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.
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.
<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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
do you have a source for that?
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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);
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.
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...
If it's 1st or 2nd, then it's ok.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
She has only been complaining since iOS 26, though.
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. Perhaps somewhere (below?, to the right?) you include a progress bar. But a designer (I will not name, ha ha) came up a combined textfield/progress bar. It looked to my eye as though, as the page loaded, the text was being selected.
Jobs loved it!
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.
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?
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”
- 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!
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.
It’s also not just one problem, autocorrect and the keyboard combined make for at least a dozen seemly different defects
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.)
Now I’m entirely invested, what was the problem causing the crashes? How did they solve it?
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!
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.
Be glad you only type in one language and that it is US English (probably) ;)
Other times were not so bad.
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!
there must be some kind of event trigger on text focus being removed or keyboard hiding that does that... ughhhh
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.
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.
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.
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
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”.
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
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.
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".
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...