that to Apple’s fantastic design.

I think maybe we forget how using Windows 98 and XP was day-to-day.

So what I’m reading, is they are able to dumb-down the design to fit less tech savvy people.

When tailoring for one audience you usually do tale away something from other audiences.

I understand your point and have a long list of bitter grievances against Apple, but OS X triggered a large influx of geeks to the Mac world. It was a Unix that just worked, and there were all kinds of important ways that appealed to key tech people.

This is accurate. Apple’s been losing its soul ever since they spent a billion dollars making a headquarters that’s shaped like the “Home” button that they then immediately got rid of.

>Come on. OSX was a paradigm shift in desktop usability and intuitive design.

OSX was born by moving from a real crap OS that couldn't even multitask property, to slapping the same UX paradigms on a Unix base.

The first release of OSX wasn't meaningfully different from OS9 in UX. They had the same goofy window gadgets for minimizing and maximizing a window, and still couldn't resize a window from any corner/side.

Finder is still just as much garbage as it ever was, nothing has really changed there. "About this software" is still the first thing on the first menu, because of course that's the most important thing a user could do with MacOS software is to look at what version they are using.

There's a reason MacOS has never gone above 15% market share - part of that is the extortionate cost of Apple hardware, as well as their shitty UX.

I will gladly take Windows XP over any version of MacOS.

In editable text fields you can tap a word a few times and it'll select the whole paragraph, if that's any help.

What drives me insane though, is double tapping a word is supposed to select that word. But I think starting in iOS 18 it started selecting the word and a random amount of surrounding words, but only about half the time. I couldn't tell you what it could possibly be trying to do but it's maddening.

It’s using AI to try and determine if it’s a proper noun or other scenario where multiple words are really one semantic term. Except it’s really really bad at it and it’s almost never the behavior I want, but there’s no way to turn it off. (I vaguely remember there was a WWDC talk sometime a couple years ago where they went into how this works)

I know when I was on Android they'd do some smarts to detect stuff like that (handy for copying links)

But I swear if that's what they're trying to do here, I've never seen it work properly once. It's always just a random substring of the sentence.

It works surprisingly well on Android; expanding to grab a full address, for instance, or complete phone number. Sometimes it needs tweaking, but mostly it's directionally correct and helpful rather than harmful

Word segmentation has been a longstanding problem in CJK languages too. Coupled with the terrible text selection in iOS it makes it really hard to select substrings.

Just keeping my finger on the word works for me every time to select it. Double tap works only works in the edit fields. Also works reliable for me here in the hacker news post editor, as long as I do it in the middle of the word.

My favorite ( /s) IOS hassle - aside from running around on 12% battery at all times, didn’t I buy a pro max for the extended capacity ? -

… is not being able to paste into an empty box unless I type a letter there and select it/clobber it/overwrite it

And I just LOOOOOVE not being able to tap a URL in safari and get to the end of it to add parameters or change a path anymore…

Just gave my MacBook that hasn’t been turned on in months away(i haaaaate Tahoe) and been using GrapheneOS on a pixel 7a.

so far I’m not in love with it but I’m getting used to it and starting to like downloading apps anonymously (if I name the app, I’ll probably get scolded) anyway this might be the end of the line for me and Apple.

It's still there, it's just difficult to know when it will appear. Sometimes it takes one more tap than expected, or sometimes one must deselect a word and tap again, or change focus away and back again. Very sloppy UI.

Yeah, it is still there, and there is a pretty clear cut logic for when it will appear.

If you tap while a word is selected, it won’t appear. If you tap on the cursor while a word isn’t selected, it will appear.

If by "clear cut logic" you mean a consistent process, then sure. But if you mean intuitive, I must disagree.

Especially because it was working fine and understandable in older iOS versions.

Also for some reason autocorrect seems to have gotten a lot worse. It has become nearly impossible to type a grocery list without all kinds of annoying wrong corrections.

Yeah, good point. Your guess was right, I meant it in the sense of consistency, not in the sense of it being intuitive without knowing about it

They're a modern tech company. They need to changes things every so often no matter what downsides come with the change.

YES. WHY?! GOD WHY!?!!?!?!?! I'M GOING INSANE!!

It's not just the keyboard. My iPhone 15 is often so unresponsive I am tapping twice as much.

Example but the issue not limited to web browsing; Safari will do nothing, I tap again, it does the thing, then it does the thing again due to the second tap. I have to tap back to get to where I really wanted to go.

Sounds like the liquid glass animations are so heavy that if the system is busy with anything else for a second then everything simply breaks.

I remember seeing the videos about cpu usage spiking over 40% just to show the control center.

And similarly, even on a Mac I find myself clicking on links and button multiple times, just for things to work. It has a dedicated keyboard, how is it that they messed it up so much that a physical keyboard stops working. It's an interrupt based interface, it takes less than a millisecond to process things, how can someone mess things up so freaking stupidly.

That was basically the whole point of it.

Apple makes money selling hardware; they have a vested interest in making things slower/worse to incentivize people to buy newer hardware.

This is why you can never really trust Apple and also why no matter how bad Windows gets, it's still a better deal because at least you can count on the fact that PC businesses will compete on the hardware front to get your money.

Choosing Apple is a lot like being in an abusive relationship; you can't leave because the switching cost are quite high, so you tolerate a lot more abuse than you would be willing to otherwise.

And this is the reason people try to not rely on Apple software too much; if you do, they truly have you by the balls.

Shortcuts run but often do not trigger all the stages in a pipeline. No issues with same shortcuts prior to installing iOS26. These Shortcuts do not trigger UI transitions. They send data over network.

Sounds like Apple management enabled a quality assurance failure that is fostering so many distractions for users it's turning people against Apple.

Tim Cook handing his replacement a dumpster fire.

Extremely common pitfall in UI engineering. If you treat all input as a queue that's divorced from output, you end up with situations like this.

It's kind of a paradox, but in many cases you need to actually discard touch inputs until your UI state has transitioned as a result of previous inputs. This gets extremely nuanced and it's hard to write straightforward rules about when you should and shouldn't do this. Some situations I can think of:

- Navigation: User taps a button that pushes a screen on your nav stack. You need to discard or prevent inputs while the transition animation is happening, otherwise you can push multiple copies of that screen.

- Async tasks: User taps a button that kicks off an HTTP request or similar, and you need to wait on the result before doing something else like navigation or entering some other state. Absolutely you will need to prevent inputs that would submit that request twice. You will also need some idempotency in your API design to handle failure/retries. A fun example from the 1990s is the "are you sure you want to make this POST request again" dialog that Web browsers still show by default.

- Typing: You should never discard keystrokes that insert/delete characters while a text input field is focused, but you may have to handle a state like the above if "Enter" (or whatever "done" button is displayed in the case of a software keyboard) does something like submit a form or do navigation.

Essentially we're all still riding on stuff that the original Mac OS codified in the 1980s (and some of it was stolen from Xerox, yes), so the actual interaction model of UIs is a mess of modal state that we hardly ever actually want to fully realize in code. UI is a hard problem!

This analysis ignores the fact that the user experience has regressed from a previous version which didn’t have these issues.

So it’s not like some longstanding industry-wide UI issues they’ve ignored forever, it’s that Apple has introduced new tradeoffs or lowered their quality standards to the point that some users feel their experience has worsened.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Debounce

Okay, how long is the debounce window? Where in the input pipeline do you debounce (obviously not immediately on keystrokes)? Will debounce work for long-running requests, which are event-driven and not time-driven?

I have seen, far too many times, naive approaches like wrapping all click handlers in a "debounce" function cause additional issues and not actually solve the underlying problem.

To clarify - I am not stating that simple debouncing is the solution to all the issues you're identifying. I agree with you that handling some of them can be very complex. I just shared the article as a pointer to a broadly similar concept that can be used to help communicate the gist of what you're talking about.

Just to correct a common error, nothing was stolen from Xerox. Apple gave Xerox stock (which they later sold too early) for demos and access to the Parc work on Smalltalk and GUIs.

Autocorrect not getting simple character substitutions is beyond frustrating.

Do you know a corrector that "understands" a typo at the third or fourth character?

If it's 1st or 2nd, then it's ok.

What I don’t get is why it can’t tell I’ve gone back and edited a suggestion or correction it gave me and correct itself in the future.

The same things are happening on Android too, no coincidence.

It's not just apple - windows and android autocorrect are more auto incorrect these days.

Your statement isn't incorrect - but I think it needs a slight qualification of "And none of them are acceptable". Both Apple and Android have regressed in quality and it's only possible because of a duopoly.

Is there a windows autocorrect? I thought that was a feature implemented by the individual program, not any sort of OS functionality.

I can't tell about windows - never used autocorrect there - but GBoard became laughable. I don't think I was able to use its suggestions since a few years. For instance, it will NEVER but really never put a uppercase I when I'm talking about myself. Never. I could select it from suggestions if I feel like, but I kinda gave up (this is written in Windows, that's why you see capital Is). Or my name, used quite often right, is also never spelled correctly - although it's there in the suggestions. I am using a yahoo email, GBoard knows the username, but it will ALWAYS suggest a gmail extension, which simply doesn't exist. I don't know any other keyboard which can properly handle multiple languages, so I'm stuck with GBoard, but it's nothing to be proud of.

SwiftKey can handle languages, but it kind of sucks too , lol. It crashes all the time

No it cannot. SwiftKey has exactly two "languages": one is French, the other is German/English/Italian/Romanian. Yes it's a mash of all four, which makes the default swiped word and the suggestions exactly useless. Who the hell thought that was a good idea... only Samsung keyboard offers separate languages as well, but it's kinda worse in suggestions than GBoard.

I have the same email @yahoo.com and @gmail.com (one is mostly for online shops etc), and the amount of time GBoard thinks it needs to recommend @gmail.com, it's obnoxious...

But the correction offers are still okay for me, I can mash keys around my email username and one of the corrections offered will be my username...

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...

Thats a pretty snarky thing to say about Apple. They were arguably the pioneers in OS UX... granted, its not the end all, be all, but still. You could do worse.

> They were arguably the pioneers in OS UX

Who is "they"? The employees at Apple when the HIG was first published in 1986, 40 years ago? That Apple is dead, what you see before you is an empty and rotted husk.

When I began at Apple in 1995, we followed "Tog on Interface" to the letter. It was not uncommon to expect arguments over what the Right way was during lunch.

I watched as Steve Jobs came back to Apple—he really took hold of the reins of UX (aided by his team of designers).

Personally, (and I say this as it is often a matter of taste) I didn't care for a lot of it.

A simple example: the URL field of Safari should have been, to my Tog sensibilities, an editable text field only. Perhaps somewhere (below?, to the right?) you might include a progress bar to indicate the page loading. But a designer (I will not name, ha ha) came up with a combined textfield/progress bar. It looked to my eye as though, as the page loaded, the text was being selected!

Jobs loved it though.

It was then I think that Apple departed "Tog" for these "one-off" UX experiments.

I have rationalized this move away from a standard since, with the advent of the web, the customer is now being bombarded with all manner of UX—ought to be comfortable with one-off UX.

(Thankfully I see that now we have a thin line that seems to grow along the lower edge of the URL field.)

First is not the same as best. First is not even the same as good. First is only first. Just because someone was the pioneer doesn't mean they should be considered a positive example.

Introduced a concept decades ago in no way implies that their current implementation of the concept is at all ideal or market leading.

The people at Apple who were the pioneers are long gone. The people at Apple now have killed them and are wearing their skin.

> You could do worse.

Perhaps you shouldn't encourage them. Based on recent software releases from Apple they might see it as a challenge.

Operative word here is "were".

> arguably

Sick of this weasel word. Either argue it or don't.

Also used incorrectly most of the time. They meant to use “debatably”.

Arguably:

- used to say that a statement is very possibly true even if it is not certain (merriam-webster)

- in a way that can be shown to be true (cambridge)

ie. you can be prove it through argument, not “you can make the argument”

Even worse, "I would argue that..."

It's not hypothetical if you are here, in the current tense, arguing that. I've mostly cured myself of the habit, but its tough.

“I would argue that…” is a weaker statement, because it ends with an implied “…but since I don’t care that much, I’m not ‘seriously’ arguing that.” It’s not at all equivalent to the strong statement “I argue that…”, which has no such qualifier.

Why cure yourself of useful conversational nuance?

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!

My fav is when iOS autocorrect corrects me AFTER pressing send.

Be glad you only type in one language and that it is US English (probably) ;)

As long as we are ranting: I have many multilingual converstations. At some point iOS started offering the "German/English" keyboard option. I assume it also does "French/Swahili" or whatever, but for some reason it didn't auto-create a combination for "Hungarian/English" which I use more than German/English.

This sounds like a great idea, but in practice it just autocorrects incorrectly in two languages instead of one. Which is a shame, since even the German government uses a lot of Denglish these days, you'd think it would be trainable.

Meanwhile, when the chat gets stuck in the wrong language, it's a comfort to know that selecting another (or trying to press Shift for that matter) will take me to Keyboard Settings at least 80% of the time. Because who knows when you might need to change those!

Come on, the 6th word after 5 English words is obviously going to be a rare word in your second keyboard language, not another common English word.

On top this my own language is Englishifying so it’s understandable it gets confused. But still, the whole thing is infuriating when you type something correct and boom, it becomes a word in another language.

Yes this behaviour is infuriating, the surprise autocorrect! Can result in some really embarrassing messages being sent..

Try typing

Other times were not so bad.

> - autocorrect “correcting” correctly typed words

This brings up so many emotions. I disabled autocorrect. I don't give a damn if my words are spelled wrong but they should not be words that I did not type!

I will add: text prediction was so much better before that I could be very sloppy and it would still figure it out. Now I have learned to be more careful with the keyboard.

I got anxious about autocorrect potentially inserting the wrong words and what kind of social fallout that could cause, so I just disabled it entirely. Takes longer to type everything manually but at least my anxiety has gone down.

> Clearly tapping a letter “taps” a different letter

My iPad Mini 6 sometimes gets into this state, especially after deleting something, when tapping one of the keys in the lower right corner becomes completely impossible, it always registers as this different key (I don't have the iPad nearby to check which one), and it stays broken like this until I press a few other keys. It's incredibly frustrating and it's been there since day 1.

The keyboard actually does this all the time, and many assume they are the problem (making typos, etc.). A few have recorded videos to show what is actually happening and it's wild. If I had a link handy I'd share it. The user directly taps on a letter, and the system picks what it thinks the user actually meant, even when the key hit was dead on.

Turning off slide to type in settings improves the situation, however it still happens.

My fav is when iOS autocorrect corrects me AFTER pressing send.

that is the worst! i hate that so much!

there must be some kind of event trigger on text focus being removed or keyboard hiding that does that... ughhhh

> Clearly tapping a letter “taps” a different letter (hot spots poorly calibrated)

FWIW I encounter this in Android every so often (using gboard). Anecdotally I don't know what causes it (I swear sometimes it's worse and sometimes it's better), but Android isn't entirely problem free.

I have genuinely considered if my (and perhaps everyone on hn) life calling should be just to make a better touch keyboard.

Bearing in mind the amount of constant pain and torment the current best keyboards inflict upon the world, can there be any more urgent problem to tackle?

Forget climate change guys. Make a keyboard. Save the world.

There already was one. For all its faults, Swype for Android ~12 years ago was better than any swiping keyboard available now - both in its interpretation of swipes, and in its other features like "squiggle over one letter to indicate a double letter", "run your swipe above the keyboard to indicate a capitalized word", and the incredible editing features (it had an editing keyboard!). The Swype key, located in the bottom left? You could Swype-A to select all, Swype-X to cut, Swype-C to copy, Swype-V to paste. Swype-space brought up the editing keyboard.

Sounds great. When you say 12 years ago do you mean newer versions weren’t as good? Or was it discontinued or something?

I think the really puzzling thing about these keyboards is we all seem to remember typing being easier - even though phones back then were so much smaller. It makes no sense!

I still use it on iOS, and I've tried to remove all other keyboards, but Apple still just seems to "make up" keyboards I don't know are installed. Or switch keyboards on me mid-typing a word to a weird native one I also don't show as installed. It used to be very occasionally this would happen but now it's so repeatable since 26 I can almost not use my keyboard.

One caveat, I have an Icelandic keyboard installed on there. Sometimes web controls will force an input box to a US english keyboard (or numpad), which is annoying but at least that's sort of covered by a spec. What really drives me nuts is when I'm mid typing on the swype keyboard and suddely it switches to a completely square grid keyboard with up and down quotes in the autocomplete (which is not actually autocompleting or correcting(which while technically correct has almost completely fallen out of popularity since the dawn of the internet)

I quit using Android ca. 2016 (not because I hated it, had other work-related reasons why) and Swype for iOS was only around for a brief period before Microsoft killed it (and most of the things that made it great).

I never used the much-vaunted tap-only iOS keyboards of the earlier iPhones. I have large hands (the OG Xbox Duke controller was very comfortable) and typing on those small screens always felt painful even though I was so often told it was great.

It was bought by Microsoft and declined, yes.

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.

I don't know if you experience any of these:

- Clicks on buttons and links not registering, and needing to click multiple times, sometime to no effect.

- Safari not suggesting the website you visit multiple time a day, and points you a random website you have never visited before.

A lot of these issies seem damiliar to me as well on the glasskwyboard pn my iphone13 mini.

Also typed without any maual fixes. My typingwas mucu better before glass.

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Recent versions of iOS make me feel like it wont let me type spaces anymore, I'm always adding full stops instead!

I've given up bothering to correct it now.

So I just search for why.is.ios.keyboard.broken and google seems to know!

Sure, I can consciously and deliberately hit the spacebar, but for a decade or more I had zero issues with causally typing and not looking.

Is it a result of moving to Pro Max sized phones? It could be, and maybe the spacebar is just now further away. I'm willing to concede it could be that.

But then there are many reports of other people with issues....

autocorrect suggesting words that I've never typed before

Ahhh yes, there's nothing like when autocorrect turns because into Decatur!

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.

Well, presumably the page's intended audience is software developers at Apple. As a software developer myself, I am all too familiar with the unnecessary churn caused by vague bug reports. It saves time when people include details like error messages (when applicable), steps to replicate, expected result vs. actual result, etc.

Besides, users and developers don't always use software the same way, have the same settings, follow the same forums.

This just feels so backwards. Yes, I know recreating ambiguous issues is annoying because it’s a lot of work, but it’s also our job.

Reminder: we are asking users to give us money in exchange for software.

It’s our job to deliver that working software. It’s not the user’s job to hold our hands and pep talk us into fixing problems. Users can and should find another product that will just do it for them without the whining.

I think the real point of the website, besides joking around, is poking fun at the broke state of the software industry where a bunch of whiny developers and managers will make a million tired excuses for why their software doesn’t just work.

Highlighting bug report and bureaucratic process in response to “your keyboard is jank” is exactly the mindset we need to change.

The point isn’t to start a forum or technical conversation with Apple devs. The point is to laugh at them because their software sucks and “just one more Jira ticket” isn’t going to fix it.

Then again, sometimes a big feature is so comprehensively broken that it’s hard, from the outside, to break it down into specific flaws. Even if you can reproduce the complex circumstances where they manifest.

In the case of the iOS keyboard, I remember one bug that made the rounds (in the popular press!) after somebody recorded their typing in slow motion to validate it [0]. Once they documented it, everybody recognized the feeling and felt vindicated; but it took actual work to substantiate.

That’s the work it seems that Apple engineers should be doing. They have the telemetry, the source access, the design documents, the labs, and the time in their day to make a comprehensive study of it. Just as I can say “my car is handling funny around turns” and let it be the mechanic’s job to diagnose what’s wrong in mechanical terms.

There was a time when this humane aspect was Apple’s particular magic: engineering beyond technical requirements to the point of simplicity, ergonomics, “it just works”…

[0] https://www.macworld.com/article/2952872/heres-proof-that-th...

This isn't a bug report.

Do you honestly think that the developers working for apple looks at the "keyboard experience" and thinks "yeah this is good"? Of course, not. They are competent developers.

Are they? At this point I seriously question that assertion.

It does make me wonder if Apple's own employees actually dog-food iOS day-to-day.

It just seems like, you could stop any iPhone user in the street and ask them "How do you find the keyboard?" And get a consistently negative response, but yet nobody within Apple seemingly has noticed for YEARS.

Everyone says iOS 26 did it, but I strongly disagree, I disabled most options in General -> Keyboard like three major iOS versions ago, and moved to Swiftkey* in iOS 18 (although iOS keeps changing my keyboard preferences back to the default).

*SwiftKey is also a shit-show with the "Your Tap Map" crap you cannot disable, where it moves the keys and makes the thing inconsistent. Just goes to show how bad Apple's keyboard is, when I'll put up with it.

It's so bad that I have to assume that Cupertino is filled with people who "hold the phone differently" and tap with their long fingernails or the very tip of their fingers or something.

I'm always mistyping and I don't know how to fix it to do what they want.

> It's so bad that I have to assume that Cupertino is filled with people who "hold the phone differently" and tap with their long fingernails or the very tip of their fingers or something.

Fingernails won't trigger a touchscreen. They do matter, though - as your fingernails get longer, you're forced to tap the phone with the side of your fingertip (so the nail doesn't block you) instead of the front.

I'm typing this disagreement to your statement on a touchscreen with fingernails only

Did you use metallic nail polish? Or is your skin just barely not making contact with the screen?

I'm someone who never puts any sort of product on my finger nails, and I can confirm that my nails work on my iPhone screen, both when I've lazily forgotten to cut them, letting them get annoyingly long, and if I turn my finger over so that my nail is just about flat on the screen - I checked while writing this, and confirmed the screen was responsive despite my skin definitely not touching it. (I'm a man who doesn't have any experience growing my nails to extend more than a few mm beyond my finger tips so I can't speak to that scenario.)

I’ve noticed since iOS 7-ish that some sliding animations have such a long tail-end easing of the animation that it blocks the touch input of the user. Like if you accidentally scroll to the side instead of down, you have to let go and wait for the side scroll to completely stop.

Then I watched Tim Cook have trouble with tapping the screen multiple times for one action at one of the older WWDCs pre-COVID.

I felt validated and exasperated. Does Tim just put up with this?

I feel like that’s the main thing Steve Jobs brought to Apple - he never put up with anything.

Yeah, Steve would've smashed that phone on the floor if that happened to him in rehearsal, and then fired the whole team responsible.

if my experiences at google are any indication, when it comes to "regular user" facing features management pays very little attention to negative feedback from the engineers. it always seems to be assumed that we are atypical in our dislike for things.

This is incredibly resonant

They must be, I can't imagine they're all on Android. I'm on iOS and didn't know there was an issue with the keyboard. Maybe it's because I've not tried out any competing ones or maybe because I don't type that much on the phone generally.

I think the keyboard is fine. A few small issues here and there but in general I can type quickly and accurately. I must be lucky though, perhaps my typing style is what apple expects.

My wife got me to switch over from Android 2-3 years ago and I have fucking hated the iOS keyboard from day one.

She has only been complaining since iOS 26, though.

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

As an iOS user I don't have any specific grievances, but I can definitely say the keyboard has got shittier and shittier in the past few years.

Apple's problem is their keyboard used to "just work" as the original article says. No one knows what magic they did back then, but it's obvious that they turned it off now.

They're still better than the spell checker in MS Teams, although that's not really positive.

I think the point is that the keyboard is so broken the problems should be obvious to the people who work on the iPhone.

Exactly.

There are some Apple folks here who keep gaslighting users with their iOS 26 concerns and every other issue by calling them weird names and asking them to not complain.

The damn keyboard is broken, one would've known that if they used it more than a few minutes a day in real life examples. Stop shutting people off and use your own damn products instead of getting them all made in China and sell them.

You get that kind of nonsense when people get an irrational attachment to a technology brand.

I see that a lot with Tesla, there's the group that praises them publicly and makes outrageous claims about self-driving... But remains strangely silent about how the windshield wipers don't work right and Tesla won't fix them.

Did they edit the article after your post? There’s a list just after the first paragraph.

Anyway, I was just considering switching to android today after repeated problems with the keyboard, maps, siri and notifications / incoming calls.

They’re almost as bad as pre-iPhone Linux phones at this point.

Q: “Can it be a daily driver?”

A: “Sure, as long as you also carry a Garmin/TomTom, and a dumbphone or pager”.

> It feels like someone changed the keyboard to optimize for some typing behavior that doesn't match my own

I want the keyboard to work the following way -- after I press the button: 1. Letter that I pressed (not a random one) appears 2. Instantly

iOS keyboard somehow fails both. I have no idea what "typing behavior" can you optimize for to end up like this

but anyone who uses the keyboard knows the statements to be true.

I have just switched to turning autocorrect off.

The "select all" comment hit home. I frequently try to copy/paste text and it is maddening to try to locate "select all"

And cursor movement? ugh. It is so painful to move the cursor to one specific letter that I frequently just erase everything and start over.

How did you make that happen?

I use swipe keyboard in iPhone. I turned off all "autocorrect" features they offer.

Still their random generator keeps replacing perfectly fine words _and the words before them_ with random crap that makes no sense.

Heck, I even turned off all features, and still it happens.

So I switched to another keyboard from appstore.

I would switch to another OS, but I find the others even worse in some respects I care for deeply.

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?

Same here. If you shouldn't design for the average dimensions, what _should_ you design for?

I am not sure there is much more to say. I have used an iOS device for many years and "broken and nearly useless" perfectly describes every aspect of the iOS keyboard.

I have always just suspected that it is the same as it was with the lack of t9 dialling. Everybody knew it was awful, but apple just stuck their head in the sand and asked their users to just live with it.

There are many things I dislike about iOS (most notably the settings app), but those are just intermittent annoyances but the keyboards is still so infuriatingly bad.

The reaction at work when I brought a usb keyboard to plug into my phone when I had to write something wasn't "why do you do that?". It was "I have thought about that as well. The keyboard sucks".

The YT video they linked is excessively clear about what the issue is. There's no point in explaining it again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo

> 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.

It's a 2 minute video. It gets the point across faster than any blog post.

No, it’s not a lot to ask.

That is assuming the user doesn’t first have to offer incense and whisper a fervent prayer to the Omniscient Deity of USB Devices to seize control of the mouse and click the link in divine intervention.

However for most of us that is uncessary and clicking a link to a video requires no effort at all.

TL;DW.

I don't watch video complaints. I don't watch most YT videos except at 2x because by time the person who made the video got started saying what they're trying to say, I could have finished a text article version of the same thing.

Most people speak way too slowly for me to be interested in what they're saying, especially when they could have written an article that is more information dense and it typically shorter in any case.

Videos have value for enhancing reports, but are mostly useless as reports themselves.

So yeah, it's too damned much to ask to watch a video.

You know the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words"?

So yeah, a video that precisely reproduces a UI/UX bug is worth more than anything you can write about it.

Showing exactly what the problem was is much better than describing the problem. It's a lossy conversion that adds noise.

Saying this as someone who doesn't watch videos normally.

Sorry. That comment is too long. Didn't read. Hope you didn't waste much time on it.

Jokes aside, that video is 2:23 long and it gets to the point within the first 33 seconds, at which point they have demonstrated the issue.

You're being beyond incredibly silly right now.

I mean you could do what i did and turn off autocorrect…

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Why not install an different keyboard app?

I love the fervor with which this is written, but the threat is so weak I literally chuckled.

Imagine your an exec or manager on the team for keyboard development. You read this, get to the end to discover the user is gonna switch devices for... 2 whole calander years?

What's that amount to? Maybe 2 device upgrades on If your a die hard gotta have the newest latest model phone each year. Then what? you'll be back?

The threat doesnt even carry the weight losing a user for a 2 year blip, registers more as a dropped ping request then a drop in revenue.

If meant to be whimsical sure nailed it. To be fair I mean any boycot with a large scale mfg carries about the same weight. just thought it fell flat as much as anything.

I think this is the wrong read on the “threat”. One user going out of their way to spent time writing this post is a canary in the coal mine. Most users never give feedback, they just churn. This is the same reason your toothpaste has a phone number on the back - that one random person who cares deeply calls the number and provides invaluable feedback on the product.

It’s not about the one person, it’s about that person representing tens/hundreds/thousands of customers. This feedback is a gift to a product manager that listens.

It's one of the downsides of having dedicated and fervent fans. They obfuscate problems regular users are having by drowning them out with praise for Apple.

During my last weeks on the iPhone, I reached out to various Apple discussion spaces on the web for help with some problems I was having.

I was met not with assistance, but ridicule. The majority of the people "helping" were saying some variation of "you're holding it wrong" or "I personally don't have that problem" (which is such a funny quirk of the Apple fandom - I didn't ask if you are having that problem, I'm asking for help achieving a specific outcome).

You can even see examples of this sort of behavior in that post about the window resize handles for the latest version of macOS. There were Apple fans saying some variation of it's not an actual problem, that they don't have that problem, that they don't use the window resize handles anyway, or that the post was an exaggeration. Turns out it was an actual problem that Apple addressed with a bug fix. Of course, Apple fans, being shameless, will jump to reframing the discussion from "Apple can do no wrong" to "See, Apple listens! You know who doesn't listen? Microsoft!!" I get it, not a monolith, but recognizing Apple fans aren't a monolith doesn't make them less off-putting.

The final nail in the coffin for me for the ecosystem was getting called a child for *checks notes* making the adult decision to move to Android to have a phone that did the things I needed (with much fewer annoying, uncritical fans and a lot more people who genuinely want to help).

So, yes, there is a danger in letting the fandom do all the work and laughing off "threats" of user exoduses. The conduct of Apple fans coupled with Apple's ignorance to regular users' feedback soured me to the ecosystem. It would take a lot to bring me back. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Exactly! The fact that this has 300+ votes and is on HN's front page (and is just CONSTANTLY brought up on Reddit), should really tell you how fed up people are with the iOS keyboard experience.

I legit feel like Apple should actually make a public statement like "we hear you, we're working on it!" because it is actually bad PR at this point.

Apple is allergic to admitting anything. They go straight from "there is no problem" to "this update brings improvements".

This new keyboard is revolutionary. It's not just an improvement in the way you will type. It's an entirely new way of expressing yourself.

This new keyboard is revolutionary. It's not just an improvement in the way you will type — it's an entirely new way of expressing yourself.

Works better with an em-dash to make it feel more like today's default ChatGPT style.

Do robots wear turtlenecks?

Dunno, but they surely are weighted a lot to sound like some people who do.

Perhaps it's just a natural case of convergent evolution when the fitness function is bullshit at scale.

I feel like the people who could move the needle don’t actually type on their iPhones, they pay someone to do that.

Its presence on Hacker News and Reddit tells you that the folks who use Hacker News and Reddit are fed up with the keyboard. Most people don't care. Tech nerds do, and that's not nothing, but it's not necessarily a majority either. No one I know outside of tech brings up the keyboard to me, ever.

Everyone cares, most people can't express it because they're not techies and don't know what's going on. But the keyboard is straight up buggy. Everyone is just working around it.

That's just how software works. People also care that the windows taskbar just kills itself sometimes. But they feel powerless, stupid even, so they just work around it every day forever and never say anything.

Once you lose tech nerds, the battle is lost. Other users always follow them.

By that logic, Linux should be the most popular desktop operating system. But even most tech nerds realize that their needs are different from regular users and recommend stuff to them they wouldn’t use.

Yup and it's clearly getting attention.

> Most users never give feedback, they just churn

Uh...

We're talking about iPhone here. You can read complains about iPhone online all the time. When you have more than a billion of users, lack of feedback is the least problem you concern.

> Most users never give feedback, they just churn.

Sure, but this is a duopoly and it's not as if the competition is perfect. A lot of issues like this simply don't matter because of that. The response that goes through the PM's head is likely to be along the lines of, "What you gonna do, switch to Android? Ha!"

> This is the same reason your toothpaste has a phone number on the back - that one random person who cares deeply calls the number and provides invaluable feedback on the product.

You'll notice that tech companies go out of their way to avoid offering that option.

as a counterpoint to that, i'm an iOS user, i use the apple keyboard every day, and it's fine? i don't really understand the complaint. it's clearly not "broken".

and i also never give feedback. there's probably hundreds of millions of iOS users out there who agree with me. so maybe don't change the behaviour just because this guy is mad?

The article ended up making it to HN and, at least the discussion I'm seeing, is highly critical of Apple's recent design changes. There isn't a threat you can construct that'd throw 20% of Apple's profit into uncertainty, but losing their mantle of technical excellence is something that will deeply damage Apple in the long term. Microsoft seems hell bent on being a worse example right now but if the grade of Apple's products slips too much then the price markup they enjoy will be eroded which is a very dangerous cycle to fall into.

People complain about everything on HackerNews, if I was Apple I’d 100% ignore us.

The recent kerfluffle has been all the Liquid Glass stuff, I hear lots of people in my offline circle who aren’t reading every phone UI review who are trying various schemes to avoid or mitigate this update. It’s pretty bad! (The keyboard sucking is water under the bridge at this point, I think).

I get what you're saying; but the thing is you can kinda-sorta ignore the Liquid Glass stuff (performance not withstanding on older devices); but the keyboard is a "touch surface" people are actively using every single day.

Kind of a big deal that something you'll likely use every time you pick up your device has been broken now for going on years, with no real movement on the issue.

Wake me up when it shows up on Apple's balance sheet.

HN can be as critical as they want of Apple's design changes. Until they vote with their wallets (they won't, because most people here are ideologically tied to Apple) no one inside Apple cares.

I was "ideologically tied" to using products created by people who clearly cared more about creating them and my experience using them than their competitors. That era seems to have finally passed.

If this phone dies before they right the ship, I'll be looking around for the first time in almost 20 years.

There is a possibility that this "threat" could go viral. Now something dumb your company is doing is being discussed everywhere. Companies hate that kind of publicity. It's the kind of thing that sticks around and lingers even after things have been corrected.

It can't go viral until you actually make a post for people to find and promote. Step one has now been completed. Step two is gaining traction.

Your comment makes no sense to me. What in your opinion would be a strong threat? 'Tim Cook, open the suspicion package I sent you in the mail!'?

I mean, this random person added a countdown timer, and after that revealed that when it reaches the end, if Apple hasn’t met some arbitrary demand they’ll leave the platform but probably be back (just in time to spend more money on another device) and that the colour of a phone is enough to get them back.

This is one of the emptiest threats I’ve ever seen. This is about as effective as having a madman inside your house destroying your property with a baseball bat and saying “if you don’t stop smashing my stuff in the next 72 hours, I’ll consider writing mean things about you in my diary”.

No need to get specific. Write a blog post about how the keyboard is broken and say you’re leaving for another platform because of it. It’s not like Apple is going to check when you did it or for how long (or care). The theatrics are unnecessary and laughable, they undermine the whole message. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone inside Apple is sharing this with their colleagues and laughing.

Another random blog post about the broken iOS keyboard would not get any traction. This is getting traction.

I'm pretty sure the author realized that Tim Apple isn't shaking in his boots, looking at the numbers going down. That's not the point, the point is that it's funny and interesting and thus getting attention.

Is this getting traction? The front page of HN and some meta-debate is a pretty low bar for what I’d consider traction if I were a one of the richest companies on Earth.

> Another random blog post about the broken iOS keyboard would not get any traction.

Nonsense. Complaints about Apple’s declining software quality get a lot of traction on HN. Here’s another example from today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46997008

And lookie here, what was submitted within one hour of that post?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46996575

This exact same submission! Which didn’t get any traction then. The traction this is getting has little to do with the quality of the post, it’s popular because it’s another thread where we can air our grievances.

Why so agressive? You're making a conclusion from a tenuous correlation. I upvoted TFA because I've been annoyed with my Apple keyboard and them not fixing it. Not becaue I saw some other post on window resizing. Judging by the other comments here a bunch of people are in the same boat. I've been complaining in my social circle about it and have partially switched to Android as a result.

> I upvoted TFA because I've been annoyed with my Apple keyboard and them not fixing it. Not becaue I saw some other post on window resizing.

That’s not what I said. Upvoting one post has nothing to do with upvoting the other. They’re two wholly separate posts, the one thing they have in common is (rightfully) criticising Apple for declining software quality. The point is that this submission isn’t special, as the person I replied to suggested. These types of posts are a dime a dozen (which I approve of, I think Apple should be getting criticised for what they do wrong) and they get traction on HN all the time.

I upvoted this submission too, it’s not wrong. But I agree with the comment up the chain that it makes its point as a pretty weak threat, and that doing so undermines the message.

Ok, it's clear that I misunderstood. Thanks for clarifying.

"Why so aggressive?"

The post you're replying to is hardly being aggressive.

There are dozens of blog posts about this, and this one is trending on HN.

Anyway, why are you so upset about this? Why are you calling my comment "nonsense" and obsessing over this counter? It's clearly having an effect on you, which was its purpose. Realistically, another post about Apple's borked keyboard should create zero emotional response, yet here we are.

I think you’re projecting. How is mentioning a counter once in one comment “obsessing”? I’m glad this post is getting traction, I’m pretty open about my disdain for Apple’s declining software quality and Tim Cook’s management, I welcome posts that shine more light on it.

> Realistically, another post about Apple's borked keyboard should create zero emotional response

Of course that is not true. That is trivial to disprove.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46232528

The linked post is from two months ago.

There aren’t daily or even weekly submissions about the iOS keyboard being broken. That seems pretty obvious (and understandable).

There was a time, a few months ago, when everyone complained about the iOS keyboard, and blog posts about it got traction. If you want to get a blog post about the same topic to get traction now, you need a hook. The countdown is the hook. That's why I said, "Another random blog post about the broken iOS keyboard wouldn't get any traction."

That's the point of the countdown. When you write that "this is one of the emptiest threats I’ve ever seen", you are completely missing the point of the threat. Everybody knows it's empty. The writer knows it's empty. But it makes the blog post fun and interesting. That's the actual point.

Do you really think the writer thought that Apple would care about one lost iPhone sale?

That's the joke.

I also took it as a joke; I'm glad at least one person validated my sense of humour, I was getting a bit worried reading all the replies.

At this point, I assume 90% of complaints about the apple keyboard are either tongue in cheek, explicitly humorous, a detailed, qualitative study with new information, or written by someone who is very new to apple, the internet, and technology in general.

I don't see how else anybody could seriously think 'The apple keyboard is bad, and the world needs to know about it! I'll make my opinion known, and surely that will solve the issue', let alone following it with 'no more Mr Nice Guy: I'm going to threaten Apple, the company, with consequences that will force them to act. It's high time somebody held these mega-corps to account and I'm willing to put myself on the line!'

Like, even if the article was written by the United Nations or the EU, there are very few actual threats they could include that might realistically spur apple to finally sort out the keyboard.

'If Apple don't sort it out, I'm going to fine them 75% of their revenue,' might be logical but seems a little deluded: terrorism or personal violence would be... unadvisable... and 'I'll switch to android' is also comically unthreatening, while also being hugely overplayed and almost always played straight, empty, and uninspired.

Everyone knows the keyboard sucks. Everyone knows that's not going to stop people buying iOS devices. It's the equivalent of 'fast food isn't nutritious but companies pretend it is' - in the year of our lord 2026, a multi paragraph article to that effect can probably be assumed to be numerous, new, surprising, ironic, or insanely naive.

The fact that a realistic, honest assessment of one's probable future purchasing decisions reads as a joke is maybe a little dark, but hey. It's a dark world, and it won't be lightened by yet another 'I'm totally gonna boycott if they don't stop!'

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Don’t we all deserve a little whimsy in our lives?

Exactly. So many people missing the whole point.

I actually logged in just to upvote it. Just hoping to boost the signal enough that Apple will actually do something.

I have a similar countdown of my own but is less specific. I’m on iPhone 15 (coming from android) and I know for certain that the next time I’m on the market for a new phone it won’t be an iPhone. I also don’t need a new phone, but the intrusive thoughts to buy a new one are always caused by the faulty keyboard

I somewhat agree with this. There are probably not that many users who purchase(d) Apple hardware but will leave due to the keyboard.

> The threat doesnt even carry the weight losing a user for a 2 year blip

Agreed, but it may be different if there would be more people feeling in a similar way.

> If meant to be whimsical sure nailed it.

It's a bit strange though because there are many things one can critisize Apple for. My main gripe is still Steve Jobs underpaying developers via illegal agreements. Yet people praise him as if he would have been a god. I am not saying he had bad ideas or was a bad designer per se, but some people never even mention criminal activities for their heroes. The court case was mega-clear; that is undeniable. If he would still be alive I'd love to hear what people would say now.

> My main gripe is still Steve Jobs underpaying developers via illegal agreements.

I'm blown away by Apple building their own stores in competition with the franchisees who carried them those lean years.

The threat is weak, the attraction it gets is great.

It was never about loosing one single customer, it's about getting a bad reputation and loosing many more undecided potential customers.

Yeah imagine all those customers, loose to wreak havoc. Would be a shame to lose them …

I don't think the threat is to leave for 2 years then come back. He just doesn't want to commit to leaving forever. Who knows if in a decade it'll be Android with the shitty keyboard (or Apple will have the better Direct Brain Interface, or whatever). Most likely though, if someone switches ecosystems for 2+ years, they're going to get used to the new one and stay there.

I can't believe there are also other people downrange who don't get it, but in case anyone has a broken sarcasm detector:

Yes, this blog post is meant to be whimsical and tongue-in-cheek because the post takes itself too seriously by pretending like one user leaving to another platform (for 2 years GASP!!) with a big scary countdown timer is a credible threat to a multi-trillion dollar company. The real part of the post is the request and complaining about the bug.

Yep, lol. Example 364023 of high prevalence of autism accompanied by an arrogant need to weigh in aggressively despite these people having to had realized by this point in their lives that if something completely doesn't make sense, it's worth sitting it out in the case that it is indeed sarcasm.

I’m a long term AAPL shareholder and even I see a bit of the hegemonic vibes.

Little people can’t get the attention of large organizations without literally setting themselves on fire. Voting with your feet isn’t going to affect a trillion dollar company at all. Unless maybe you’re Dame Judy Dench.

Interesting idea: celebrity influencer for hire: pay a celebrity to champion your cause/make it go viral. Maybe do a "GoFundMe"-esque model (although, giving celebs even more money will probably not be popular... how about "$$$ for a charity of your choice if you talk about the stupid iPhone keyboard"?)

Unfortunately people of intermediate standing try all the time and get told to go back to their day job and stop dabbling in political action.

Also some of these people would have voted for Reagan so... you know. A person is smart, people are stupid.

Given that the esteemed Dame is almost completely blind and has never positioned herself as a tech influencer or aficionada, I feel that her (thoroughly deserved) prestige and social power might be a little wasted on the grand cause of 'the iOS keyboard could be better'.

I mean, I'd agree with her. But it's hardly Joanna Lumley championing the gurkhas, when she's been saying for years that she can no longer recognise even loved ones standing right in front of her. Apple could do a lot better, but I'm not sure they could improve the keyboard that much.

Counting the spark while the house is on fire.

It's even worse: based on "orange iPhone" they just bought an iPhone 17. So they'll skip the next two iPhones and be back in 2028? Sounds like a standard upgrade cycle.

Yeah I’m boycotting Apple for like 8 years at a time by this standard, I guess. Their hardware lasts a while.

I do wish I could get a “security patches only” update channel, though. Their declining software competency is visible and annoying.

You better believe is not just one user. Read the comments. We are thousands or millions. I‘m really tired of the shitty Keyboard. For a long time I thought it was my fault, now I know is not.

[flagged]

As a lifelong Android user (in the EU, where Apple hegemony is not as strong) I always saw Apple as the "pay more for more polished ecosystem UX" option. So it always surprises me when things that are trivial on Android/Linux are sticking points on iOS/macOS. Worse, it seems that proprietary means you can't do anything to fix them yourself.

I recently switched to iPhone for network reasons, and some UI/UX things are really shocking. There is no way to toggle location services without going into settings. The alarms are tricky to set and don't have niceties like telling you the time until your morning alarm. There is no clipboard history. They want you to use swipe gestures so much, the touch targets to exit fullscreen media are barely functional. If you use browser extensions and a browser other than Safari, to change their settings you don't open the app that bundles the extension; you don't look in the menus of your browser or Safari; you dig several layers into Safari's app preferences to find the extension's settings. After such praise, there are so many rough edges I can't believe iOS users just put up with.

I recently switched the other direction and one rough edge I was surprised to hit on Android is the state of copy and paste for images; on iOS I would copy from Google photos and paste in WhatsApp, now that's just gone and the only option is either Google photos share-to or WhatsApp insert-from. There seems to be pseudo image clipboard support but it's mostly limited to pasting between Chrome tabs afaict.

My switching was due to a build up of minor frictions and frustrations with feeling like a second class citizen on iOS because I use largely gsuite apps rather than being bought into the Apple way for everything, with the last straw being the limitations on Pebble functionality.

I've been a lifelong Android user and still find this a glaring omission. As far as I can tell, copying an image in a browser and then pasting it elsewhere results in a character.

Some of these are design decisions, not rough edges. There’s pros and cons. Eg, centralising settings makes it simpler min some ways and more convoluted in others.

That being said clipboard history would be a nice addition. However I never want to see how long until my morning alarm, that’s one thing from android I don’t miss, it would give me immediate anxiety.

Regardless when you’re used to something it often doesn’t feel like “putting up with it”, and when you’re not used to something things that are totally fine can feel like you’re putting up with an annoyance. This works both ways.

Take any iphone user and put an android phone in their hands and within the first two months there will be a lot of things they’ll say “how do android users put up with this stuff” about too.

It’s fine. They’re both fine, it’s about what you’re used to more than anything.

There are some things that are hugely better on the iPhone, like accessibility setting that can be set on a per-app basis. Overall though, I expect the whole UX feeling to differ, but I am surprised that both camps have sort of given up on feature parity. Back in the days when "pull down to refresh" was novel it seems like iOS and Android meticulously copied each other's innovations.

Yeah, there’s been a culture of stability as the platforms mature I suppose

They dont enforce the centralised settings. That is why it is maddening. Some apps have the settings in the settings app. Some do not.

They're both emphatically not fine from any erudite informed perspective of what has been better in the past.

I've used small-form factor DOS luggable-bricks, miniature Windows7 7" diagonal laptops (Fuji B112, B2131) obsessively since the epoch, also exotics like Fakespace NDOF dataGloves, yada~ and my usual combination of trackball magicMouse and 3D connextion SpaceNavigator on my desktops. Now I've got an Android tablet and an iPhone which are decidedly not 50 years better.

Neglecting the exotics, UX experience in DOS sometimes was better than, e.g. explicitly touching (yes DOS could do that) somewhere in the middle of a paragraph only to have the cursor leap to the beginning, end, select the entire paragraph (iOS18 or so..) or invoke some unintended 'gesture', and then require twenty more touches of adjustments to getthe selection right.

Using external near-fullsize BT keyboards which actually make typing tolerable on my iPh and DroidTab, I'm constantly taken 'aback' (to memories of the past) by having to remove a finger from the keyboard to the screen to accomplish some cursor positioning that might just as well be done with less trouble with a keyboard touchpad or mouse. I do use a tiny tactile feedback BT keyboard with it's own tiny thumb-trackPad which works nominally better than on-screen keybooards when I'm crunched for space and can't use near fullsize kbs.

  Oh.. there's speech-to-text these days. Something about my present set of afflictions is holding me back from venturing forth into that void. 

  Auto-spell correct, anything that interrupts the cadence of typing, because  waiting for CPU cycles or accomodating network delays - none of those 'helpful' things 'intruded' into UXs historically. These Gaffes could be easily wiped away by local high-priority code executing on handhelds which actually pays attention to the people trying to use devices these days, andm actually, timely respons to that.   

 One can see this pathologically simply by repurposing some old, deprecated thing like a Nexus4 phone not as a thermostat but as a Web client for music steaming. The Nex4 actually has a 1/8" mini audio-out jack!! Web pages are so hopelessly loaded down these days the Nex4 struggles, rendering them only slowly. Button presses may go completely unacknowledged for seconds until the button glyph actually changes. Almost like delays in auto-correct!!

  In an epoch of no tactile feedback on glass (maybe audio clicks..) Devs, frameworks, dn toolkits largely ignore all except 'the most recent browser' on 'the latest hardware' case, doing nothing and likely relying entirely on someone/thing esle (is there an acronym ofr this, like DNRY? It's someone ele's problem? >>ISEP<< to acomplish 'low level' requisite confirmations real humans depend on and use to see they've done something that affects the UI, and can continue on, e.g. type-ahead as was the case as of old. Gesture forward!, perhaps.. the UI will catch up. 

  MacOS (as of Monterey, haven't gotten fa/urther) yet - has that 'application' (read: not _user_, nor _context_, nor _task_ centered behavior, _by design_. all AAPL genius, I'm sure. Yes I really want to see *all* my textEdit windows in Spaces. That makes a lot of sense when I have half dozen different unrelated tasks going on and need only another textedit window. Sure, hide *ALL* an applications windows when I hide only a single one. Like I don't exist and it won't take me half hour to find the one I need again. Forget that in X-Windows omg that's _dead_, Jim!! one could push a single window to the bottom of the window stack to get it out of the way and not have to minimize it to go search for it later in a micro-dock stripe with only enough room for half-dozen minimized (oh and fully descriptive)  window icons beside all those appicons. 

  The iPh sub-oops automagic rearrangements of screenfulls of colorful bouncing icons is particulay visceral insanity, All rearranging unpredictably when one is stuck amongst others, like some kind of entertaining visualization of a cocktail party. Android tries to rise to this level with some obscure thing in settings which completely obliterates perhaps tens of minutes of careful arrangement of multiple screenfulls of icons- all gone!  with what of course what is de-regeur in mobile smart-space now, no hint of 'back' or 'undo', anywhere. 
 
   If you want a summary, put an iPh1 next to a Droid, neglect the fact they absolutely will not talk to one another without multiple intervening clouds and laborious and error-prone interactive shovelling of 'takeouts' and exports of data involving visting dozens of WebPges, and likely only though some full sized PC/Mac intermediary, and simply contemplate how wildly baroquely different they are.

  Before I actually got one, I literally was incapable of using an iPh1, despite years of experience with Android and dozens and dozens of prior systems. I could say I'm yet pretty incapable now, a year on. a dozen years of OSX time doesn't help either. So many colorful icons I _NEVER_ use, filling my tiny little screen, glaring at me like they are hoping to induce a seizure. 

  Most glaring - what is abjectly absent with both Android and iOS. 'Messages' well there are different Icons, who wrote the App? Is that Meta's, or Apple's, or Google's, or someone else's messages? Oh my phone buzzed; some notification appears then disappears, irretrievably. Does one have to go the the AppStore, Play, or 'settings' to find out these things in the middle of trying to figure which app to use to reach someone?? 


  No 'info' hover-over (no hover over ever, I guess for touch, yet an uninvented 'gesture') Obscure and infuriating and undocumented (guess one has to buy the book, or read the mags, and fawn for a while) things like the phone UI changing such that the button to hang up a call, even the entire phone UI disappeared over on some other appView perhaps.. That one might search and find three identical names in contacts, none which can be edited with all the data of all the others still visible. None which can usuall be edited _AT ALL_ unless one is deep within the bowels of 'Contacts'. A name but no a phone number displayed. Which of that persons phones am I calling?

  DNRY - a mantra of devs, seriously the bane of UX. forced modeful dives into app ratholes when something is right in front of you and you don't have ten minutes to go into its' 'responsible' app to fix it. And Certaianly *NO WAY* can you edit it right then and there.  No one ever would think some magic invocation might be possible to enable doing literally anything which is possible to to with something that's right in front of you, displayed on your device. Sort of the non-authentication triple-A: anywhere, anytmie, anyplace.

   I've used some remarkably baroque UIs  - seems every single CAD package of any sort has it's own. Some like Blender resembling the empty bridge of the NC1701 Enterprise void of helpful crewmembers. Want to know hoa to use something? Nothings' 'idempotent' anymore - gotta go Google it.

No drag-and-drop, have to thumbsType everything character by character. Copy/cut/Paste selections when not impossible, barely controllable. Time is displayed but not the date. <eyes wander, sees clock at top of screen>

Gotta go.

It's even deeper than that. You know the fancy side button that is designed to be used as a camera shortcut? You don't need that shortcut? Guess that button is unusable for you, because you won't be able to assign it to anything else.

Meanwhile the lock button long-press was hijacked for Siri, so now you have to click it five times if you want to turn off the phone.

And don't get me started on the useless back tap, which now displays a popup randomly, trying to seduce you into using it instead of a physical button, but the detection is so flaky I doubt anyone actually uses it.

Do you mean that new action button thingy above the volume controls? You can reassign to perform something else in the settings. Only a few options to choose from, but it's totally possible.

As for powering off, you can tap the ⏻ symbol in the upper right-hand side corner of the control center.

No they are talking about the new camera button on the same side as the power/siri button. Which is semi-ironic considering the volume buttons still work fine as camera buttons they just don’t also handle zoom (you can slide your finger on the button to adjust zoom). I honestly am more annoyed at the button than enjoy it, yet another button I accidentally press when I nearly drop my phone and now have the camera app open.

You have to long-press that icon, not just tap it. Granted, it enables lockdown too, which is what the physical button used to do. As other have pointed, you can also do that by long-pressing lock + volume up.

It is still ludicrous how Apple had to work around its own decision to not use the camera button for anything else, since allowing us to move Siri to the camera button would leave the lock button for the easy duress gesture it traditionally has been.

You can assign the action button to run a shortcut, which opens up thousands of possibilities for what it can do.

I find the shortcuts extremely powerful all over different parts of the system, but I wish the contours of what it can and can't do were less opaque. Feels like a lot of time-wasting trial and error to discover what is or isn't possible on an iPhone.

If you long press the lock button and volume increase at the same time you can turn the new iPhone off. I can’t imagine doing 5 clicks to do this!

Which is not great considering it's a gesture you're supposed to do in duress, and should be easily done blindly with one hand. At least for my hands, that's too complex of an incantation.

Back tap is an accessibility feature, not intended for general public use.

Accessibility features are intended for general public use and they should work.

Specially on Apple devices, where common customization features are tucked away in the Accessibility menu.

I use it all of the time! I actually love it but I use it for grayscale mode, nothing actually critical. And yeah it triggers randomly but I am never upset to be without color.

I’m curious and suffering from a failure of imagination—why toggle location services regularly?

Why is the toggle allowed at all? Presumably, sometimes we don't want apps to know where we are and record/share that to the highest bidder.

International travellers will know that some apps will alter behavior or refuse to work based on your location, if it's provided. If I use a VPN, I want the app or website to use only the IP location*, not the radio location.

If you are not actively benefitting from GPS, why let the man get a constant lock on your location? Make them suffer with cellphone tower pings.

I too keep GPS off unless I am navigating.

Increased privacy and decreased battery use when disabled, presumably.

Their software quality really went downhill in recent years, really hope whoever comes in after Cook treats it as priority

I'm getting a strong feeling that the first generation of really, really talented people who built iOS in the 2000s have now to a substantial degree moved on/retired. Similar feeling with OS X/macOS.

Please correct me if I'm wrong - it is after all just a feeling.

The problem isn’t so much that the original people aren’t there anymore - that’s just a fact of life, and is unavoidable.

The problem is that software design as a discipline has changed fundamentally in terms of core values. “Old school” designers had a bit more of a human factors training and would think about things like discoverability, information hierarchy, error recovery, etc. And the software from that era tended to be stable for many years in terms of design, in no small part because it shipped in boxes.

Current day designers work almost exclusively from a visual bling/marketing angle - what’s going to look good in a 5 second sizzle reel? And because software can be updated 5 times a day if you want, design is much more subject to the whims of a random exec/PM wanting to push their feature/whatever AB test is popular that week rather than stable, proven foundations.

The web, rather than desktop, being the primarily delivery vehicle for software also changes what kind of design gets built.

And with more and more software being AI designed in the years to come, this won’t get much better I’m afraid.

I have this feeling for every software out there.

It’s not overly far fetched. A lot of the software and platforms we use now we’re all developed around the same time period.

There’s obviously new talent coming in to the industry but the attitudes are different, and talented people like to make new things not work on someone else’s legacy code.

So yeah I think it’ll continue to get worse until something new replaces iOS/Android/macOs/Windows hegemony.

So Apple has a new software crisis on their hands. Echoes of the 90s.

Well Microsoft too, but their customers are long used to working/living in a dumpster fire.

People who like building new things, like building new things.

And people who like getting raises dont like leaving things alone...

IMO Apple grew too much it became another slow megacorp, more connected to their quarterly reports and shareholders than their consumers and engineers. The growing Apple was the one that gave us innovation.

I'm not saying it's dead, not by far, but it has become stale. The biggest innovation it has made in 10+ years was using their mobile processors in laptops.

That is the usual path. You can say the same of Google or Microsoft or pretty much any big tech company.

Its true of many businesses outside tech too.

I think the problem is actually political capital.

Someone who deeply understands how to qualify the product.

But with enough political sway to tell entire orgs of 1000s employees to shred their timelines and planning docs and go back to the lab until it’s right.

Without those two pieces, the problem is that individual devs and leaders know that there’s a problem. But the KPIs and timelines must lurch onwards!

Maybe they started to use some internal "Siri Code" tool ...

They should stick to Claude Code, like everyone else.

I don't think vibecoding is the solution to software quality problems, regardless of what tools/models you are using.

I would say Catalina in 2019 already had enormous issues, there were hard faults in Console pretty much daily that Apple never bothered to fix. (Plus hundreds of minor faults per day)

I had to downgrade to Mojave so the wheels likely came off internally around then.

Recent?

They have been last to get Widgets. They don't have apps I use (terminals, emulators, pulse wave generators). Not to mention Gemini AI is actually really nice for scanning a screen and doing actions with it.

Apple is always 2nd place or worse. Except marketing, they are #1.

"Quality" and "features you happen to want" are two different things.

Their hardware is world class. Software? Not so much.

They sold the Macbook air with Broadwell processors for over 3 years. They only changed the processors because intel discontinued them. They skipped 3 generations of processors.

It would also be fair to say they didn't skip any generation of processors with that gap in updates, they merely sat out the first two years of Intel shipping Skylake five years in a row.

And in the meantime, they did use those first two years of Skylake for the 12" MacBook; the next update to the MacBook Air was after the last update the 12" MacBook ever got. For a while, the 12" MacBook was the more premium, thinner and lighter alternative to the MacBook Air with more advanced technology (and could plausibly have been construed as the intended successor to the MacBook Air), then in 2018 they merged back together with the introduction of the first MacBook Air with a Retina Display.

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say here.

They sold old hardware for the same price 3 years later as if it was a premium product. They didn't really have an excuse, they've been the most valuable public company on earth since like 2010.

Selling an old model for a few years after its replacement shows up is not unusual. The only thing unusual here is that the 12" MacBook didn't end up actually replacing the MacBook Air in the long run, and the next major iteration went back to being called "MacBook Air".

The three-year gap in processor updates you're complaining about disappears when you recognize the 12" MacBook as an attempt to move the product line in a different direction, which Apple partially backtracked on after a few years. That course correction was quite a bit quicker than for the Touch Bar MBPs and the trash can Mac Pro.

> disappears when you recognize the 12" MacBook as an attempt to move the product line in a different direction, which Apple partially backtracked on after a few years.

and if my grandma had wheels she'd be a bicycle. As far as I can glean this was never something that they intended to do.

That's entirely you choosing to ignore real and relevant products that Apple shipped during the time period you claim they were doing nothing. If you're looking for some kind of absolute consistency in when and how Apple uses the "Air" modifier on their product names, you haven't been paying attention.

I'm not really ignoring anything. They shipped real Macbook Airs for years with outdated processors, hence Hardware isn't first class.

What do you mean? For a phone? Are people doing anything on a phone that you can't do on an Android? Be realistic, not idealistic or giving test situations that no one actually uses.

On desktop? Uh... There is a reason Nvidia is #1. Wake me up when I can get Nvidia on Apple.

Long-time iOS user here. My motivation for iPhone has always been "you pay more for fewer features and customization, but the UX is more polished." For the past 5-ish years, the UX has consistently gotten considerably worse. Not just the usual things like the horrible keyboard and atrocious Siri capabilities, it's all the stuff that used to just work. Nothing deal-breaking by itself, but all together feels like death by a thousand cuts. I'm at the point where I'm seriously considering Android.

Also add Liquid Glass, it strains the eyes.

Even siri got worse, when I say call <nickname of my gitfriend> now it does some location based search, and calls sonebody, when near home it is a doctor, when on the other side of the river it is a flower shop, at othe rplaces other random non-contacts, with a contact having the sting it used for search, as her nickname is always part of the called person… It used to work flawlessly as expected…

I would be fine with Siri actually if if could handle simple fixed phrase based task, no AI, as it could a few years ago.

The most frustrating aspect of Siri's quality decline is that super-basic things inexplicably stop working. For years I have been able to say "call <wife's name>" and Siri called my wife. A couple weeks ago she started dialing another contact I haven't talked to in 15 years with a similarly-pronounced name (but different spelling). I had to delete the old contact to stop that behavior from happening.

I mainly use Siri for cooking timers, I really enjoyed the brief period of time where it started flipping 50 minutes and 15 minutes. And then went back, for some reason, but not after I started using things like 14 minutes and 59 seconds or 51 minutes to make it think just a little harder.

First thing I did when I got an iPhone was disable Siri as much as possible.

They said it was Apple Intelligence - they didn't tell you how intelligent it would be!

I'll sometimes ask Siri to take me to a local address, and it'll instead pick some random address in a city 2500+ miles away and start routing me there like that's obviously what i wanted

I’m not sure if gitfriend is a typo.

I’m lonely and really want a gitfriend to push and merge with! Please tell the story of how you got one!

/s for the /s impaired

I'm afraid of commits.

It always ends up with a lot of blaming.

In extreme cases, it terminates with a bisect.

You could wait a bit after forking.

Squash commit can fix the conflict.

Doesn't work if there are too many diffs

Diffs can always be patched up.

From an outsider that used their products years ago.

Apple has shifted from working to produce quality to working to maximize profit ... when it comes to software.

The only thing that would change this would be a new CEO or Apple hemorrhaging money with more people buy alternative solutions.

To be fair ... Microsoft is in the same down hill spiral in quality and the IT industry staying with them allows form the to do this.

Steve would've never let this shit happen.

This is a way that Tim has been failing Apple and its customers. The quality just isn't there any more. "It [doesnt] just work". And the UX is increasingly terrible.

I have also been considering switching to Android. The Apple tax is decreasingly worth it when it don't buy quality.

And to be clear 'do anything to fix them yourself' is as simple as install a third-party keyboard from the official Play Store, if you had such an issue as this with the default 'GBoard'.

You can install third-party keyboards on iOS too, I'm not sure why that's not considered an option in this case.

I had an iPhone for three months until I switched back to Android because the keyboard was trash. The one thing I could not believe is how even SwiftKey on iOS is horrible, even though it's my default keyboard on Android, and I've been very happy with it.

3rd party keyboards are frequently banned from some of the bank apps, delivery services and so on.

This way you have to keep the default one anyway and make even more typos when yet another app forces you to get back to Apple’s keyboard.

I can’t even search stuff in my local delivery with SwiftKey

Oh that's really lame, I didn't know apps could do that.

This comment explains why:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1l2gg3r/thirdparty_ios...

tl;dr: gatekeeping by Apple. Yes, it would probably be embarassing to Apple if someone built a way better touch keyboard.

That definitely explains SOME of why SwiftKey is worse on iOS, but it doesn't explain much of it. It just seems like Microsoft never got it to feature parity.

Anecdote but I've never had issues with the keyboard, or with Siri mishearing me (just to touch on another common pain point that people talk about re: Apple tech). I've always interpreted stories like this as the people who are most affected by it being vocal and speaking out (as they should), while the majority who aren't just have nothing to say because it all works fine.

> Worse, it seems that proprietary means you can't do anything to fix them yourself.

We can install third-party keyboards on iOS, so I'm not sure why that's not being considered here.

> the majority who aren't just have nothing to say because it all works fine.

This is a bad way to go through life with this reasoning. It is pretty well understood that in normal situations the vast majority of people are not vocal even if they feel the same way about things the vocal people are saying. As an example I use a lot, congress critters use a formula to get the pulse of the constituents. If they receive a hand written letter (yes, I learned about the formula when people did that), they'd multiply that by some factor knowing that if one person felt strongly enough to send in a letter that others also felt that way. Phone calls were the same, but with a smaller multiplier as it was easier to make a call that write a letter followed by emails with yet a smaller mult. This was all well before social media, but I'd imagine searching tweets would give a pretty good indicator as well now. A single tweet would be worth something, but tweets with lots of retweets and heavy comment activity would be something else. Even if a tweet is something done pretty much on a whim with little thought behind it like that letter.

The silent majority is called that for a reason. It doesn't mean they are happy or content. Ignore that reality at your own peril.

> As an example I use a lot, congress critters use a formula to get the pulse of the constituents. If they receive a hand written letter (yes, I learned about the formula when people did that), they'd multiply that by some factor knowing that if one person felt strongly enough to send in a letter that others also felt that way. Phone calls were the same, but with a smaller multiplier as it was easier to make a call that write a letter followed by emails with yet a smaller mult. This was all well before social media, but I'd imagine searching tweets would give a pretty good indicator as well now. A single tweet would be worth something, but tweets with lots of retweets and heavy comment activity would be something else. Even if a tweet is something done pretty much on a whim with little thought behind it like that letter.

This is an extremely popular bit of apocrypha that's repeated ad nauseam across reddit. It's more like a political truism than an observation on the behaviors of the silent majority re: Apple users.

> The silent majority is called that for a reason. It doesn't mean they are happy or content. Ignore that reality at your own peril.

It doesn't mean they're discontent either.

> This is an extremely popular bit of apocrypha that's repeated ad nauseam across reddit.

This is so tiring of a lame excuse. I don't use reddit, so I don't know what that has to do with anything. As a high school kid, I volunteered with my congressman in his office and heard this directly from people working in the office. You can try to snipe anonymously from the internet, but it doesn't make me wrong.

I'm not sniping you, nor am I using it as an excuse — I'm just saying that what you've related is such common knowledge that it's become a political truism, apocryphal folklore you can find posted 15 times per day on Reddit and other social media. I didn't mean it as an attack on your reasoning or your personal experience, but it's too late to edit my comment to change it. I apologize.

Again though, I don't understand the point of your comment. Not everything on the internet is made up. While it is healthy to have a heavy amount of suspicion that things promoted on the web are not true, you don't have to throw the baby out with the bath water. Some of the users on reddit are not total wackos.

o/ I'm a silent majority member for sure. I've seen these complaints before and I nod my head every time remembering that "Oh yeah, this DOES suck but I just put up with it because it happens so frequently and there ain't no way I'm switching ecosystems".

Sidenote: please Apple, if I type the same misspelled (but not) thing two times in a row, just leave it be. And no, I did not mean "what the he'll". And why is selecting text so hard.

    …or with Siri mishearing…

I just want a small set of commands that are easy to differentiate from each other, and a readback before executing the command. This is what phones did back in the days of Symbian, and I could reliably use one from a motorcycle helmet intercom without ever touching my phone. It's what air traffic controllers do, because even people can't reliably understand each other.

We've had decades of Apple and Google pretending that their voice recognition is so flawless it can understand anything and execute it immediately, but for petty much everyone except yourself they can't, so I can no longer use a hands-free phone. I'm glad I'm not blind.

> Sounds like you won the lottery. I've never used a voice recognition engine that worked even close to reliably, nor seen anyone else.

I think I'm just #blessed with the specific American accent (or "no accent") they must have trained it on lol. On the other hand, Siri frequently mishears my wife who's from California but doesn't have what I would call an accent any different from mine, so who knows.

My wife is ESL (although without much discernible accent) and Siri understands her every time.

I have a vaguely white trash Maryland accent and that fucker needs to hear everything three times from me.

anecdatum: I've encountered the dumb keyboard behavior and haven't written any scathing blog posts about it, I've just grumbled out loud and upvoted the ones I've seen.

So consider the possibility that many people are affected but haven't reached the threshold of writing something about it.

Yeah I used to love the iOS keyboard 5 or 6 years ago but now I find it completely baffling, and the way it goes back into my sentence to change words around the word I just typed is very frustrating as I will then have to edit those words back.

Dear Tim Apple, I meant exactly what I typed please stop changing it because your product manager doesn't think I know English.

I'm definitely willing to consider that. If it wasn't clear from my original comment, that was just my own impression based on my own experience and observation of HN/Reddit's anti-Apple trends over the past few years. It wasn't meant to be a rigorous assessment of all opinions regarding the state of apple devices.

'Lots of people say this, but I don't agree' really doesn't logically lead to

'therefore, the majority of people probably agree with me'.

Lots of people say they love in India, and that is not true for new. That doesn't make the likeliest fact that a majority of the world lives in the UK and, while India is an oddly vocal 'minority'.

What?

I'm part of the silent majority and I'm not speaking up because I have so little trust in Apple to ever fix anything that I'm just riding out my 2nd gen SE on IOS 17 until it physically stops working. At which point I'm going to seriously consider whether I actually need a smart phone at all.

Except the OS decides at random times to switch back so you end up having to use a keyboard you're not used to. I get why. I don't agree with that why.

When I had iPhone for work, the first thing I did was install gboard. Iphone's native keyboard has always been less accurate. I have no idea how to describe it because I haven't researched it.

I am an android and windows user but i have an ipad and i listen to an apple-centric podcast and I'm amazed at the things that don't work. I've been using swiftkey on android since before MS bought it so I kept using it on ipad. The ipad reverts to the apple keyboard all the time.

On macos there was a post a day or two ago about window arrangement which seems very inferior to windows. I was in the mac lab at school and was surprised that there's no multi item clipboard built in. The answer seems to be use a 3rd party app for these but it seems odd that such basic things aren't built in.

I also had that idea before I tried to use Apple products to help friends... I really was amazed at the hoops you had to jump through for things which should have been really simple. That was a long time ago.

More like, "everything is proprietary, so you get locked in".

Apple’s implementation of desktops/workspaces is maddening.

In the US Apple is the

"Use it or your social group will not want to interact with you"

option.

Outside of tech circles (where apparently people easily get their entire family and friend network on signal), people want to use imessage and only want to use imessage. Android phones can't support imessage because they are poor low quality phones that cannot handle imessage. So you need a high quality phone like iphone so you can use imessage and easily communicate with your friends and family.

This strategy of leveraging friends and family to pressure people into getting iPhones was intentional and came out in the Epic trial lawsuit.

I shit you not there is a large percentage of people in the US that think Android phones are not capable of sending pcitures and videos.

> Android phones can't support imessage because they are poor low quality phones that cannot handle imessage.

Android phones can't use iMessage because Apple never opened it up, contrary to what Steve Jobs was hinting at back when it was released.

Nowadays I believe you can get a blue bubble when chatting from an Android with an iPhone user by using RCS / JOYN.

You don't get a blue bubble for using RCS. That's still reserved for iMessage exclusively. (At least, on iOS 26 in the US on T-Mobile)

Yeah, there's a myth spread on the internet after Apple announced rcs support in iMessage that it was the end of green bubbles for android users. But green bubbles still exist; they never meant the other party is just using sms, they meant the other party isn't using iMessage.

Pretty sure that was sarcasm.

> "Use it or your social group will not want to interact with you"

Maybe your "social group". If your friends refuse to talk to you because of the cell phone brand you use, I have bad news for you: They might not really be great friends.

That’s not what this is about. If you have a group chat with one android user, it used to make all aspects of the interactions clunkier. Green bubbles, sending a new text instead of reactions, etc. as such, people would get left off of a list. Those small interactions add up over time.

Man, if you seriously would exclude someone from social interactions because of the colour of their speech bubble in group messages, I dread to think how m stressful it would be to interact with people who's entire bodies were different colours.

Not even joking. 'Its legit stressful if someone's messages use a different colour background' is not logically compatible with being ok having different coloured people in view. I'm not actually calling you a racist, because it would also mean you get distressed if people wear different colour clothes and have avatars that look different, and I think a social group like that would have struggled enough to realise that the solution might not be 'get the Wrongly Coloured Group Text Guy to purchase a different phone rather than, idk, stop spending so much time staring at screens.

But it was amusing to imagine how wildly conformist one would have to be to actually dislike someone because their phone number doesn't have enough 7's or their name is longer than everyone else's so it looks untidy or whatever.

He's not saying HE is this way, he's saying the US culturally is this way.

Which... uh, yeah, it is. The US is superficial, it's vain, it's racist. I thought everyone knew that.

If your "friends" care enough about small stuff like that to cut you out of their conversations, they're not your friends.

You're misunderstanding the situation and reading malice into teenagers who are living in a world of decisions that were made before they were even born.

It's not "small stuff", it's the entire medium through which the conversation happens. It's the entire thing.

Do you "cut" your mom out of your group chats with your coworkers? Do you "cut" your coworkers out of intimate chats with your partners? Of course you do, because people maintain multiple overlapping group chats.

In group chats with your blue-bubble friends, they will be easier to read (because of the shades of color), media quality will be better, you can add more people to the group chat after it's made, you can text people from your iPad or Macbook, you can text people over WiFi even when you don't have service. When each text used to cost money, it was also a huge deal that iMessage (on WiFi) was free. This is on top of all the other chat features like playing games, pins, etc.

A lot of these limitations are intentional so that Apple can make more money, some of them are just limitations of SMS / RCS. But the point is that this is not the kids faults, this isn't bullying.

I am not misunderstanding the situation. If you omit me from a group message with our circle of friends because of the color of my speech bubble, you are not a real friend. Full stop.

Just the phrase "blue bubble friends" strikes me as absolutely wild, foreign and ridiculous. But, I admit to being almost 50.

The "blue bubble" just signifies someone's using the iMessage platform, and we still have multiple messaging platforms nowadays. Think of it like "Usenet friends", "IRC friends", "ICQ friends", "AIM friends", etc.

I don't know you, of course we're not friends. I addressed this in my comment. There are group chats you are part of and ones you won't be part of. Most people maintain multiple different overlapping group chats.

Seriously, sounds more like a local user group than anyone who cares about you

My favorite part about this is how you blame it on your friend, not on Apple.

This just isn't true anymore (besides the green).

Yes. Mean girls at school are mean. If everyone has the same color bubble they’ll just find something else to be mean about.

This is really reductionist. This isn't a bullying or in-group / out-group thing.

Someone who is not on iMessage will be excluded from iMessage group chats, just as someone who is not on Snapchat will be excluded from Snapchat group chats, just as someone who is not on Instagram will be excluded from Instagram group chats, someone who is not on WeChat will be excluded from WeChat group chats.

iMessage has supported RCS in group chats for more than a year. It’s a non-issue, technology-wise

This is correct. Everybody has green bubbles in Europe even on iOS, because everybody is using WhatsApp. But mean people are still mean.

I'm not a highschooler, and you don't understand the point.

If you're not an American younger than 35, this is probably something you don't understand because you didn't experience first-hand.

It's not a scenario where "your friends refuse to talk to you", it's "there are so many people to talk to, and there is a lot of friction around talking to this one person". You don't get the chance to become their friends in the first place.

If you can't get on iMessage, you can't be in iMessage group chats.

Similarly, if you don't have a cell phone, you can't text. If you don't have a landline, people can't call you. If you don't have the internet, you can't get on chatrooms. You wouldn't expect a teenager in the 90s to give up a landline in favor of living exclusively by handwritten letter.

This is the state of friendship in the social media age.

> Android phones can't support imessage because they are poor low quality phones that cannot handle imessage. So you need a high quality phone like iphone so you can use imessage and easily communicate with your friends and family.

You are missing the /s right?

The last sentence makes it clear that it is sarcasm

Texting images and videos to iPhone users used to be much worse than it is now, but it's gotten better in the past few years if my (Android) experience with my family (iPhones) is any indication.

The hard to tell part is I'm also crossing carriers to message them, so that might have been the issue as well.

> I shit you not there is a large percentage of people in the US that think Android phones are not capable of sending pcitures and videos.

Source? Would love to read this one lol

It was kind of true a very long time ago except in potato quality. And if you were out of data, but was connected on WiFi instead, you actually couldn't. And you still can't text a large video across the Android / iPhone chasm, can you?

You can send decently sized videos between Android and iOS assuming RCS is enabled. Attachment sizes can now often be up to 100MB, where as with MMS you'd often be limited to maybe a megabyte or two.

I'm regularly sending/receiving gifs and decent quality short videos between iOS and Android these days.

‘Potato quality’ ahahahahahahhaa I hope this was iPhone autocorrect to prove the point.

No, it's an old phrase. It came from the question, "Was this filmed on a potato?" when someone posted a video of particularly bad quality, as if their phone was a potato.

It wasn’t too long ago either. I mentioned it before in prior comments but due to how MMS works at one major carrier (verizon) they sent picture quality back to pre-smartphone days for a large % of android users.

The quick explainer is phones send a user agent with the request to fetch a media message, this user agent contains a link to a file that describes what the device can handle. Apple and Blackberry hosted these files themselves, Verizon hosted most of the android ones on its network itself. They decommissioned the server hosting them a few years ago which made it so all affected devices pulled the lowest potato quality image down for compatibility. Huge number of complaints.

It's a phrase that's been around for years to mean "poor quality" (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/recorded-with-a-potato). One theory behind the term is that the recording device was so bad/low-tech, it could be powered by a potato battery.

For smartphones, I think it has always meant you could replace your smartphone with a potato and get the same functionality.

i wanted to hate apple so much at the advent of the smartphone era, so when i made the switch from flip to smart, i went with a samsung and gingerbread and it was such a universally awful experience compared to the iphone mobiles my employer issued (before BYOD). i gutted it out through the life of the contract and switched to iphone for my personal as well and have been quite happy up until ios 18. if there is no appreciable change in the next version, i plan to export my curated music library/playlists and walk away from my "sign in with apple id" accounts and set up new ones. liquid glass is just that painful and hostile of a user experience.

I agree, Liquid Glass is the reason why I'll stop buying Apple products. In the meantime, my Mac is going to be stuck to Sequoia.

>"Use it or your social group will not want to interact with you"

I see this in middle and lower-middle class people.

But in the upper-middle class, this is a non issue. We know how Apple manipulates people who struggle to spend $50/mo on a phone.

This feels like 5 year old social media bullshit.. can we let it rest?

5 year old as in .. a child of 5 years old

I have a lot of issues with dictation as well which I feel has gotten much worse as it gets "smarter." It used to take literal dictation & I could say "comma" "period" etc. to insert punctuation. Now it tries to guess when commas or full stops should be added and it's horrible. If I pause to take a breath it puts a comma or period, sometimes entirely changing the meaning of the sentence.

Recently I said "I ran into this too earlier on the project" and it wrote "I run into this tube earlier on the project." So now I'm running into a tube... because this makes more sense than "too"? And it can never write the names of immediately family members I text about every single day, and it has 5th grade vocabulary so if I said I demurred or that something was germane or any other word beyond the 500 most common words it butchers it.

What I want: 1. let me handle the punctuation manually 2. assume a broader vocabulary 3. let me specify how people's names are pronounced!! How are we this many years in and it still misinterprets my wife's name on a daily basis?

Here's a recent conversation I had with Siri.

Me: Hey Siri, set the living room lights to 100%.

Siri: 100% = 1

This has been working for 6-7 years without any issues, and suddenly Siri is giving me math lessons. What the hell is happening in this company?

Me: Hey Siri, turn on the [such and such] light

Siri: Shows the literal text “Hey Siri, turn on the [such and such] light” on the screen and does absolutely nothing. It’s an edit box. Pressing enter has no effect.

Siri is about old enough to be getting a drivers license now, and I swear it's going through the same brain development woes.

Same thing has happened to me with Siri. It's absolutely garbage.

For years, I've said "Hey Siri, turn on Bright" because I have a "Bright" Home scene configured. About 2 months ago, the HomePod updated and now responds consistently with "Pause in the bedroom?"

Nothing is playing in the Bedroom. Nothing CAN play in the bedroom, there's just lights in the Bedroom. No speakers. What the heck is it even _trying_ to pause.

It's infuriating.

It made me remember how Siri used to turn on the lights when you say “Let there be lights”. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work anymore either. It was a cool gimmick that made us chuckle.

Didn't they add name pronunciation guidance a few years ago?

https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/correct-siri-pronunciation-...

I'm curious though if that affects recognition as well as audio generation.

It's extremely painful that there's are free, OSS dictation tools that can run on-device, that are so much better than Apple's dictation, and yet it's quite difficult to use them on the iPhone. I'm referring to Whispr. Microphone access is a pain for custom keyboards -- for good reason, but still.

Same frustration here. It’s somewhat painful for me to type but using dictation on the iphone is so terrible I prefer the physical pain.

As for names, I an also baffled. Most people in my family have either a Brazilian Portuguese or German name, but my work life is in English, so guess what, no getting anyone’s name right!

I still use spoken punctuation and it works ok so long as you don’t pause. E.g. “ hey siri text my wife I’m not sure when I’ll be home comma but I’ll text you when I’m leaving” if I say that without pausing, it puts the comma in the right place

I think the point is the opposite. Heaven forbid you might need to take a moment to think: now you get a comma or period

Perhaps but it was always like that so it hasn’t regressed

I struggled with family member names too until I realized I can create shortcuts for them (usually just their initials). Now I just type the shortcut and it always works. Joy!

Reminds me of some research I once did in order to reduce typos on low-end Firefox OS devices. The capacitive touchscreen had horrible limitations, especially for typing. It had bands across the screen where it could only detect one finger at a time. Once you picked up typing speed it ended up in similar misses you see in the YouTube video, albeit even worse (you end up with a letter between your two fingers).

Eventually found two simple but effective ways to improve autocorrect/typing performance. First build a personalized and adaptive touch model trained on the device itself, mainly to fix simple typos. Second to fix low end screen limitations, use simple heuristics based on touchstart, touchmove and touchend [1].

Anyways, I'm no iPhone user but interesting to read. It would drive me nuts.

[0]: https://www.brianweet.com/2015/03/24/implement-touch-model.h... [1]: https://www.brianweet.com/2015/04/08/low-end-touchscreen-lim...

It will be hard, but I’m transitioning out of Apple ecosystem regardless of whether they improve.

Just like Windows 11, I get ads whether I want them or not - just got a push notification for a new financial product (!!!) despite going out of my way to opt out.

iOS 26 made my 16 Pro, practically brand new, feel slow. I upgraded because my 13 mini was slow, and I chose Apple in the first place because they had some of the best performing phones (especially cpu/gpu; they always had less ram but before llm it didn’t matter).

The keyboard is horrible, but I don’t trust Google or Microsoft keyboards either; I think my next phone will be graphene; just waiting to see who their new hardware partner is.

I loved Apple TV because it was fast; under 26 it is slow.

I chose Mac for best in class hardware. That is unfortunately unchanged; really hoping snapdragon X 2 elite has good Linux support.

My Apple Watch, despite doing nothing new it didn’t used to do, has also become slow and annoying, and its battery was never as good as it should have been. When I jump to Android I think garmin is probably the best choice, but maybe there are good wearables now. Unfortunately Android doesn’t have its act together re:built in health data database.

Replacing Athlytic and keeping my history will be one of the biggest challenges in the transition.

Competitors unfortunately still have huge blind spots even if some of the core experiences are better.

I'm curious why my experience with Windows 11 is so different from what I regularly read. It was some years ago now, so I don't remember exactly what configuration steps I went through, but presumably I turned off ads when I first installed. And so, I don't get ads. I don't recall ever seeing an ad embedded in Windows. Are people talking about Edge (which I don't use) or inside the Microsoft Store (which I very rarely use, but I presume does have sponsored apps or whatever)? Or is this mostly people who don't use Windows, repeating what others have said? Or are these ads targeted at users who aren't me?

People just like to hate on Windows. The home version has some issues and limitations, but if you are willing to invest in the Pro version, it's mostly fine, really.

There are still many complaints to be had, but the fact is that Windows does what it needs to do on a wide range of hardware without much hassle if you know what you are doing.

There is a setting that turns off many of the notifications that irritate people.

Settings -> System -> Notifications. Scroll to the bottom, expand Additional settings. Uncheck "Suggest ways to get the most out of Windows and finish setting up this device" and "Get tips and suggestions when using Windows".

I get more prompts from macOS about Apple products than I get from Windows about Microsoft products after unchecking those two settings.

Your Windows 11 experience strongly, strongly depends on where you are. Are you inside the EU? 90% of the crap people complain about is simply illegal and you don't see any of it.

In the US, of course, our government loves to let citizens be the product for corporations. America: by the corporations for the corporations.

Even more true now than it has been in maybe 100 years.

I've also never seen an ad in windows 11.

I did uninstall all of the weird apps like "News" "Weather" etc.

I've been an Android & Mac & Windows user for the last 15 years, (Windows just for gaming), iOS only on an old iPad, and have no plans to change that, but while I do have frustrations with all 3 systems, iOS is wildly irritating to me. Thankfully I've only been forced to use it on a phone for a short term work requirement, but my god I was happy to not have an iPhone in my life after that. Keyboard and notifications were unavoidably annoying to interact with. I've always loved Apple hardware though, and hope that they can turn things around on the mac software side

> When I jump to Android I think garmin is probably the best choice, but maybe there are good wearables now. Unfortunately Android doesn’t have its act together re:built in health data database.

I have a Garmin Fenix 8 - the latest flagship. I love the look of the watch but it does not feel snappy to use in any way- significant lag after each button press. Not enough to make me immediately go back to an Apple Watch but I do miss the snappiness.

But the Connect app is actually pretty good in terms of a central place to look at the stats.

Garmin Connect app is terrible. It's outdated, it doesn't cash anything at all - you have to have internet connection to see anything. They are pushing for Connect+ subscription. And their watches are getting more expensive without any real innovations in harware (most of new features you get, say, from Forerunner 570 or 970 probably could have been easily enabled on Forerunner 265 or 965 with software updates).

Coros has a nice app. A lot of elite athletes are seemingly switching to Coros wearables (especially the HR bicep band). Alas, it's slightly behind Garmin in terms of accuracy and functionality.

Suunto is similar to Coros - nice app, lower accuracy and less functions.

I've read a lot of complaints about Polar's Flow app - it is also outdated and the data is grouped so counterintuitively, it takes forever to find.

There's also Amazfit (AFAIK it's a subsidiary of Xiaomi?). I used their watch (GTR) a while ago and it was unremarkable, but I also weren't doing any sports back then so I can't judge it from the standpoint of activity tracking. They are Chinese company (as is Coros btw), which makes it slightly uncomfortable for me to share my health data with them.

In other words, if you find an ideal sports watch, please let me know!

With Android (GrapheneOS), I can customize stuff on the phone that you can't customize with iOS.

It reminds me of Apple's 1984 commercial, except that Apple users are the ones sitting down, all looking identical, drinking the Kool-Aid from Big Brother.

The irony is that things like HealthKit make it easy to build a system out of parts that just work together - my glucose monitor, watch, and scale all feed data into my nutrition tracking app seamlessly, and if I want an AI spin on the data, I use a separate app that reads the same data. Very hard to do that on Android.

My iPhone seamlessly adapts to my working context using focus modes automation - Android still doesn’t do that; maybe they have launchers with equivalent features.

Android makes it easy to customize the things I don’t want to customize, and hard to customize the things I do.

Which customizations do you find most beneficial?

+1. From the original post, I found this video to be particularly damning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo

Does anyone have an explanation for how something like this passes QC at a company with the resources of Apple? Is this video misrepresenting something?

For years I thought I had a faulty touchscreen and started relying on dictation more and more. Seeing this video saved me from going insane. They must have crunched the numbers and decided that these choices benefit more people than not. BUT HOW!

I keep talking to friends and family who aren't techies and use iPhone. They believe their typing has gotten worse or something like that.

Don Norman has written about this. Users are more likely to blame themselves than the tool.

It's a weird sort of almost gaslighting.

I suffer from chronic migraine and had begun to think my typing failures were early signs of severe cognitive decline…

Watching that makes me irrationally angry. I use the Google Keyboard myself and I find it's a lot better.

> The iOS keyboard has been broken since at least iOS 17...But I came crawling back to iOS because I'm weak and the orange iPhone was pretty

So the keyboard has been broken since iOS 17 (>2 years [1]), and to show your displeasure, you bought an iPhone Pro?

Your threat of leaving in 3 months rings hollow. All Apple has to do is verbally say things will get better and, if they can't even do that, you only commit to leaving for two years.

If you want to leave, just leave. I am confident that blue bubble pressure will exist in 3 months. I am also confident that the iPhone 18 Pro will be pretty. If a nice color and blue bubbles are enough to keep you in the iOS ecosystem today, why should anyone believe you will leave tomorrow?

[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/06/ios-17-makes-iphone-m...

There are exactly two mainstream phone providers. Neither is perfect and there are heaps of tiny (fixable!!) annoyances in both.

I do not expect someone to be a “single issue voter” with regards to any one bug. There is significant friction in switching platforms and you are just as likely to be annoyed by something else in the competition.

> So the keyboard has been broken since iOS 17 (>2 years [1]). 2 years? How is this even possible? This is a major bug affecting more than 1 billion iPhone users and they did nothing? And even the Youtube video is from 3 months ago. This is insane. Why? Only sane reason I can think of is that they are from a satanic cult and deliberately torturing 1 billion people in subtle ways.

> orange iPhone was pretty and the Pixel 10 was boring

I guess this is really important to people.

One time I broke an Android, which happened to be white, and spoke to the insurer for a replacement. The agent insisted she find me another white phone, not another Android, and though an iPhone was suitable. She couldn't grok how the OS and phone specs were more important than the color.

Right? Most people encase it in an opaque phone case anyway.

> You were the "it just works" company. Now you're just a fruit that I used to know.

This had me simultaneously chuckling and sad, because it feels very true.

Switching from Android, I was shocked by how much in fact did not just work. I kept a running list of basic features that were clearly broken.

Especially around text editing. It seems like they made some fundamental mistakes with their text inputs that they are playing hard defense on. I never know if a given field is going to respond to long-press, double tap, or what context menu I will get if any.

Totally agree. I swapped about 2 years ago (work requirements), and I battle against the Apple keyboard every single day. I prefer the Android keyboard in every single way - it’s more intuitive, works better, more logical, significantly better auto-correct, significantly better text selection, much better prediction, and so on.

Everything seems so much more intuitive and just easier in Android.

For how good the Apple hardware is compared to the rest (especially MacBooks), the software really lets it down.

I agree that this behavior is insane and should be fixed.

Do however note that it is possible to install another keyboard on iOS, which may alleviate your suffering before you switch to Android in about 120 days.

Personally I rely on Gboard [0] every day for the simple reason that it auto-detects several (more than two) languages, and of course it has the added benefit of not having this crazy bug. Gboard is google software however, so it does come with huge privacy issues, and others will hopefully point out better alternatives.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gboard

Gboard for iOS has been discontinued though. On top of that, 3rd party keyboards are a bit limited on iOS (which might be a good thing for some people).

Has it? It's still on the App Store. Is it just not in active development?

Last update was almost four years ago: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gboard-the-google-keyboard/id1...

Gboard is a lot better than the native keyboard. Strange that OP is going to such lengths to complain when iOS supports other keyboards.

The main benefit I've found with Gboard is a larger vocabulary, and perhaps a less aggressive autocorrect that doesn't constantly try to correct technical terms into similar common words.

I’m not suggesting this is the author’s reason, but avoiding a Google product that keep a trail of everything you type seems like a strong argument.

Via iOS permissions you can restrict internet access to the keyboard and it still works well.

I can guarantee that's 100% not his reason given that his stated alternative is switching to Android.

Yeah fair point

I’ve tried Gboard and SwiftKey on iOS.

Not sure if Google just gave up on updating the iOS variant or if Apple holds it back intentionally (probably a bit of both) but they pale in comparison to their Android counterparts.

I’d prefer a useable stock keyboard but I take your point.

SwiftKey also crashes daily. There's no good keyboard for iphones, at least for my stubby fingers. I've literally won local mobile typing speed contests (so it's not user error I dare say) and the last five-ish years that I've been on ios have been a total and utter misery. If I had some cash floating around I would be back on android.

One of the reasons in recent times to go to Apple ecosystem was supposedly better privacy protections and decoupling from dependency on Google. You would pay extra for the UX and privacy among other things. Installing third party keyboard means that they can see what I type.

Apple has a privacy setting for each keyboard that restricts if they have network access.

Glad to learn this! I didn't know about it but I also double-checked the UI and it says in a warning dialog that the third party will be able to see everything I type and the network setting isn't mentioned there.

Anyway, my point regarding the UX still stands. Apple's UX is barely as good as other major player's - not great, not terrible. Mediocrity isn't what Apple should be aiming at.

Gboard hasn't been updated in 4 years and as a result the UI doesn't always display properly. It's especially jarring on iOS 26. It doesn't fit into the OS keyboard target area properly (on my iPhone 17 Pro, at least).

I've tried pretty much every reputable third-party keyboard app in the App Store. Unfortunately, there's really nothing better than the stock one.

I have Gboard and have weird issues with it crashing randomly. Not sure if it's because it's hamstrung by the limitations of Apple's support for alternative keyboards or what.

Any properly supported third-party keyboards? Swiftkey was bought by Microsoft and lost my vote. Gboard stopped updating.

+1

I do the same, and I find it way better.

As a longtime Android user, I can't imagine going back to iOS for a number of reasons:

- Still no multiple-accounts feature in WhatsApp - No app cloning (multiple versions of the same app with different logins) - Crazy monthly storage fees with no ability to control photo storage on phone - All google apps including Chrome, Gmail & Maps work better on Android and sync with Chrome on desktop - No gemini built-in - No fingerprint reader - No multiple physical sims - Slower charging

I'm really not sure why anyone would pay more for an iPhone besides social signalling.

Yep. Basically the iPhone was very good at the start because Jobs smelled the future with his legendary intuition, but it was still a flawed product. They won because it took competitors years to meaningfully catch up.

But now they are falling behind quite hard. In general, you just can't compete alone against a free market, and Apple gets a lot more profit compared to their volume, but they are unable to use it for meaningful improvement.

If nothing changes at Apple, I think they'll have a hard time in the next decade. Apple being forced to rely on a competitor for AI is just the sign of complacency that will get them in trouble.

I suspect 99% of users have no use for multiple versions of the same app.

€10/month for 2TB storage is pretty good. I don’t use any google apps, or Chrome. Charge overnight so speed doesn’t matter.

Now the parts you didn’t mention:

- Apple makes great hardware, iPhones last forever (typing this from my virtue-signaling 2020 phone, my 2007 iPod touch still works).

- A similar spec Android costs about the same but usually has a flimsy plastic build and will become unsupported in 2-4 years

- Amazing integration with MacOS; continuity, camera, seamless sync for everything, seeing SMSes and calls on your laptop

And most importantly, despite the seriously degrading quality in the past years, the Apple ecosystem is still ahead in software and design. iOS apps are better designed, especially third party ones. They rarely crash, I go years without restarting my phone.

Android is definitely a lot closer than it was 7-8 years ago, but Material UI is still a complete clusterfuck and who wants to entrust Google with all their data? Apple not being an advertising company plays a huge role here.

> €10

Apple has frozen their currency matrix at 2022-2023 levels, so in plenty countries they charge much (20%+) more than that.

> A similar spec Android costs about the same but usually has a flimsy plastic build and will become unsupported in 2-4 years

Maybe 10 years ago, but this couldn't be further from the truth today.

I have an iPhone SE, and social signaling has literally not cross my mind at any point when deciding for it. It has the perfect size and form factor, I know it will be supported for at minimum 5y, and the cost is perfectly reasonable. That’s pretty much the only things I care about. It also has a fingerprint reader, and none of your reasons are things I do care about. I think I pay 2.99€ for monthly storage? Which is fine, that’s low enough that I couldn’t care less if that’s cheaper somewhere else

So, that’s a data point if you want to consider others perspective

It's so many things other than the keyboard I notice are just like, "wtf, who and why decided this was a good idea?"

In safari browser, if you want to go to the menu where you can favorite/bookmark a page, the tiles on the menu are literally different and in different order every time. Sometimes you might need to press an additional button to find what you're looking for, sometimes it's there, sometimes clicking "favorite" will just go "ok, favorited" message, other times it asks for an extra prompt. Like, why? Just be consistent, I can adjust to all the "PM trying to save their role by reinventing something that isn't needed" like liquid glass, but the usability itself suffers all over the place in the latest ios releases. It's very difficult to understand, because up until a little while ago it had been consistently very good.

Let me name names for you: Alan Dye is responsible for it, he messed up all the Apple operating systems and then fucked off to Meta.

Android: Here's the phone; knock yourself out

Apple: Father knows best (but Father is getting old and sometimes forgets things)

Windows: If only we understood what the ancestors knew

More like: Apple: Father died a while back, but Step-Father is here now and he doesn't love you.

Cook is, ultimately, the enshittifier of things Apple. The buck stops with him. But he does things to keep the stock price up so...

If Steve jobs was still around, the iPhone would be considerably worse.

This is a bold statement - care to elaborate?!

I think they mean worse at generating services revenue. Everyone knows that’s the iPhones primary goal and purpose.

This is a bold statement - care to elaborate?! :)

Android is more "here's a pocket panopticon we hope you won't unconfigure"

Apple is more "here's this refined product which we designated as refined after a heavy session snooting cocaine off a toilet seat"

To be fair my iPhone spys on me in much more actively creepy ways than my android ever did. Showing ads for nearby pizza places at lunchtime on the homescreen. Telling me at about the time of my son's soccer that I may be interested in going to the place where his soccer is about now (despite me never using navigation on my phone) etc

Not sure how you managed to get it to do that. Mine doesn't!

Not sure where ads for pizza places are coming from, but the suggested maps trips are part of the “Significant Locations” feature. That data is end-to-end encrypted across your devices and is unreadable by Apple. It can be disabled if you don’t want it tracked.

> That data is end-to-end encrypted across your devices and is unreadable by Apple.

Sure, Jan. Next you'll tell me that Google isn't evil and Apple truly does care about human rights.

Just to play both sides here, on pixel there is a news feed if you swipe the home screen right. It is now infused with ai summaries rather than the first few lines of the story with no way to go back.

Course, I can switch to a different launcher, but it makes it much less of a "batteries included" sort of product.

There is a setting to disable this. Long press on your home screen background > Home Settings > Toggle "Swipe to access Google app"

Right, but I appreciated easy access to a news feed.

> and I caved to the blue bubble pressure

Ha! I feel this. I was a long time Android user since the original G1 (aka HTC Dream). Was a strictly Pixel phone user for my last 4 phones. Recently jumped over to iPhone. For the most part I’m enjoying it.

There are minor things, like the keyboard being annoying to type with. For instance, when I’m typing something into the URL bar of Safari, for some reason, I’m constantly hitting the period key next to the space bar, and I feel like I’m not anywhere close to it.

I also find it confusing how to dismiss the keyboard. Android had a very clear icon for this, on iOS it’s just a checkmark which is a little misleading in my opinion.

On iOS, speech to text is pretty good, but I have to annunciate clearly, where I felt that android was a little bit more forgiving.

Another issue I’ve noticed is that I don’t think the GPS (or maybe it’s just Google maps) is as accurate as it is on android. On iOS, if I’m on a highway it sometimes thinks I’m on the shoulder road next to the highway. So I’m constantly being rerouted to get back on the highway. I felt like I didn’t have that on android.

Back to the blue bubble thing though. Being the one and only android user amongst my friends and even my wife, I was always hearing about how I ruined the chat. I didn’t realize until switching over to iOS just how integrated everything is and what you can do in the chat when everybody else is on iOS, like editing previous messages, being able to answer messages via your Messages app on your laptop, and of course, not having images and videos getting compressed terribly. Although RCS chat improved that more recently.

One thing I do love is that automation and shortcuts is something that’s natively part of the system and that I don’t to install some app like Tasker or whatever the more modern version of that is.

At this point, I really like both of the OSes. What made me actually finally switch over was that everyone I knew who had an iPhone would have it for like five or more years and I was going through pixel phones every two years. I got tired of spending all that money.

You can send messages from desktop on Android too.

I really wish someone could start a legitimate competitor to Apple. They are so bloated and just squeezing service revenue out of us. The M chips are great but the software is so buggy.

What would a "legitimate competitor" look like to you?

Samsung and LG make high-end phones, and there are plenty of good personal computer vendors. And Windows is certainly a desktop OS that some people choose.

Apple doesn't offer any services unique to itself. It does offer a slick-looking and well-marketed "ecosystem" which is really just a bunch of different things that you could get from other vendors.

That competitor is GrapheneOS. For now, the OS runs on Pixel phones only, but they plan to release their own phone in partnership with an OEM. I expect that this will easily be the most secure and privacy respecting phone out there when it releases. You get more or less 100% Android compatibility except for a handful of apps that enforce the Play Integrity cancer.

So, most of the banking or other financial apps, government ID apps (like AGOV in Switzerland) probably won't work on that phone?

Cannot Graphene just lie to those apps so they think they're running on a Google-sanctioned Android?

Most banking apps run just fine. My experience is limited to a handful of U.S. banks, but the Graphene community maintains an international list of apps tested by the community.

Aren't there other Android releases that run on older hardware and no Google?

It needs to be compatible with iOS apps, not Android.

Why so? Last time I checked Android had more apps available, especially FOSS apps.

You can't because there is a network monopoly and barrier to entry is sky high. Realistically, your only option is to piggyback on Android by developing an Android-compatible OS like Huawei did. However this will soon become impossible anyway, as Google will abuse Play Integrity to make your device unusable.

The only way out is either regulation or a whole paradigm shift that renders phones irrelevant. I'm not sure the latter will happen any time soon.

IMO this is the true root of the problem. You have two options: Android or iPhone. Apple simply has no financial incentive to fix anything.

So I 100% agree, we need more competition. I was hopeful for a fleeting moment in time with the Firefox phone.

Yeah, but it's not really their software that's the moat they rely on. It's a lot more to that. They have incredible branding, Devices may be MID, but at least they make good commercials guys..... Plus, everyone's like sheep. If everyone's getting the latest iPhone, they're going to continue to get the latest iPhone because everyone else is getting the latest iPhone. *Sending dis off of a MacBook with my iPhone 16 in my left pocket btw*

Or people make rational decisions when it comes to thousand dollar purchases and some people can’t admit that others choices can be different from theirs without trying to justify there being an outlier.

I don't think the devices themselves are mid. My M-series MacBook pro is fantastic. The battery life, suspend resume, the track pad, the audio quality, it's all really good hardware. Name a better laptop; I'll wait.

Hardware wise I'd agree, on the software side though...

Yep some of the software is pretty bad, but don't forget that a lot of the track pad/suspend resume/battery quality comes from good drivers and energy management in the kernel.

I used to have an old Thinkpad and after I switched from windows to Linux the battery and track pad experience was noticeably worse, even with tlp and all the power management options enabled. It's just one of those rare aspects of OS development that large companies can do that's superior to open source.

Fuck Finder, though.

I was once blown away by iPhone 8 editing capabilities. The keyboard seemed to work OK (minus swipe-to-type, but that wasn't great on Android either), and using 3D Touch to move cursor and select text was the most pleasant text editing experience, even better than on the desktop (arrow keys and vim hjkl).

And then it was all removed in a software update.

3D Touch was a useless gimmick for most users because it wasn’t discoverable. The move cursor feature didn’t disappear btw. It’s now in the space bar.

wow, i didn’t know this existed until now. thanks!

I never understood why Apple discontinued 3D Touch. I agree that it was a very nice typing experience.

> I randomly tried Android again for a few months last spring. Using a functioning keyboard was revelatory. But I came crawling back to iOS because I'm weak and the orange iPhone was pretty and the Pixel 10 was boring and I caved to the blue bubble pressure. But the keyboard on this beautiful phone is worse than ever.

Most of those problems aren't solved by software. You are using your phone as a fashion item.

Plus devices can be wrapped for a few dollars. Turning a Pixel orange is trivial.

https://qskinz.com/en-us/collections/google-pixel-10-skins/p...

The most frustrating one for me is how in safari in the address bar the keyboard changes and drops '.' to the right of the spacebar in the exact spot I usually hit the spacebar with my thumb (because I'm just tapping the edge, not stretching to the middle of the screen).

This means in the modern mode of using the address bar as search, and not to type a domain manually (which is what I believe most people are also doing) I just end up with a search string separated by dots which Google can evidently deal with but is just very annoying.

I see threads on the internet going back years complaining about this issue and yet there's no configuration to change it. It would be such a simple and easy fix (like, just give me the regular keyboard, nothing special). It's a bit baffling since it seems such a glaring everyday UX problem.

I’d love to see (it won’t ever happen) what the bug fix for this is. I tried doing what the video said and just typing thumbs up over and over again and I didn’t actually have any trouble.

I just typed "thumbs up" ~50x and was not able to reproduce the bug. But, as was pointed out in another thread somewhere, since I don't have 'Predictive Text' enabled maybe that has something to do w/it. So; I enabled 'Predictive Text' and there's the bug. It's consistently misspelling 'thumbs' with any number of different variations.

Disabling 'Predictive Text' seems to correct the bug; however, there must be something in the algorithm that's causing this that Apple does need to fix.

I never have predictive text, autocorrect et al. turned on. I somehow never figured it could work well. To be honest I did not give it a chance, but I'm happy to just always get exactly what I type. Don't remember running into any issues like author of the op article.

I turn off predictive text for a deeper reason: it interrupts your train of thought. I have a sentence mostly formed in my head, but when predictive text predicts a word that’s different, there’s so much extra mental overhead to consider whether I should change the sentence or ignore it.

I begrudgingly accept autocorrect on iOS however. On a real computer, I turn that off too. I have learned since a long time ago that writing and editing should be two separate activities.

Oh interesting, I have Predictive Text on. But I imagine that means a local model might be doing something on your phone which might be getting messed up.

> see the bug fix

Possibly re-tuning of some LLM parameters? Or forgetting some bad learnings... sounds like it's specific to a small-ish percent of users.

It's so strange, when I switched to Android, it felt like iPhones had more polish and fewer glitches like these. But there's just aren't any usability bugs that I deal with on Android anymore.

I think the blog explains why people put up with such a buggy OS:

> I randomly tried Android again for a few months last spring. Using a functioning keyboard was revelatory. But I came crawling back to iOS because I'm weak and the orange iPhone was pretty

IOS 26 has been a massive dissapointment. I was strong-armed into updating this week with the vulnerability they refused to patch in 18.x, and it's what I would describe as "Gen Z's Vista"

> But I came crawling back to iOS because I'm weak and the orange iPhone was pretty and the Pixel 10 was boring and I caved to the blue bubble pressure.

If your decision-making is this poor, you cannot say for sure that you're leaving iPhone.

"I caved to the blue bubble pressure"

The fact that this is a real thing is ridiculous. Say no and move on with life. This is the type of freedom that is actually freeing.

Definitely ridiculous and mostly an exaggeration on my part. There is some truth to it because the features of iMessage group chats are fun (stickers, message animations, etc.) but more generally I just like the Apple ecosystem.

My personal devices are usually Apple products and they all work together pretty seamlessly. Then I have all my other Linux servers, Windows desktops, random tablets, etc. for my hobby projects which generally require more manual configuration to work together.

I just like having my “personal” things within an aesthetically pleasing, relatively privacy preserving ecosystem but I get my kicks outside of that ecosystem aplenty.

Its a real issue in North America.

SMS and as a result iMessage is the dominant text based chat.

iPhones have become the default smartphone, and is a status symbol compared to Android.

Mac vs Windows is similar on the laptop front.

Which means if your an Android user in a relatively average social group:

* You will get left out of group messages

* You will be starting on a back foot in the dating scene

On top of you wont be able to answer messages from friends on your laptop, because again, sms is dominant, not whatsapp.

Now don't shoot the messenger here. I don't like it either, but this is the social/technical reality in NA at the moment.

(sigh: receiving downvotes)

> iPhones have become the default smartphone, and is a status symbol compared to Android.

It does not function as a status symbol in the west. It's not a big deal to get one if you really want to and live in a developed country. People in asian countries making 1/8th of their american counterparts can afford iPhones. Someone making minimum wage in Germany can buy one using about 3-4 months worth of saved disposable income. In the states they'll throw one after you on credit without looking at you twice. It's only a status symbol if you want to set yourself apart from someone living in Zimbabwe... oh wait they also have lots of iPhone users. From who exactly? Afghanis?

Honestly if the bar for status symbol's is that low, you should sooner consider excercise and good dietary habits. These days in many western counties that will do many orders of magnitude more for how people perceive you and your dating life. Certainly more than what flavour of annoying chiming piece of shit you bought.

Unfortunately for us, logic isn't the arbiter of social behaviour.

Heres some examples

- https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1nt7czg/do_iphone_...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/14rhes2/friends_in...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/Nicegirls/comments/1ja3iy4/green_bu...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/OnlineDating/comments/17xrue5/are_y...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/datingoverthirty/comments/b6w9iu/oh...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/f1i3q8/this_is_why_...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/rz4wlp/why_apples_...

----

One more:

https://mashable.com/article/iphone-users-think-less-of-andr...

I might have a bridge to sell you.

What says a lot is that you had to dredge up some up to 7 years old posts on reddit, on which replies still overwhelmingly call the idea silly. This smells like an attempt to manufacture consent, but it'd be pretty low effort for even that.

As a rule, if something sounds stupid to you, it will probably be just as silly to most people you should give a damn about. Certainly don't let some posts that look like the lowest-effort FUD imaginable tell you what other people think.

I may have something to teach you about indicators, averages, and population samples/biases.

We're not debating majority opinion here. Just that people exist who have that bias / perception and what it leads to.

People exist that judge and exclude based on if you have have an Android.

Im sure the reverse exits too.

Im also sure the former is more common than the later.

But I have no idea how large that population is.

Just like Im not in that population.

> * You will be starting on a back foot in the dating scene

Perhaps you should be focusing on losing weight instead of blaming the color of your text messages, lmao.

Fit, happy, married and have the cognitive ability to not conflate the message with the messenger.

Sounds like a good way to filter out assholes. Anyone who cares what phone you use in this way is someone you don't want in your life.

Maybe, but let me pose you mental model that a lot of NA iPhone users have.

For a long time, if you were on iOS and added a android user to your group chat. All threading was broken. It was no longer a group chat just a bunch of out of band messages.

So iOS users naturally started leaving the android user out of the chat. They would text their 5 friends on iOS in one group to make plans, then text their Android friend separately to update them when plans were made.

I believe this is relatively fixed in latest iOS, but that habit is still very much their in iOS users today.

Anecdotally I did just experience a group chat of 4 iOS users this year that was very active, then died when one person switched to Android.

It's hardly surprising when a large percentage of HN users will whiteknight a trillion dollar company whenever EU tells them to stop anti-competitive practices.

Especially with RCS support, I’m more willing to leave iOS more than ever. Group chats aren’t as easy but everyone uses WhatsApp anyway.

RCS on Android seems to require Google services, which is just as bad as Apple, and seems to not work well with GrapheneOS.

Signal has blue bubbles if you care, and is hands down better for privacy.

I almost switched to pixel before getting my new 17 pro max. I feel like im just constantly fighting the ios keyboard or having to type so slowly and carefully but it still is screwing up. I have a pixel 8a and Im shocked how quickly I can type on it while constantly tip toeing and fighting the ios keyboard.

It's ironic because my first iphone i used was a 4s and i was pleasantly surprised how nice it was to type on after using samsung phones. Now it's like the tables have turned. Im constantly fighting the ios keyboard. Sometimes when i tap and get the wrong character i will move my thumb to where i would have had to type to get that wrong character and i know for sure i did not move my thumb that far away from the character i actually wanted and thought i tapped on. Im honestly shocked how bad typing on ios has become. i got a pixel 8a just to amuse myself and i was again totally surprised how fast and easy the typing was. something is going rotten inside apple.

even controlling when the keyboard appears and when you want it to go away is frustrating on ios. i find the little universal down arrow on the pixel phones much better.

I've also debated Android because there are cheaper phones that, ostensibly, don't suck—and can run non-Google-ized not-spying-on-you Android.

There’s one specific thing driving me insane: it corrects “we’re” to “were” and “we’ll” to “well” EVERY TIME. It even did it while writing this comment. If I go into the symbols menu and find an apostrophe and type it in IT MEANS I MEANT TO PUT IT THERE

It does EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE for me. It autocorrects to "and" to "and's" very single time, for example.

Keep autocorrect on and turn off predictive text. Makes the experience way better.

Is predictive text the one that reaches back and changes correct words that I had already finished typing?

Man, gboard does that on android so much that I wound up installing and using heliboard. It kinda sucks but at least it doesn't "fix" your message after you type everything

It predicts what you are going to type as you type. It has a tendency to add words to the end of a message when you hit send.

Whatever it is, it's bad on GBoard, too, if you possess better than a 6th grade vocabulary.

This helps, but it's not nearly enough, thanks to the terrible (and continually declining) quality of predictive tap zone enlargement for keyboard keys.

One thing you can't fix is that every iPhone and iPad invisibly resizes the keyboard keys as you type.

:(

This is actually a necessary feature for a touchscreen keyboard to feel usable, and it's been in iOS since day one. The problem is that it has gotten not only much worse over time at predicting which tap zones to enlarge, but it also feels more aggressive. For example, tapping the shift button on the iOS keyboard enlarges the Enter/Return key's touch area so much that I am unable to immediately tap the microphone icon to turn off dictation. If I've tapped shift, I need to then wait a second for the predictively-enlarged tap zone to shrink before I can turn off dictation.

I disagree that it's necessary and I wish I could disable it. They even have it enabled on iPads, which are a tad larger than the original iPhone, and which can be used with the official stylus.

"Necessary" was probably too strong a word. I'm definitely no expert so I can only offer anecdotes, but for the first ~decade of iOS, the keyboard felt amazing to use. I felt super fast and typing mistakes were rare. Now I feel like I'm constantly fighting the keyboard to type the letters I actually want to type.

Agree at this point that I would disable it (in its current state) if I could, but when it worked correctly it was a huge boon to typing.

Ok so it's not just me. I never had predictive text enabled but stopped being able to type easily when I switched from iPhone 5 to 12 mini. Thought I needed to get used to the new phone, but it's been years.

I wonder if it's an optimization for the monstrously large phones they make today, and on a reasonably sized phone such as my 12 mini it doesn't adapt well.

> But I came crawling back to iOS because I'm weak and the orange iPhone was pretty and the Pixel 10 was boring and I caved to the blue bubble pressure.

I love how diverse humans are, this is literally an alien sentence to me, it's actually impossible for me to conceptualize. I'm here with my Pixel 7 mourning my Pixel 4a, which was exactly the same to me as every other phone but had the fingerprint unlock sensor on the back which is the only meaningfully differentiating feature. I guess can imagine a non-boring phone like one of those gamer phones, but I can't imaging wanting one, and I can't imagine a phone that's exciting in a way I care about. The idea of finding a phone boring enough to want to switch from it though is just crazy to me. Is scrolling instagram and texting people and googling directions somehow different and exciting on iOS?

(save i guess i'd probably be pretty excited if a company was giving me root by default and not having banking apps break because of it)

I watched the video and immediately tested it on my iphone. It's true?? About 50% of the time, typing "Thumb" resulted in "Thimb" or "Thjmb", while the visual feedback on the keyboard showed u being pressed instead!

Other comments here say Predictive Text is the culprit, but I already had that off. I also turned off Slide to Type. Same result.

I had just sort of assumed it was me, but yes, this happens on my phone too. If i type very quickly i see the u feedback and i get an i or a j.

First notepad.exe gets a rce then this, is it the bottom, sadly I think not…

Highly recommend Nintype third party keyboard. Such a breath of fresh air to have a keyboard made for power users.

The project is abandoned but it still works well. I hope someone sees this and gets inspired to build something to replace it. If you do you can have my money!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nintype/id796959534

> The project is abandoned but it still works well

Hard deal breaker. And alternative keyboards in iOS feel second class in some ways, so we really rely on Apple to get it right.

> alternative keyboards in iOS feel second class in some ways

From my experience the opposite is true. The iOS keyboard feels unintuitive and buggy whilst most alternatives just work.

Funny thing is theres probably some Apple employees reading this right now kidding themselves into thinking this is an end user problem. It's not - your keyboard is bloody awful now, you made it worse.

> theres probably some Apple employees reading this right now [...] you made it worse.

Apple employees reading this right now: "IDGAF about the keyboard, I made 500k in TC last year."

When some iPhone users try to get past their snobiness, but still can't without a timer.

> I caved to peer pressure. If you don't fix this thing within four months I will switch to your competitor for one maybe even two product cycles.

He sure showed them. The people I know using super old iphones are doing more than their public commitment to buy more apple products as often as they can -- after a brief tolerance break, of course.

Reminds me of these Reddit API protests for.. one day. Of course it didn't work.

Apple has become beholden to announcements. Work that someone can shove into a feature that someone else decides is flashy enough to maybe get mentioned on stage gets resourcing and support. Work that isn't going to show up in a Keynote deck gets ignored.

That means that all of the polish work is shoved to the bottom of the stack until it reaches sufficient critical mass that someone finally makes time for engineers to pick some of it back out.

That, I think, is the critical failure of modern Apple. The company used to understand that polish could be more important than something new and flashy, and they've forgotten that in favor of marketing and Liquid Glass.

I read things like this, which I absolutely agree is happening, but then compare it to my ongoing, multi-day failures to create a child account on a Samsung device (which also involves a child account on Google, which is where the workflow is failing) and I wonder if the entire technology industry has simply given up. Every mobile experience is awful lately, nothing seems to work, errors pile up, and people just quit.

Whenever I have an Apple platform issue, I simply write up a detailed complaint and then send it via iMessage to one of my friends. I know that it's all supposedly e2ee but I swear it's a lot more constructive than firing it into Apple's feedback black hole. So far, it's worked pretty well.

On macOS (26.2), if you have a game controller that has been connected over bluetooth but is not currently connected, if you go into the bluetooth device list in System Settings then click the circled "i" icon, it opens an information modal. This modal incorrectly lists the device type (my controller right now says it's AirPods 4). It also has a button for "Game Controller Settings...". If you click this button, it opens Find My. If the controller is connected, it opens the "Game Controllers" pane where you can adjust the settings. I'm not sure if this is just my specific controller (Nintendo Switch N64 Controller), but it seems like a pretty obvious bug. And while you're at it, why don't you just go ahead and roll back the entire System Preferences app UI to what it used to be?

I always imagine employees from the vendor (in this case Apple) reading the blog or this thread. They’re here, lurking. I see you! I see you in the shadows!

Anyway, they know things we don’t, for both good (real constraints that users don’t see) and bad (fake constraints from bad internal decisions).

But dear Apple employee reading this: if you have fought the good fight, I appreciate your attempt, please keep it up. If you didn’t, we’re having a keyboard experience that you shouldn’t be proud of, no matter what the internal corporate logic maze you are caught up in.

The keyboard stuff is really embarrassing. I’ve definitely been making more mistakes in the last few years.

I thought I was just getting more fumbly and it was making me question whether something neurological was going on. (Only "symptoms" were weird issues typing on my phone when I never had these issues on the android devices I'd used prior).

Yeah, text editing on iOS has gotten progressively worse and worse. It's astonishing how much it has degraded in usability compared to the earlier versions of iOS. "It just works" is no longer a phrase I would ever consider saying about iPhones or Apple products in general. Pretty disappointing as they used to be quite an inspiration for quality software design.

The actually issue according to another comment [0] is this[1]:

> Around iOS 17 (Sept. 2023) Apple updated their autocorrect to use a transformer model which should've been awesome and brought it closer to Gboard (Gboard is a privacy terror but honestly, worth it).

> What it actually did/failed to improve is make your phone keyboard:

> Suck at suggesting accurate corrections to misspelled words

> "Correct" misspelled words with an even worse misspelling

> "Correct" your correctly spelled word with an incorrectly spelled word

Which makes me wonder: is Transformer model good with manipulating short texts and texts with errors at all ? It's kind of known that open weight LLMs don't perform well for CJK conversion tasks[2], and I've also been disappointed by their general lack of typo tolerances myself as well. They're BAD for translating ultrashort sentences and singled out words as well[3]. They're great for vibecoding, though.

Which makes me think, are they usable for anything under <100 bytes at all? Does it seem like they have a minimum usable input entropy or something?

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006171

1: https://thismightnotmatter.com/a-little-website-i-made-for-a...

2: The process of yielding "㍑" from "rittoru"

3: No human can translate, e.g. "translate left" in isolation correctly as "move left arm", but LLMs seem to be more all over the place than humans

Turn off swipe typing in the keyboard settings, and tap typing works a bazillion times better. It's like toggling a completely different codebase behind the keyboard and resetting it back to when blind-tap and autocorrect actually functioned as expected.

I assume the code that checks for tap vs start-of-swipe is to blame. I have no idea why that would cause word recognition and/or autocorrect to work so differently, but it seemingly does.

Frankly, just switch the stock keyboard. It's 2026, this should be working on that ancient Egyptian joke of an OS.

If not, Apple users deserve this kind of behaviour where the user willingly signs off on their freedom

I'm one of the developers of Mister Keyboard. If you want, you can give it a try! Everything essential is completely free, maybe it works out for you.

For something that is as personal as a keyboard, it would be good to know what "Usage data" you are collecting and how it is used. I am eager to switch away from ios keyboard, but I do not trust most developers to have access to what I type. I understand it is "not linked to me", but this is an area where heavy skepticism is warranted.

Hey, we're super transparent about the data we collect.

We collect zero data about your typed words, personal dictionary data, stored contacts, clipboard history and basically anything else that's privacy-sensitive.

What we do collect is very generic and fully anonymized metrics such as: Do you use a theme, did you modify the keyboard, did you add an emoji key to your keyboard, etc.

We are not interested in typed words or any private data. We just want to know how people use the keyboard in general (which features in particular), and that's all we collect. You can opt out at any time, and all collected data is automatically deleted every 30 days because we only keep a 30-day rolling window.

If you want to be extremely safe, you can also skip enabling full access for the keyboard, which makes it impossible for us to send data from the keyboard itself to the app. But as said, we don't actually collect any privacy-sensitive data (and never will), and disabling full access comes with a few other caveats because Apple put many basic features such as vibration etc behind the full access setting as well, for whatever reason.

This is exactly the reason why I haven't looked into other keyboards. Gboard seems like a google-sponsored key logger? Anyone know of some good privacy-focused ones?

Please see my other comment here :) We do not collect any private data, and we never will. We only collect very generic and fully anonymized usage data, but that does not include typed characters, words, clipboard history, snippets, or anything else that could be considered private.

Subscriptions for a keyboard. The world has gone mad.

Funny how Apple get to mediocre level with the phones while making really good progress with hardware and acceptable level on tablets and notebooks.

I see in Europe iPhone is now common - it was a little bit premium for long time, before. Only Samsung is so bad that iPhone still isn’t the worst experience, but iOS 26 brought so many bugs, issues and bad UX decisions that it’s depressing.

But having macOS with „completely different, but the same” natural scroll switch - you have the switch „separate” for mouse and touchpad, but they switch together as one. Incredible that company having such history makes so stupid features.

Having „lower level”/masses join the Apple-train I wouldn’t expect them to fix anything in near future. As long as money will flow - the won’t look at quality.

> I'm switching to Android for good. (Good = at least 2 calendar years)

wow, such a commitment. Not only it's as said only one customer but it is a customer who thinks "for good" is just skipping one phone. Which means she/he usually buys phone every single year.

What a bold and committed move. It's astonishing...

I think it's hard for Apple to reproduce because maybe none of them are experiencing the issue? I have never seen issues with the keyboard, and I'm pretty pedantic about it.

If Apple is getting occasional feedback about a mysterious bug, but it's near impossible to reproduce, what can they do?

I thought this was just me!

Every now and then, I feel like I simply cannot tap the correct keys. Things I do from muscle memory are jumping to the next letter over. This isn't just a temporary problem. It lasts for days/weeks.

Then suddenly, it's fine again.

The select copy and paste experience is terrible on iPhone too. They randomly shuffle when to show select or not and rarely show select all.

I had situations where I had to wait for 2 minutes with return pressed due to iPhone not showing select all

On the same week that an AI's PR was rejected and it turned around and published a hit-piece in order to pressure an open-source community to accept it's change [1]...on the same week...we are watching a human publish a hit-piece (more or less) in order to pressure a closed-sourced project to accept their change.

Someone needs to help me with the ethics here; is it okay to post hit-pieces or...?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559

My keyboard is currently behaving. For once. It's been useless roughly three times since the last major update.

Over the course of each year-long iOS version life, I've become used to it sucking for a bit, either at the beginning (with bug fixes improving things) or towards the end (where, I assume, accumulated learning diverges from clean slate behavior.)

I suspect that the keyboard team is pegged with using new features on the silicon (Neural processing in earlier processors, then Neural Engine with newer processors) and they're doing what they can when tasked with new code.

But man, iOS4 didn't have all that and the keyboard was GREAT.

Didn’t you mean “Apple, fix my keyboard before the timer ends or I’m leaving g iPhone”

I've been staying on iOS 17 and macOS 15 because I just don't see iOS/macOS 26 as an upgrade in any way. This is the first time I haven't been running a beta or getting a day one upgrade for Apple operating systems. I can't imagine moving away from iPhone or a MacBook, however if they want to avoid OS fragmentation and security issues caused by users like me refusing to upgrade, 27 better address these UX and stability issues.

Is the Android keyboard so much better? I'm suffering enormously from some of the same symptoms some people here describe - the keypress adaptation seemingly better for someone who isn't me.

I found ridiculous how the Apple keyboard requires you to press shift or alt equivalent to get to the period. That's a weird one.

I considered starting a similar tweet to Tim Cook today but decided it would do nothing.

I tried adding swifter, i tried vtt, they filed that up to.

If true wondering, this message is typed on my apple phone.

*Edit: Just figured out I can delete the apple keyboard from the enabled list. They can put that in their metrics and smoke it.*

I had kind of accepted maybe I had brain damage or something when it came to typing on my phone recently. I pulled out my iphone X the other day and had the most validating feeling of "I can type on my phone again".

"But I came crawling back to iOS because I'm weak and the orange iPhone was pretty and the Pixel 10 was boring and I caved to the blue bubble pressure. But the keyboard on this beautiful phone is worse than ever. "

I don't understand. What could Apple possibly have that is better than a working device?

"blue bubble" here is undersold. It means Apple has anti-competitively broken the experience of speaking with loved ones on purpose if you leave their ecosystem.

As a European it's hard for me to comprehend the influence that iMessage has on the US.

I saw the video and understand the problem but I cannot simulate it. The keyboard always works great for me. Could it be that this bug is related to AI? Or some language settings?

Same. I have both NL + EN configured languages on my keyboard and I couldn't reproduce it with either NL/EN and EN/NL. In the video you can see they have 4 keyboards configured. It would be helpful to know which keyboard they are using.

My guess is that the 'wrong letter entered' bug is by design.

The keyboard animation happens on the touchdown event, whereas the letter is entered into the text box on the touchup event.

Between the two, more information might emerge about the touch - for example the exact shape of the touched area, and movement during the touch, etc.

I would guess the keyboard sees a down in one spot, and an up in a slightly different spot which falls into another letter.

I tested this, and if I have slide-to-type disabled, and slide my fingers, then every letter I slide over will highlight, but only the letter I let my finger up on will show up in the text input box.

If I don't have slide-to-type enabled, then only the letter I press down on will highlight, and what shows up in the text input box is pretty inconsistent for horizontally adjacent letters.

You can indeed see this behavior in action by tapping a letter and briefly swiping slightly to an adjacent letter. Maybe I’m missing something but I don’t see why the letter should be submitted on touch-up, since I’ve never intentionally tried to correct an individual letter between touch-down and touch-up.

For what its worth I use the Microsoft SwiftKey on iOS and I am a fan!

> But I came crawling back to iOS because I'm weak and the orange iPhone was pretty and the Pixel 10 was boring and I caved to the blue bubble pressure.

My Pixel 10 is in a pretty orange case. Furthermore, if I get sick of it, it's not too big of a deal to change. Maybe I'll even figure out how to 3d print one!

FWIW: Pretty much everyone keeps their phone in a case today. Seems to make a lot more sense to focus on the case instead of the aesthetics of the phone.

My iPhone Xs is slowly dying (being stuck on iOS 18 is probably a good thing). I guess I will replace it soon with a cheap refurbished iPhone 13 or so. Just to wait out iOS 27. If there is no dramatic improvement of software quality, I guess the next phone is a high end Android device.

Oh, that is happening a lot to me and I wasn’t sure if it was only me!

A lot, I mean, about 80% of my ”não” (I speak Portuguese) are becoming just ”na”. And about 50% of my ”mais” are becoming ”mas”.

“o” and “i” are next to each other at the top row, so I wondered if the keyboard got smaller and my thumb automatic moviment became discalibrated.

But… I started to often see ”na” where it should be ”não” in other people’s texts.

Turns out it is a bigger issue it seems

This used to be by biggest annoyance with iOS, it no longer is. Now my app search does not work properly after iOS 26 update and that has been literally making this phone harder to use.

Reading everyone’s comments it looks like there is a lot of rant with current iPhone state. I’m also feeling last releases introduced huge regressions. I bought an iPhone 16 seen many issues including keyboard ones.

I do hope Apple’s iOS 27 will be focused on fixes and optimizations. Apple Intelligence isn’t useful if the basic experience is mediocre

—— Sent from my iPhone sorry for the autocorrect

120 days and 2 years? Lame.. You might as well just use your iphone in the meantime.. Stupid to get a phone for 2 years just to buy an iphone again later on..

I haven’t been able to swipe-type “you” (on qwerty us) for two+ years now – it autocorrects to “your” every single time.

My wife, an archetypal normie iPhone user of 15 years, has recently switched to Pixel for this and many other small reasons. It's just crap software.

Staying with Apple even after they "purposely" hand you broken keyboard is psychological abuse. When people become habitual of abuse, they even start defending it. I am searching for my next Android. No longer waiting for Godot.

I used to think the android keyboard(s) were terrible when I switched over to iOS, but now after switching back to a android, it feels leagues ahead of iOS 26's kb

Arg. What's the quippy internet adage for this?

Where someone (traditionally in a FOSS project's support / bug report / feature request pages) posts some angrygram of "Fix my pet peeve OR ELSE YOUR PROJECT IS DEAD TO ME!!11!!one!11!!!"

The only thing that's coming to mind is "emotional blackmail" but that's not it...

Several Redditors have observed that turning off swipe-to-type has improved keyboard accuracy. I tried this and confirmed that it makes a small difference.

Nevertheless, I shouldn't have to disable this (and AutoCorrect, as that has definitely gotten worse) on iOS, especially when Google's GBoard is as good as it is.

Anyone else remember the days when you switched to iOS for its legendary keyboard? I want those days back!

No phone is perfect, It's the overall complexity of the systems that is causing the multiple issues. I moved from iphone 13 to pixel 10pro and it wasn't such a great transition. It's totally not "better". Each have their own disadvantages. Android: - Pixel really sucks at apps and sharing content in app/ between apps. This is really killing me, because it's impossible to share more than image from whatsapp to telegram e.g. No image copy in apps. - The apps are not as polished - The gaming performance not even close to apple (or samsung for that matter) - Wifi / GSM doesn't feel as reliable or fast as it was on my 4yo iphone - Videos cameras switching is unreliable, photos colors are washed out and dead - You can't compare Pixel watch and Apple Watch (same goes for Garmin with it's terrible sluggish UI)

Iphone: - No Screen text translate in real-time like on Pixel. Currently the only deal breaker for me personally and reason I'm using the Pixel. - The keyboard is dumb. But speech recognition is ok. - Duplication of photos between icloud and google photos. The Google Photos is crazy good in comparison to the icloud.

I have recently switched from 7 Plus to 16e. Now I make typos all the time. I still do not know who I should blame primarily, my muscle memory or Apple.

I didn’t even need to switch. Merely upgrading the version of iOS increases my rate of typos.

Just use Android (Google stock not Samsung). Come over, the water is great.

Yeah he's right - my Pixel 10 is not as sexy as an iPhone but not only is the keyboard great but the AI integration is first class citizen.

iOS will never have first class citizen AI even if Apple finally develop their own model because Apple doesn't control the user's data.

We both know you're staying regardless

I'm entertain by the potential meta in these kinds of posts. Apple does not care at all about the contents of the post (presently).

But, if this post goes viral, it will affect the stock price and Tim Cook will pay attention. It makes me brainstorm other "stock manipulation" schemes with the sole goal of improving product quality.

It used to be better? I use android daily and was given an iPhone for work, and using it is incredibly painful because of the keyboard. I was wondering how people have been putting up with it for so long. When I've asked other long time iPhone users about it they just nodded along so I though it was a long running issue.

I've never figured out how to type a sentence into the Safari search without.every.word.ending.up.like.this

maybe it’s just some quirk of how my fingers work, but when typing with two hands, I constantly get the letter “n” where I want a space. Itngetsnquitenfrustrating and it’s really annoying to go back and correct, because none of the intermediate words got autocorrected either. It seems like a) such an easy thing to prevent, and b) such an easy thing to detect and fix after the fact.

Second most egregious issue is how every space becomes a period when typing in the Safari url/search bar. I’m using it for search 90% of the time, and directly entering URLs 10%, but Apple must think those proportions are flipped.

Free the space!

Finally - could we have a simple gesture that toggles words between lowercase, first letter capital, and all caps? Highlight a word and swipe up or something? So much needless input to make a word capitalized.

Im convinced its all planned to force users to upgrade. The “7 years of updates” selling point is just a trojan horse to install a newer iOS that makes the product run like garbage.

Id honestly prefer never to update than get these bogus “security updates, features and fixes”

In later iOs versions i started making much more mistakes. Felt i got old or something. But whenever i type on my Android phone, its like nothing has changed. I swear that the iOs keyboard is trolling, I HIT O NOT I! O AM CERTAIN!

I tried to call Tim Apple to complain about the shitty keyboard on my phone — here's what happened:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjpcLplkMUs&t=2s

Autocorrect is balls. I have a friend in my contacts, and when I type her name it sometimes autocorrects to "leaving".

We all yearn for the BlackBerry. I wish we got a modern one with support for the popular messaging apps (WhatsApp, Slack, etc). I know there are some smartphones out there with physical keyboards that run Android, but they feel more like a prototype than a full product.

Autocorrect just cuts out for me pretty often, usually when I’m a couple sentences into a longer text entry. This is particularly annoying when using the Claude app or similar. The suggestion bar above the keyboard goes blank and I just stop getting any corrections.

Not sure if it's gotten worse in the last release for English-only users, but for us writing in and often mixing multiple languages in the same message, the spelling correction has gotten way better in the last releases.

On the Apple TV interface on my Roku, I can't tell which movie thumbnail I'm on because their UI just slightly enlarges the image which I can't really make out from my couch.

I always wonder who makes these decisions and whether they fancy themselves a designer.

"caved to the blue bubble pressure"

As an Android user, I truly don't understand this "pressure". I exchange SMS/MMS with various users, some Android, some iPhone. I am in group chats with both Android and iPhone users. I feel there is no major issue. It's interoperable. We all see each other's emojis/photos/videos/etc. There are only minor technical rough edges: for example an iPhone's user emoji reaction sometimes (not always?) shows up as separate text instead of the emoji appended at the bottom of the text bubble... And I am pretty sure videos are sent in a lower quality. But is any of this really enough to cause a "blue bubble pressure"?

I asked ChatGPT to explain but only got this vague answer: "Group chats with a mix of iPhone and non-iPhone users can be less seamless (e.g., lower video quality, no read receipts, or issues with group chat features)."

I had to open my texts to check: I indeed have read receipts when texting Android users, but not iPhone users. And this is funny but up to this very second, I had never noticed this difference... because, at least to me, read receipts is such a minor feature that I rely on very infrequently.

This leaves me still as perplex: why the "blue bubble pressure"?

This is a brilliant, Love that timer, not sure why the exact time frame was picked though.

It makes me want to create a similar landing page for Apple to fix Spotlight Search. I remember when I used to be able to just find and launch apps on my Mac.

I categorically do not love the timer. Timers should be a fixed-width typeface so the numbers don't jiggle.

Good point, I’ll fix this in a bit, any typeface recommendations?

I emphasize with the author: switching from Android to iOS was an abysmal change in terms of keyboard quality. I installed GBoard which is way better but the experience is not the same as with a default keyboard.

Post viable alternatives here and your thinking around why.

Being free to leave the iOS ecosystem is the biggest flex anyone can make to enforce beneficial change.

E.G. Signal is the iMessage killer.

What’s your answer around lockdown, security, updates, hardware, iCloud replacement, AirPods etc

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, as I've long wanted to switch to Android.

If you have an Apple Watch and are using it for anything other than fitness tracking, then you're SOL. Non-Apple alternatives are nowhere near as capable. (In fairness, Apple has done a very good job of making the Watch a useful device on its own and providing a strong app ecosystem for it. I can straight-up leave my phone at home if I'm going to the gym or going somewhere nearby outside of working hours.)

If you don't have a Watch but do have AirPods, then you can switch to Android, but their capabilities will be slightly reduced. (Customizing noise cancelling and transparency mode, as well as add-ons like Live Translation, are only available on iOS.)

If you don't have either of these, then it comes down to apps, iMessage and FaceTime.

Many apps use StoreKit for managing subscriptions. These will need to be cancelled and re-subscribed with Google Play. Apps that were bought outright will need to be repurchased. Several apps (like the Vinegar/Baking Soda Safari extensions, which I, surprisingly, haven't been able to find alternatives for) are also iOS-only, so you'll need to find alternatives or live without them.

Regarding iMessage: you'll need to accept being a green bubble and breaking people's chats. If you use iMessage for most of your communications, this alone might be a dealbreaker. RCS is bridging the gap but isn't all the way there yet, and that's before considering how slowly carriers do things. Good luck getting people to change apps; that's like trying to turn a cruise ship.

FaceTime is really good. Google, despite launching 752 messaging apps in the past, doesn't really have an equivalent that works as well as FaceTime does (to my knowledge). Not an issue if you don't use FaceTime.

I'm still on iOS 16 (I don't use a smartphone anymore and my old iPhone 8 works fine for the handful of times I need one) and even I notice it, I'm constantly pressing one letter and it gives me another

I’m glad this just isn’t me.

I’ve been noticing a slow decline in my iPhones ability to autocorrect or hit the key I wanted to hit (it’s already made two mistakes just typing this out).

I thought it was a “me” thing, and “there’s no way a feature like autocorrect or key sensing would regress”.

I was apparently wrong.

I have a personal Android but spend a lot of time on a work iPhone. I was not expecting the keyboard (and voice-to-text) to be such a poor experience on iOS. Selecting text and autocorrections are both a nightmare.

For the people who wonder what this is about. You might want to take a look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo

I thought it was just me… like maybe my hand eye coordination was failing as I aged or maybe my dexterity was decreasing. Its been driving me absolutely nuts since i upgraded my phone a few months ago.

As an Android user of SwiftKey with swipe typing, can someone explain the whole iOS broken keyboard situation? I guess I literally don't understand what the issue is, is it not allowing people to type in the letters they press?

There was a video posted in the article that demonstrates it better than a comment would. One of the most glaring defects these days are the keyboard registering the press on the correct letter, and then inputting a different letter. The keyboard is hot garbage right now.

Wow that video [0] is incredible, in a bad way. How can the OS correctly register the letter tapped but then input a different letter? That is like the most fundamental feature of a keyboard. It's not even autocomplete because the letters "Thj" as shown in the video don't even match any words that start with T. Glad I'm sticking to Android then, whose typing, you know, actually works, not even to mention how good (at least SwiftKey's) autocomplete and swipe typing is.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo

I’m feeling this way about the removal of “Select All” so that I can no longer easily copy/paste articles to my chatbot. Freedom’s not Tim Apple.

The lag in the latest update on my 13 mini is almost unbearable too. I'm typing, it lags out, it then adds a lot of letters at once and, as expected, they're incorrect. Getting very, very frustrating.

Just use Type Nine! https://www.typenineapp.com Write a comment if you want some free promo codes.

I thought it was only me.

The autocomplete has a preference for proper nouns, even when they make zero sense .

The next suggested word is, at best, naive. Using the previous word, it would be clear that the subsequent suggestion would not be reasonable.

Android is the same. Grass isn't any greener over here. I miss T9.

On android there are 1000s of keyboards to choose from. They have various perks, customizable and if you don't like what's available you can simply build your own if you have the skills

The issue is that the letter that pops may be replaced, if it later changes its mind. Eg if you hit U, get a U popup, and sofly release while moving into the target area for J. You get a J.

My keyboard is convinced that when I type “is”, I really want to say “OSS”. This seems a priori unlikely.

Very related for those not familiar: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo (2min 24sec)

I was skeptical. I then recorded the screen of myself typing, using the iPhone's screen recorder itself, and it is happening with me. I thought I was the issue. Wow.

Does anyone have a keyboard suggestion that is multilanguage and has a comma on the top layer? German without a comma is, troublesome.

I thought they fixed the bug where autocorrect would add text but repeat one word in the middle so it would look like: “I’m trytrying to”

Been an issue for two years or so. Resetting, all that doesn’t help.

For what it’s worth, swipe to type works just fine on the native keyboard, for those who didn’t know.

Agree about many of the other bugs / issues.

I'm thinking of switching to iPhone after always having and Android. All these negative posts are really making me reconsider though.

WOW I've spent years thinking that I suck at typing on phone screens, I never even considered that it might be the keyboard software is just shitty....

I feel like I’m the only one without major issues here. The autocorrect works, the keys I tap are right. Going to Android with the Android Keyboard drives me nuts.

And no Colemak support. I bought an in iPad to try as a home assistant kiosk and found the keyboard layouts don't have colemak as an option.

It's not so bad over here in android world. If you don't like the keyboard you can just pick a different keyboard.

> You were the "it just works" company.

Yeah, two decades ago.

We live in time when instead of booking a ticket you have to create a landing page to draw developer’s attention to a quite irritating bug.

I like it, bookmarked, let's see how this extortion fares

Why don’t third party keyboards take advantage of this situation? Why hasn’t Google updated Gboard on the App store in years?

I wasn't aware it does it insidious. I always assumed I miss typed something, not that the phone itself was messing things up.

Bitdefender flagged that website for me, but it does not give me any useful details as to what the reason might be...

I prefer the iOS keyboard than over the Android ones. Why does my autocorrect work fine and my keys and swipe typing work, but not yours?

Feeling smug as I type this on my 'boring' pixel 10

I would like to know why it is correcting thanks to Thanksgiving.

> I randomly tried Android again for a few months last spring. Using a functioning keyboard was revelatory. But I came crawling back to iOS because I'm weak and the orange iPhone was pretty and the Pixel 10 was boring and I caved to the blue bubble pressure.

Here's a more substantive reason to prefer iPhone to Android: Android phones, mine anyway, have no option to suppress audible notification of incoming texts or calls from numbers not found in Contacts.

"I'm leaving iPhone" is the new "I'm quitting Twitter". Nobody ever does it.

You send an email to customer service to complain. I build a whole ass website to complain. We are not the same.

That's the thing. Android is equally bad in their own idiosyncratic ways. Or actually worse if you factor in stuff like Google tracks everything you do or don't do on the phone or while having the phone on you and sells/exposes those trackings to advertisers, even when you explicitly ask it to not do that. Its distractive design is by design.

If you are going to change the iOS just for the keyboard (and yeah it's keyboard is bad; but that's not even a mild atrocious design and implementation decision they have made) then I guess your intention is just a big rant and a this post and a little discourse and that's it. Esp. the 120 days timeline. To be honest if you had to switch you'd have switched you know if Apple even does such "fixings" they will take decades (not years) because 1). yes, they are that incompetent when it comes to software, 2). they wouldn't want to mix the opportunity to say even something silly like For the First Time on an iPhone™ you have TrueAutocorrect™ (which will stick suck and will be at least 2 decades behind the 20th worst Android keyboard)

So yeah, good luck.

But there are the forks of Android that don't include anything Google.

And any app that normal non-rooting non-hn folks use or might actually need to function in the real world will refuse to work. Not only that there will be no OTA. List goes on.. and it’s actually going to get worse.

The problem with Linux phone is app support. I dont know how it can compete with Apple or Android.

What? there's probably millions of programs for Linux.

Sure there is. But not for wha people use their phones for.

Can I call an Uber from a Linux app? Pay for things with tap to pay? Food or grocery delivery? Public transit passes? Etc.

Windows phone tried to unseat the duopoly. The OS was surprisingly good. But, no one made apps so it died.

Same thing for Linux phones.

edit if Apple didn’t go through great lengths to cripple PWAs then it wouldn’t be as big a problem. But even all the various services are crippling their own websites to direct people to apps for that sweet sweet data harvesting.

U have internet and browser on Linux phone.. If the service cant be used with those (or some other normal software) then its not worth using.

It's so bad. I think it has to do with touch targets because the slide to type is great in my opinion.

> I randomly tried Android again for a few months last spring. Using a functioning keyboard was revelatory. But I came crawling back to iOS because I'm weak and the orange iPhone was pretty and the Pixel 10 was boring and I caved to the blue bubble pressure.

I know this is somewhat a joke site, but I think admitting this really proves Apple's dominance and doesn't really help in making your case. So long as the walled garden / "platform" approach still works, enshittification will continue

Yep! I can’t type on this thjng

I don’t think the keyboard is any more broken than it has ever been. It works pretty well for me aside from its awful, awful repeated "corrections" it applies, I delete and it reapplies. This is not new at all.

There are a lot of broken things in iOS, just try any apps in landscape and you'll wonder if QA even realizes the iPhone has landscape.

Someone actually took the effort to make a video to show how broken it is, it’s worth a watch: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo

It’s only 2 min 24 sec.

I know the video, again it doesn't matter. I speed type on my phone exactly the same way I used to. I understand how autocorrect works and that it retroactively fixes multiple words later on. I typed this whole comment on my iPhone and I encountered no such issue.

What the video shows could be a problem only if you disable autocorrect or if you want to type a single letter. I made a bunch of errors typing this one and in the end the phone autocorrected it all.

Why the drama? If you do not like native keyboard, install 3rd party one like Gboard.

Because thirdparty keyboards are equally bugged. Sometimes keyboards simply fail to show up or cover app content without rhyme or reason. This happens across multiple thirdparty keyboards so it must be an ios issue.

3rd Party Keyboards exist, but they don't have the same rights/abilities as Apple's native keyboard, directly resulting in some features/functions being impossible to implement.

Interesting (I am Android user myself). Any examples of such features?

- Apple's keyboard has richer context; third-party keyboards are largely limited to the text proxy (surrounding text/selection) and cannot inspect the host app/see the underlying context of where the text is used/what for.

- No caret/cursor control; cannot reliably set the cursor to arbitrary positions

- No custom dictation pipeline inside the keyboard; must rely on system dictation (or move voice input outside the keyboard).

- No camera access from the keyboard extension; blocks scan-to-type (OCR), QR/barcode capture, etc.

- Can do basic text expansions, but cannot implement privileged automation/macros that interact with other apps/UI or run broadly in the background.

- Due to aggressive lifecycle + tight resource limits constrain large language models/dictionaries; cloud sync/personalization

The ability to auto-fill the text/email verification codes is a huge one.

You can use gboard on iOS and it's a bit better. But still not as good as Android.

Fix your website before the day ends or I'm not upvoting

The one related thing that has always driven me a bit crazy on iOS (which I hardly ever use, only for testing) compared to Android (which I've been using daily since 2011) is how touches register slightly higher than where you're physically tapping. This alone makes hitting small-ish targets, including keyboard keys, quite challenging and infuriating. This does seem intentional too, as it depends neither on the device model nor on the OS version, it's been like that for over a decade at this point.

i believe a lot of us are tired of this mess and will switch. can you enable an option where i could too join on this deadline/timer? this way we can all quit all at once.

What infuriates me the most is iOS being absolutely unable to detect which language I'm currently writing in and automatically replacing words in one language to another. I write in 3 languages on a daily basis and it's making iOS totally lose its mind. For instance I'm 5 words deep into a message in French with a person I'm only speaking French with, and somehow iOS still thinks I'm making typos every other word and automatically replaces them with English or Spanish words.

And it wouldn't be so bad if moving the cursor at the end of a word or selecting a few letters in a word or even selecting an entire word wasn't nearly impossible on iOS (and I have relatively small fingers… I have no idea how people with big hands can do that stuff). Writing a 10 words messages can take me like 2 minutes sometimes because of all the errors made by iOS that I need to manually fix, and having to retry like 5 times to position the cursor successfully at the end of every word I need to rewrite in the correct language…

iOS keyboard is such garbage. Almost a daily pain point for me. But I suffer for the amazing battery life and hardware. Like all Apple kit the software is crap.

It’s also reading your inner thoughts via neurallink

I really hope someone at Apple is paying attention.

The text entry experience on iOS 26 really is frustratingly bad. Almost unusable (I’ve been going to the laptop for anything more than a few words).

It’s not just the keyboard (display glitches too), but the keyboard UX is particularly awful.

In the past, it seemed like Apple paid very careful attention to the minute details of timing size, etc. All that seems to have gone out the window with this liquid gas BS.

Split mode is completely broken since 26.2.

The amount of typos in this comment section is pure gold.

Why not just switch to a different keyboard?

Because thirdparty keyboards are equally bugged. Sometimes keyboards simply fail to show up or cover app content without rhyme or reason. This happens across multiple thirdparty keyboards so it must be an ios issue.