At the risk of being controversial, isn't there also the choice not to implement autocomplete and then avoid the above conundrum, especially once you factor in the fact that they can't possibly catch all combinations of words/letters so a grey list isn't actually an effective solution either, other than it provides a we tried defense.

The ultimate problem being some subset of consumers want autocomplete and some subset will retain the right to be offended and some subset will be both of those?

I suspect Apple just decided that giving users a lot of fine-grained settings is not as good for their business as keeping things simple.

Yes, taking away customer choice is good for business, as Apple has proven time and again. It's a shame, but I can't argue with the results.

To my understanding, that has been their attitude for pretty much the entire life of the company.

> Is there any reason apple can't give us the choice of.

Because they are in the business of making money and the business case for this doesn't make sense.

The biggest problem with it for me is it also affects swipe typing by tracing over the letters. There’s no way to implement that (and have it be even slightly usable) without some amount of predictive text.

If it didn’t auto complete then that would be fine when hitting keys individually, but when I’m swiping the words, it means no matter how accurate I am or how many attempts I make, it will literally never produce that word in that position.

And it’s contextual. Obviously I can swipe in “me,” but if it’s after the word “kill” then it’s banned, and I simply can’t dedicate the space in my head to learning this inscrutable list of banned phrases that until this article I’d been unable to find anywhere so I could only ever discover a phrase was on it by having an extremely frustrating time trying and failing to type it until I realized “oh, this is a politically or emotionally charged phrase (or could be in a different context) and I’m not that bad at typing so it’s probably banned.”