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...
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.
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 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.
"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.
<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...
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.
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.
When tailoring for one audience you usually do tale away something from other audiences.
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.
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.
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.
And its Windows competition Windows Explorer has likewise gotten worse and worse each revision of Windows.
Last Mac I was on still had OSX on it.
Thank goodness for Dopus.
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.
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).
Android (70%) beats iOS (30%). Windows (68%) beats MacOS (13%).
For example, they always have been focusing on video editing since the PPC days, starting with the iMac DV. And nowadays, Macs are still quite good for video editing; even when you factor in the price, it's not that bad of a deal. Previously it was about DTP and desktop graphics generally.
But it's always the same playbook; they are first to offer the possibilities of a new usage, but that comes with their high price; over time they lose competitiveness, and they end up switching to something else.
The question is always if the asking price is going to be worth it for whatever you try to accomplish with a computer at the moment. If you are doing work that doesn't require being on the bleeding edge, the answer is probably no.
However, in general, people buy Apple stuff for the status, very often as an ego trip (to prove they are better) and not infrequently out of ignorance/incompetence (it's crazy how much stupid shit Apple fans believe).
Always seemed like an apple sort of idea.
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.
do you have a source for that?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
… 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.
If it's 1st or 2nd, then it's ok.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Introduced a concept decades ago in no way implies that their current implementation of the concept is at all ideal or market leading.
Perhaps you shouldn't encourage them. Based on recent software releases from Apple they might see it as a challenge.
Sick of this weasel word. Either argue it or don't.
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”
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.
Why cure yourself of useful conversational nuance?
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!
Be glad you only type in one language and that it is US English (probably) ;)
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!
Other times were not so bad.
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.
there must be some kind of event trigger on text focus being removed or keyboard hiding that does that... ughhhh
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.
Turning off slide to type in settings improves the situation, however it still happens.
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Also typed without any maual fixes. My typingwas mucu better before glass.
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....
Ahhh yes, there's nothing like when autocorrect turns because into Decatur!
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.
Besides, users and developers don't always use software the same way, have the same settings, follow the same forums.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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'm always mistyping and I don't know how to fix it to do what they want.
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.
She has only been complaining since iOS 26, though.
It’s also not just one problem, autocorrect and the keyboard combined make for at least a dozen seemly different defects
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.
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.
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.
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”.
Now I’m entirely invested, what was the problem causing the crashes? How did they solve it?
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
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.
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.
auto-capitalization
auto-correction
smart punctuation
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.
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.
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.
So: TL;DW.
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.
Video-first is generally as ridiculous as SEO-driven recipes where I can't start cooking what I want to cook because I have to go through someone's nonna's best friend's sister's cooking life story.
It's great that this video gets to the point in the first 33 seconds, but make me want to watch your video.
This post made me not care.
I get video bug reports all the time at work -- but it's accompanied with a description of what the problem is that makes it worth my time to watch the video. (Sometimes, with a well-written description, I don't need the video but watch it to make sure my understanding matches.)
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Works better with an em-dash to make it feel more like today's default ChatGPT style.
Perhaps it's just a natural case of convergent evolution when the fitness function is bullshit at scale.
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.
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.
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.
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?
If this phone dies before they right the ship, I'll be looking around for the first time in almost 20 years.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The post you're replying to is hardly being aggressive.
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.
> Realistically, another post about Apple's borked keyboard should create zero emotional response
Of course that is not true. That is trivial to disprove.
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?
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!'
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
> 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.
I'm blown away by Apple building their own stores in competition with the franchisees who carried them those lean years.
It was never about loosing one single customer, it's about getting a bad reputation and loosing many more undecided potential customers.
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.
Excuse me!
As an autistic/ADHD[1], I can assure you that we do get sarcasm, and it's not autism that hinders that ability. In fact, this very post is peak autistic humor. (Deadpan comedy is trademark autism[2]).
>accompanied by an arrogant need to weigh in aggressively
Ding-ding, that's the winner! A necessary and sufficient condition for comments of that sort to appear.
Not exclusive to people on the spectrum either, mind you.
[1] https://romankogan.net/adhd
[2] https://autisticamber.substack.com/p/deadpan-literal-and-loy...
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.
Also some of these people would have voted for Reagan so... you know. A person is smart, people are stupid.
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.
I do wish I could get a “security patches only” update channel, though. Their declining software competency is visible and annoying.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As for powering off, you can tap the ⏻ symbol in the upper right-hand side corner of the control center.
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.
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.
I too keep GPS off unless I am navigating.
Please correct me if I'm wrong - it is after all just a feeling.
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.
Well Microsoft too, but their customers are long used to working/living in a dumpster fire.
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'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.
Its true of many businesses outside tech too.
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!
They should stick to Claude Code, like everyone else.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On desktop? Uh... There is a reason Nvidia is #1. Wake me up when I can get Nvidia on Apple.
I had to downgrade to Mojave so the wheels likely came off internally around then.
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.
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
In extreme cases, it terminates with a bisect.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I have a vaguely white trash Maryland accent and that fucker needs to hear everything three times from me.
So consider the possibility that many people are affected but haven't reached the threshold of writing something about it.
Dear Tim Apple, I meant exactly what I typed please stop changing it because your product manager doesn't think I know English.
'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'.
If you want to edit it, you have to open the notes app, paste it, edit it and paste it back into the caller.
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.
"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 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.
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.
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.
Which... uh, yeah, it is. The US is superficial, it's vain, it's racist. I thought everyone knew that.
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.
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.
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.
You are missing the /s right?
The hard to tell part is I'm also crossing carriers to message them, so that might have been the issue as well.
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.
Source? Would love to read this one lol
I'm regularly sending/receiving gifs and decent quality short videos between iOS and Android these days.
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.
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?
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?
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.
Honestly, I don’t care how complex and advanced the Siri is, I want simple tasks to work 100%.
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.
https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/correct-siri-pronunciation-...
I'm curious though if that affects recognition as well as audio generation.
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!
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...
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.
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.
Even more true now than it has been in maybe 100 years.
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.
I did uninstall all of the weird apps like "News" "Weather" etc.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
Don Norman has written about this. Users are more likely to blame themselves than the tool.
It's a weird sort of almost gaslighting.
This had me simultaneously chuckling and sad, because it feels very true.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 do the same, and I find it way better.
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.
Apple: Father knows best (but Father is getting old and sometimes forgets things)
Windows: If only we understood what the ancestors knew
Apple is more "here's this refined product which we designated as refined after a heavy session snooting cocaine off a toilet seat"
Sure, Jan. Next you'll tell me that Google isn't evil and Apple truly does care about human rights.
In comparison, Apple also has plenty of your data “encrypted at rest”, where they have the keys (unless you use advanced data protection). That data is only superficially secured. That’s not what this feature uses.
Course, I can switch to a different launcher, but it makes it much less of a "batteries included" sort of product.
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.
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.
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.
So I 100% agree, we need more competition. I was hopeful for a fleeting moment in time with the Firefox phone.
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.
And then it was all removed in a software update.
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 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.
Possibly re-tuning of some LLM parameters? Or forgetting some bad learnings... sounds like it's specific to a small-ish percent of users.
Most of those problems aren't solved by software. You are using your phone as a fashion item.
https://qskinz.com/en-us/collections/google-pixel-10-skins/p...
- 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.
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.
€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.
Maybe 10 years ago, but this couldn't be further from the truth today.
Apple has frozen their currency matrix at 2022-2023 levels, so in plenty countries they charge much (20%+) more than that.
So, that’s a data point if you want to consider others perspective
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.
If your decision-making is this poor, you cannot say for sure that you're leaving iPhone.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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...
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.
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 didn't sample. You filtered. You used a search engine to zero in on a couple dozen in a population of 350 million, then suggest to me that the mere fact that there's at least some means it's an opinion held by enough people to matter, when in fact it's probably not - even going by the references you selected yourself.
That you throw around some statistics lingo after all that is hysterically funny to me.
Scientific rigor never was the bar to convincing me, but since you brought it up yourself, be my guest.
> People exist that judge and exclude based on if you have have an Android.
We're not debating whether such people exist, we're interested in what the experience of someone using an Android phone is likely to be. Remember that an original claim was "Which means if your an Android user in a relatively average social group: [the following will happen]"
This conversation is very much about average/majority opinion and has been from the beginning. I might let you weaken that to "an android user is likely to have at least occasional bad experiences in some social groups" - if you're willing to at least provide evidence to support that much.
After all, what could be your purpose in bringing something up that has no relevance to almost anyone? You'd just be wasting both of our time.
Perhaps you should be focusing on losing weight instead of blaming the color of your text messages, lmao.
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.
:(
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.
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.
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!
Hard deal breaker. And alternative keyboards in iOS feel second class in some ways, so we really rely on Apple to get it right.
From my experience the opposite is true. The iOS keyboard feels unintuitive and buggy whilst most alternatives just work.
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)
Apple employees reading this right now: "IDGAF about the keyboard, I made 500k in TC last year."
Other comments here say Predictive Text is the culprit, but I already had that off. I also turned off Slide to Type. Same result.
First notepad.exe gets a rce then this, is it the bottom, sadly I think not…
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.
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.
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 thing is, when you do make a typo… just double tap the word (to select) and it will usually highlight the previous spelling. undo that, around 3 or 4 times, and it will simply stop autocorrecting that.
i find people who experience the most trouble with the keyboard are the ones who aren’t very patient, and keep tapping around like crazy - it’s not a physical keyboard.
- To select all, if you don’t have any selections — just simply triple-tap a word, and it will select the entire paragraph text.
- If you have text selected and you want to de-select, just tap in any area outside of the selection. If you have any ‘word’ selected, and you want to select a different word, double tap another word.
- If you have the Copy | Paste | etc bubble, you have to de-select the text before you can do anything else. (De-select by tapping anywhere /outside/ the selection).
- If you want to select a phrase or longer string, you need to tap at the beginning of the word once and WAIT for the cursor to move and blink again. If you do it too quickly, you might end up selecting more than you intended. If you did it right, it should just land right under your tap. Then double tap the cursor and drag up or down to select your longer text.
It works very reliably for me, and I’ve learned to type long prose on my phone quite well.
Let's take an exaggerated example. Surely, a touchscreen keyboard the size of a flatscreen TV is too large. Maybe even the size of a regular computer monitor. So where is the happy spot, and why? I think it's because of our manual error-correction and the software error-correction. On the smaller iPhone keyboard, if I make a mistake, it's obvious and I click the backspace key. There's much less software error-correction on a smaller screen because of a smaller room for error per key. On larger screens, I find that if I touch a key at a certain angle, it will register an adjacent key through the software. I also find that my fingers have to travel farther, and that increases the rate of errors. Not only that, the obsession with decreasing bezel size requires me to hold the phone in weird ways so it doesn't register a swipe from the sides.
Personally, the iPhone 6 was peak iPhone. I find that the obsession with decreasing bezel size is also compulsive because it significantly increases miss-swipes and introduces weird work-arounds like the "notch", "island", or hidden sensors. The flat screen also made the keyboard desirable. It was also slow enough so that the surveillance from the autocorrect wasn't useful but fast enough for everything else.
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?
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.
> 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
edit: another apple issue i have been hearing about recently is that the apple watch alarm just doesn't work some days. i have no idea why.
i don't have silent mode on when it happens. i have tried so many different settings to fix it. ended up buying the hatch alarm.
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...
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.
If Apple is getting occasional feedback about a mysterious bug, but it's near impossible to reproduce, what can they do?
It means literally nothing. The people working at Apple now are just there for the paycheck. They push some prompts into an LLM, pick through the output, push something to production that satisfies the acceptance criteria, and move on.
There is no one staying up late doing extensive testing and refinement to get things perfect. There is no one taking pride in the work they’ve done when they push keys on the iOS keyboard. All that has been cut up and distributed through a system of tickets, teams, and managers so that the amount of pride that finally trickles down to engineers is barely more than the pride of taking a big shit.
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.
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.
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.
The other big area is Autocomplete & Autofill while using external keyboard. There is no control over autocomplete except for CAPSLOCK. correcting autocomplete leads to autocomplete re-complete infinite loop.
I could go on for another 6-10 bugs but just want to highlight your great work and that autocomplete is an entire category of keyboard bugs on iOS / iPadOS
Someone needs to help me with the ethics here; is it okay to post hit-pieces or...?
- NO auto-corr - NO predictive text - NO check spelling - NO char preview - NO feedback - NO sound - NO auto-cap - NO smart punctuation - NO slide to type - NO everything
And this ABSOLUTELY solved my problems with the iOS keyboard. Yes, I do mistype from time to time. But that is in no relation to how it was with all those features…
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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
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...
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.
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.
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 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.*
Think about how much slower the output of the entire human race is because of one software issue.
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.
Id honestly prefer never to update than get these bogus “security updates, features and fixes”
I always wonder who makes these decisions and whether they fancy themselves a designer.
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
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 had situations where I had to wait for 2 minutes with return pressed due to iPhone not showing select all
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.
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.
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"?
Had me until then. Zero respect for this, frankly.
I did not think any one gave a shit outside of kids.
If an iMessage user creates a group chat where not everyone is using iMessage, then it's MMS. I suppose now it could be RCS if everyone's using a device and carrier that supports RCS, but I haven't kept up with that. MMS has a bunch of limitations relative to any modern internet messaging app, so people don't want to use that.
Some people are also very reluctant to install third-party messaging apps.
The obvious answer is to just use any of the many third-party messaging apps, but in the USA it seems like there's always someone who thinks a one minute setup process and tapping a different colored icon is too much effort.
In the USA, the most common messenger is iMessage. Unfortunately, unlike all the other apps I named, there's no Android app for it. Instead, if you try to iMessage an android recipient, suddenly iMessage turns into your phone's SMS app (not really sure why, feels like that should be a separate app), and half the features go away.
You can no longer remove people from group chats (if any 1 of them has an android), you get strange messages sometimes, you don't get typing indicators. If they use RCS, and then go on a vacation to a country without RCS, suddenly your chat can break in very strange ways.
As a result, it's very common in the US for people to be ostracized from iPhone friend groups due to not having an iPhone.
When you use dating apps, if eventually you trade numbers and your partner is a green bubble, that's usually enough to end any chances at a relationship. Your family will remove you from the family group chat after the first low-resolution group photo.
A company made a solution to this called Beeper Mini, allowing people to have blue bubbles while using android phones, and Apple of course immediately shut it down because Apple wants the iOS club in the US to have this tangible social benefit, of you being able to have a wider dating pool, being able to talk to your family, and so on. https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/10/apple-confirms-it-shut-...
It's a truly bizarre state of affairs.
iMessage is also controlled by a private company, and by my estimate, one of the most evil ones. Apple and Google are the two companies most complicit in feeding highly addictive and exploitative gambling apps to kids via their app stores, and they both profit massively off of it via 30% cuts.
A sort of email but then for short messages would be awesome.
No, you do not see others’ messages as blue or green. You see your own as blue or green to indicate what kind of messages you are sending.
If it was ever otherwise, it certainly hasn’t been for many years.
It's not "ha, greens are poor", it's "android arnold can't be in the group chat because it'll fuck it all up"
For some reason, the (second) richest company on the planet, which has a messenger app, is incapable of making an android app for their messenger and chat protocol.
There's a technological issue, and it's nothing to do with RCS or SMS, it's that iMessage for some reason doesn't have an android version.
The technological problem isn't whether Apple could fix it, it's the fact that they haven't. So, group chats with one green bubble just work differently than group chats with all blue bubbles.
Swype was the peak for touchscreen keyboards and it all went downhill from there.
No idea why.
Been an issue for two years or so. Resetting, all that doesn’t help.
Agree about many of the other bugs / issues.
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.
iPhone Typos? It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken [video]
Apple is beholden to its stockholders, not its customers.
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.
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.
It’s only 2 min 24 sec.
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.
I don't understand. What could Apple possibly have that is better than a working device?
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
- 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
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.
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.
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.
Your post actually inspired me to stop complaining and try to fix it myself. I built an iOS keyboard that uses AI to handle the parts Apple refuses to get right. You speak or type roughly what you want to say, pick a tone or language, and it outputs clean text. The translation + tone combo alone saved me from switching to Android.
It's called Cerebro, currently in TestFlight if anyone wants to try it: https://cerebro-keyboard.app
Not trying to plug my thing here, genuinely just wanted to say: your countdown resonated with a lot of us. Some of us just dealt with it differently.
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…
Yeah, two decades ago.
I’ve definitely noticed more typing errors
This has been going on for years, so I guess when this guy claims this started at iOS 17, it seems to make sense.
The iOS keyboard really really is utterly broken. I'm glad it's not just me. I was already wondering if I should schedule an appointment with a doctor and check if I have early onset dementia or something.
It starts as annoyance, progresses to frustration, then overt anger at a lack of action from Apple. I'm at that last level now.
They pulled their head out of their ass when the MBP evolved into a frustrating pile of crap, and I think my 14" M2 Max MBP is my favorite laptop ever. So they DO sometimes listen to their users. Now is the time to listen again.
Yeah well...
I totally understand why people want to buy the same phone as their friends and have a blue bubble and whatever; iPhone is not for me, but I get it. If it's meeting your wants and needs, then I'm genuinely happy for you. But I will never understand what binds someone to a product/company that's no longer meeting expectations. It's a product, a means to an end and nothing more.
But I doubt Apple gives a fuck. They're too busy making promos about how much cardboard they're saving per year shipping their dogshit products, or sending their C suite guys to do WSJ interviews about how much they care about privacy and are a premium brand while at the same time working overtime to implement 3rd party ads into their own ecosystem. They just simply aren't at all aligned with the company that existed when Jobs was still around.
If not, Apple users deserve this kind of behaviour where the user willingly signs off on their freedom
GitHub ignores my requests to delete my account. What are my options? I will whine online because I'm not ready to break the law. This, or maybe I will bully the github employees in real life. What are my other options? I tried to find a lawyer in the european country where the github has an office, but got refused help.
Why doesn't a keyword filter exist? Any time someone tries to send me a recruiting message, just let me flag it for auto-deletion please. Jfc.
So let's vote with our wallet.
It works, but very cumbersome. The value add in phones is really services, not the hardware/OS.
HOWEVER, the bug is interesting.
I can't reproduce this bug, but I have a suspicion as to what it is. As pointed out in the linked video the hitbox for buttons changes size based on predicted next letters.
The hitboxes are dynamic based on the most likley next letter. But that changes depends on your typing style. For example my real name is similar but not the same to a common english name. however both auto correct and the dynmaic hitbox allows me to reliably type my name, now.
This took time, but when I recently got a new work phone, I had to train it to accept my name.
TLDR: I don't think its a bug, I think its a learnt behaviour based on your most common words.
If you're holding out hope for the Mac to be a first-class citizen, you might want to identify how it's making Apple money first.
News at 11?
>I caved to the blue bubble pressure
This is basically how I view iphone users. They buy an inferior product because Apple exploited their lack of status. From moms, to teens, to low-middle income people... Heck, its even infected some perpetually single techies who are so insecure they buy the inferior Apple product.
These companies that exploit such psychology is disgusting. From Apple to Nintendo to Disney, there is something that feels immoral about how they market to their customers.
And you bet they have contracted out some marketing team to patrol every social media to downvote/upvote/comment as 'reputation management'...But hey they contracted them, plausible deniability.
However, I agree that Apple should cooperate with Google on messaging. Signal is so much better, but it’s hard to get people to switch.
So how many days does your battery last? No that isnt a good question, How often do you run out of battery? No that isnt a good question, android users aren't running out of battery.
How did Apple convince you this mattered?
Sure, there may be an hour or two's difference between equivalent models from different vendors, but it's nothing like the Garmin vs Apple watch situation - they're all in the same "it'll probably last a weekend, but definitely not a week" ballpark.
What does "advertising company" mean? Apple does in-fact sell advertisements[0], and relies very heavily on marketing to convey their value proposition.
[0] https://ads.apple.com/app-store/help/ad-placements/0082-sear...
What does "advertising company" mean? Apple does in-fact sell advertisements[0], and relies very heavily on marketing to convey their value proposition.
That's how good they are advertising, they built a brand around how they don't use advertising.
Either this user is faking everything about the keyboard, or Apple is.
None is testing (the keyboard) at Apple? Possible, but unlikely.
None is checking test results at Apple, possible and much less unlikely.
They want you to forget about the keyboard and go all vocal because "it's easier"? Sure.
That user wants his/her 15 minutes og glory? Possible, but unlikely.
I don’t understand how it works internally anymore. I mean I can program it, but none of the way linear logic used to apply.
I’m concerned that it’s internally very overcomplicated, because that’s how software is supposed to be designed now, but the “simplicity” is like a second system effect. A whole layer that makes clicking a button appear to work, when really there is no code flow that resembles the process.
You could try installing Gboard (https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/gboard-the-google-keyboard/id1...), or SwiftKey (https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/microsoft-swiftkey-ai-keyboard...)...and there are probably other options.
It may be even more obvious, but there are settings in general/keyboard that you can toggle.
I noticed a bit of a shift in the stock typing experience, but I adapted and it's fine.
Of course regular window management doesn't just work out of the box, you should install one of the many different window managers on macOS.
I was under the impression that to get a product that just works, I can buy Apple hardware, right?
Ultimately, Apple is responsible here but I don't think this is an intractable issue baked into the software. And yeah, maintenance is required despite what the perception might be. Apple even offers great support services for people who are not able to do it themselves.
Does it even matter if it is a corrupt setting or not? Why would it matter? As far as I am concerned, I am seeing every iOS user around me suffering from this. The root cause does not matter here.
Throwing random nonsense about 'general/keyboard' settings (that don't exist, btw) because you yourself can't think of anything specific should have been another.
The keyboard, specifically the Autocorrect, is fucked and has progressively worsened over the past 5 years. It's atrocious today. This is a first party problem that shouldn't need 3rd party solutions, end of story.