Third party keyboards are still second-class citizens on iOS. They lag on switching, they don't have access to native keyboard settings, they crash debugger, their layers can't be viewed in Xcode, they sometimes break on app update and then users blame developers.

Third party everything seems to be 2nd class citizens on iOS. Apple's apps get special provisioning (not to mention default system app status) that third party apps don't.

Also, worth noting, many of them send whatever you type in back to the companies that built them, and they resell the anonymised data.

I run an ASO company, and received an offer from one of the keyboard companies for the purchase of the data of what people type into search.

Reported them to Apple as a potential security risk. Apple didn't care.

I don't own an iPhone currently, but I haven't had any problems with Gboard on a number of iPhones that I've used that have it. Is your statement applicable to all third party keyboards, or most of them?

Is there any reason to think the jailbreak community inspired those? I'd think competition with Android, Windows phone, etc. was a lot more persuasive.

There were many instances in which a feature became available via jailbreak tweak, then showed up in the next major iOS revision. Sometimes implemented in almost the same manner.

It is possible that each instance was a coincidence, but that seems unlikely.

A lot of the features, seemingly taken from the jailbreal scene, were rather obvious additions previously found lacking in iOS, e.g. custom keyboards, call filtering and a common filesystem. Tweaks may have hastened.their development however I am yet to be convinced that Apple relies on other people for ideas.

Safari Private Browsing comes to mind. The functionality and UI was very similar to the jailbreak "tweak" available for this.

Also, the new iOS notification system on iOS 4/5 was directly nabbed from a jailbreak tweak, though it was because they hired the developer so I am assuming it was not "copied" in that case.

Wasn't the jailbreak just adding a quick toggle for the existing setting? (And the equivalent of the quickly available mode in most major desktop browsers at that time, including Safari?)

Similarly, with Notification Center I've never previously heard that credited to the jailbreak community because it was always mentioned as an area where iOS caught up to Android, which also seems likely as the inspiration for a jailbreak as well.

Ideas are a dime a dozen, however, it is likely that usage of jailbreaks were useful evidence about which features are so desperately wanted by people that they are willing to go through a nontrivial inconvenience just to get them.

Customers saying "I really want X" is generally just empty words with poor correlation about how much X is wanted, and you should take that with a grain of salt instead of assume that there's a demand for X; but on the other hand if there's a price attached (either a literal payment, or price of inconvenience as in this case) then seeing if customers really want this is very useful data.

Even so I don't think it would be surprising if they used the popularity of certain jailbreak tweaks to prioritise their own implementations

It'd be crazy not to pay attention to, I've no doubt they keep an eye on these things to inform their feature development

One of the things well known at that time is the notification/control menu which was not available in official ios (the official one sucks). I even heard at some point that apple hired the guy that worked on the app for jailbroken iOS to help work on that...not sure if true story.

1. “Sucks” is not a synonym for “not to my personal taste”. One of the common trends around most jailbreaks, desktop UI hacks, etc. is that some people have very strong opinions which aren't viable for general usage; one common reason for features taking awhile to mature is making them usable for the other 99% of users. When that happens, inevitably some people in the first camp would complain about their idea being stolen and dumbed down, ignoring how much more work the general case required.

2. How much did Android, etc. influence both? I don't know which specific code you're referring to but in discussions I saw the most common way these things were described was as adapting an Android feature and by default it seems a lot more reasonable to assume the influence came from a the project with orders of magnitude greater exposure and UI development funding.

> “Sucks” is not a synonym for “not to my personal taste”.

I remember not using my iPhone for a year or so (switched to Android).

Next time I booted up that phone I had to click through -every- modal notification dialog in every app for that year (calendar events, emails, others). One by one.

It took hours to dismiss them all, before I could actually use the phone.

That's not a matter of taste. That just plain sucks.

swipe the spacebar to move the cursor is the one thing I missed the most when I switched from a jailbroken iPhone to Android. Luckily the Google keyboard recently implemented that function.

Wow, this is an awesome trick! Works beautifully on Google Pixel, wish I knew this one before. So useful in correcting dictated/autocomplete errors.

For what it's worth, that is a stock feature now on 3D Touch capable phones.

And imo much better implemented! I use both the Google keyboard and the default; Google's cursor swiping is one dimensional. Swipe back and forth to move around a line. The default one is two dimensional. You can swipe through columns too!

Apple's restrictions prevent third party keyboards from two dimensional scrolling (as well as selection, copy+paste etc)

I had a jail broken keyboard with two dimensional sliding which is better than force touch imo

Wordflow keyboard allows you to use the entire keyboard as a cursor with force press.

The stock keyboard does that as well.

This just might be the best thing Hacker News has ever done for my life. Seriously, life changing.

Meanwhile, I now have a legit reason to want a phone with force touch support, which the SE does not have. But the SE actually fits into my pockets and hands. So now I'm hosed either way. Thanks, ̶O̶b̶a̶m̶a̶HN.

Just tried this and... wow!

With force touch or just a regular swipe?

force touch on the stock/default keyboard

and yet none of the original devs get any credit or compensation for the ideas that were taken by apple which is kind of sad

We sure didn't. I think one guy got hired by Apple because he came out with an innovative app switcher, and I know a few others who got internships there, but largely speaking, Apple took over a lot of features we put into play.

P.S. There's another reason why jailbreaks are few and far in between. There is close to no trust between the people who create the jailbreaks...I had several good exploits that became public without my permission.

Man, you forgot the most annoying aspect: No CVE credit when fixes came out until around iOS 6 or 7.

Although not super consequential, it seemed petty to not do it.

I remember it being a practice at one time in various IRC and other online communities to share hashes of the exploit payloads between teams so that they knew whether or not there was one or more than one, and whether or not they were going to collaborate.

Nah, hashes were public as proof (Usually later followed by a zip file matching the hash).

On IRC, we generally knew who did or did not have vulns and trusted not to BS. That implicit trust did make things difficult.

Apple is pretty rampant about Sherlocking, this isn't new.

Yep, and they've closed down apps like Twitter interfaces and IIRC a camera app because they rolled the use into their own iOS.

Yeah but imagine this happening to the IBM PC in the old days. We wouldn't have lots of things now, including Linux.

Not to mention simple cut copy paste editing and being able to easily place the typing cursor inside words

Five shortcut icons, how I miss you...