Works well for me. You just type with one hand without ever lifting your thumb. You do need to set the correct language, and if you mix languages, your phone's OS has to be able to deal with that, but at least on iOS that is the case and the prediction is very good. If the first choice isn't correct, usually the first or second displayed alternative is what I wanted.

There are two caveats, though. Firstly, I type differently when using swipe. As it favors words from the dictionary, my texts sound less spoken and more written. And secondly, having backspace delete the whole word is a critical feature to avoiding annoyance. If none of the predictions are correct, I just tap backspace and then type the word like I usually would. This, combined with the rarity of those hiccups makes swipe typing quicker than regular typing to me.

It also helps with relaxing my wrists as I can also hold the phone with one hand and swipe with the middle finger of my other in a gesture like holding a pen, but without the pen.

Maybe there's actually a third aspect; screen and hand size. I haven't owned any big phones, my iphone 13 mini is the biggest phone I ever owned, but I do have large hands, so swipe typing with a single thumb is not very difficult. Your experience might be different depending on your anatomy and device.

There is another caveat with swipe in languages that write some words capitalized. The prediction fails to capitalize correctly in the middle of a sentence. The overhead to edit the word to the correct capitalization is so large, that swipe doesn't feel useful at all. A menu entry or gesture to capitalize the selected word would be really handy.

With gboard on Android, if you highlight a word and tap shift, it will go from lowercase to Capitalized to SHOUTING case.

That's cool. Does gboard have some help that talks about such hidden features?

swipe is quite nice, and on my phone it even recognizes when I want to type in 3 different languages that thankfully use the same alphabet

I do have large hands too but i dont feel the need for swipe. I use the autocomplete function much more

Swipe is good on keyboards other than the stock iOS keyboard. That one is worse than every other option imaginable and it sucks to see because iOS used to have the best mobile keyboard bar none back before they tried to get smart with it.

> ” other than the stock iOS keyboard ”

Did you check it lately? It’s really good now since iOS 17… but indeed it was bad before.

I swipe with my index finder, holding the phone with my other hand, and I find that fairly efficient.

I've been using swipe for years now on my Android phones (currently a pixel 5). I hold the phone in one hand and use the thumb of the same hand to swipe. Feels much more effortless than "actual" typing. Especially when comparing it to typing with both thumbs.

I've been using swipe since the beta version of Swype. However, Google seems to be enshittifying Gboard. It continues to decline in accuracy, so I can't swipe as fast as I used to. ...sigh...

It's indispensable for me. Works nearly flawlessly, and in English and Spanish at the same time, without having to tell the keyboard to change languages. I'm magnitudes faster with it, and rarely have to go back and correct anything.

This whole comment was written with swipe and didn’t require any corrections, I do much better with swipe than trying to tap all the letters. It’s pretty fast too.

I don't get along with it either -- it's the worst possible option for me. But I know a lot of people who get along very well with it. Different people are different.

Which phone do you have? I think it works great on the Mini, but I believe I recall it being a disappointment on a Max

Try downloading Gboard. Been using it for years. Dramatically better than iOS built in, which makes horrible decisions about when and how text is corrected and has worse gesture recognition.

After a relatively short time, I stopped having to look at the keys or think about letters. Touch typing from keyboard transfers over well.