1. Long-tap with your right thumb, drag the cursor to the end of a sentence 2. Tap with your left thumb (to the left of your right thumb) and drag to the left to select the sentence -- nothing happens 3. Drag your right thumb to the right to make sure you understand what's happening and you're doing it right -- the selection extends, yay! 4. Again try dragging your left thumb -- nothing happens.
How could Apple's human interaction people let this ship?!
Do you often select text to feel better? Are you OK?
You can tap and hold with three fingers to bring up the clipboard bar which has icons for undo, redo, cut, copy, and paste. Assuming that's what you mean by "access the clipboard"?
I copy and pasted this on an iPhone - I tapped the comment box which summoned the keyboard, and I tapped again and it gave me Paste/Autofill as options.
> On Android, I had a keyboard that allowed me to swipe on the space bar to move the cursor, why can't I have that here?
This is out of the box functionality on iOS. I had a samsung device before, and I had no end of issues with the keyboard failing to summon, certain apps refusing to use my preferred keyboard, password managers not working properly, inconsistent selection/focus/edit dialog behaviour. I don't get _any_ of those issues with iOS.
> I often find it impossible to drag a selection to select more or less characters.
Your description reminds me of how it felt after that recent OS update I mentioned, until I realized I can turn off spellchecker to restore the previous typing behaviour. Now the copy/paste popover and drag-selection work every time, but I have to really watch for typos.
Like me, you were used to previous behaviour, and the new one is unfamiliar to the point of broken. I agree that Apple has royally screwed up here by making this the default behavior in iOS 17.
However, it’s a bit disingenuous to say it was always broken if it only started working differently in the latest version.
> why isn't there a keyboard shortcut to access the clipboard
On iPad, if you bring up a large keyboard by pinch-zooming the small one, you get those buttons on screen keyboard. (On an external keyboard, the normal macOS copy-paste key combos work always.)
Wouldn't be as big of a problem if the spellchecker was not absolute garbage and handled multi-language text input, or just worked well for a single language. Honestly, I don't think the team working on the keyboard at apple has any linguists or any kind of diversity to pay attention to nothing but the most milktoast of English language use.