I find it’s best to think of the iOS keyboard[0] as being a single big touch area with no distinct buttons, which you type into by tapping your fingers in the general vicinity of where the correct keys are, and let autocorrect do all the work.
I get confused by people who disable autocorrect, because for me it’s the only way the keyboard works at all. Just as I’m typing this, fully half the words I’m typing are wrong as I’m typing them, and the phone is figuring out my actual meaning only by looking back entire sentences and figuring out the correct words by looking at probabilities. I never stop to check whether it got the word right, I just keep typing. It figures it out eventually.
(Side note, when it does get it wrong, I can’t imagine a worse system for correcting words than iOS has. I simply cannot ever get the cursor to go to the right place for correction. Whatever system is being used for placing the cursor in response to inaccurate taps, is fully and diametrically opposed to how I’d expect it to work. It’s criminally bad.)
- [0] probably android too, but I only have experience with iOS so that’s what I’m speaking to.
(Picked up the tip from another thread on here about how sloppy the iOS keyboard is, and have subjectively found it to be a big improvement.)
To each their own, obviously. But... yeah, IMO it's pretty bad on Apple.
I want to speak with my own voice, not Apple's autocorrect voice. Doubly so in casual jokey chats. I do agree that it's unusable without it, but I ducking hate it.
I can now type “fucking” reliably without it replacing it.
Also, I’m not sure how it is today, but 5-8 years ago I knew more words in my native language than iOS autocorrect and got tired of it “fixing” them.
Somewhat close languages (french/english) are often not great, and adding CJK with anything other than english to the mix is also a recipe for a bad experience.
Of course, you still need to switch for CJK languages (because they need an IME), but that’s a given.
Android will autocorrect but if you immediately backspace, it reverts to the original. I didn't realize how much I relied on this function until it was absent.
By the time I have to anticipate the machine mis-fixing my not-mistakes, I think we're well into the-machine-is-wrong territory.
The idea that a lot of the time the opposite of one bad idea is another bad idea.
The Blackberry form factor is a reasonable middle way that could be explored again. Blackberry input systems but with the expanded functionality of smart phones - just adjust the app quantity/quality to your needs. There have been companies that have tried but their efforts have been clunky and with out native OS support and apps developed with it in mind, it is an uphill battle.