iPhone Typos? It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken [video]

Is this some sort of psyop to get me to use siri to send texts?

I suspect this last iteration broke it just enough for it to impact more people and make some of the problems I’ve been experiencing mainstream.

But yeah things like deleting when I meant to space, putting an “I” instead of “K” and a bunch of other little things like “thinks” instead of “things”, unintended periods; complete failure of spelling just generating gibberish “x” instead of “c” leading to un-autocorrectable failures; and if you want to reference the name of something that doesn’t fit the grammatical structure of the sentence but isn’t a mainstream item, forget about it.

Also “od” instead of “of”.

Seeing this video is super validating. Emotionally, it does a lot to make me feel vindicated.

Someone was telling me you can install 3P keyboards, does anyone have any recommendations?

Slide to type. This "issue" is at most 6 years old for iOS users.

Turn off slide to type if you do not use it. Slide to type does key resizing logic. This is the direct cause of this issue. Please upvote this comment for visibility.

Please reply if you think I'm wrong. I see this get posted frequently enough I'm actually losing it.

Please refer to https://youtu.be/hksVvXONrIo?si=XD7AKa8gTl85_rJ6&t=72 (timestamp 1:12) to see that slide to type is enabled.

Another example is most any toggle that's linked to Apple cloud stuffs, like settings in your iCloud account or parental controls. You see it toggle immediately, but that's unrelated to the actual state. You can't know the actual state until you exit the page and go back. Meta gets this right with their apps: you toggle, the toggle turns disabled, then the toggle is re-enabled when the state is confirmed remote side.

Apple is unintentionally pranking the world.

Once they added the suggestion bar above the keyboard things got noticeably worse. Every time they try to fix it they make it even worse than before.

With the current version, it’s not just the issue in the video I see as an issue. The two big problems I have are 1) repeated words, where I will type a word once, but auto-completion will inject another one. 2) The autocorrect will seemingly look at the whole paragraph I’m typing and change random words I typed several lines up and deemed correct. I will catch it doing this in real time, and sometimes it will flip a word back and forth repeatedly. I find I don’t just need to proofread while I’m typing, but also need to go through and re-read everything. It wasn’t always like this.

Maybe it’s my rose colored glasses, but I often think the iPhone peaked with the 4S.

If I ever lose my marbles I know I'm going to accuse iOS of being in on it.

It kind of seems like the grace period for the paddle hiding with slide-to-type needs adjustment. I just leave slide-to-type off.

I imagine the problem could be severe enough to some that they would pay the price of the Apple Developer program just so they may install such a Retro keyboard app from Github - if one exists?

Not only Alan Dye, Eddy Cue, Craig Federighi also need to go. Bring back Scot Forstall.

I raw dog my typing everywhere. Zero autocorrect. The last time I did use typing assistance was on BB10 with the 'flick to complete' because it was out of my way enough that I could ignore it was there or use it to save a small amount of time. Otherwise I too have the fond memory of Windows Phone's keyboard (I ran it on the HTC HD2), I couldn't tell you why it was good other than it felt good to use, again without autocorrect.

However, I'm CERTAIN there's an ergonomics thing at play, the 'brain calibration' time for me to type accurately on a big screen takes longer. I ran the original iPhone SE's as long as I could and always carried a second android device that was huge by comparison. Today I have the 15 Pro and a OnePlus 11. If I spend a lot of time using the iPhone it takes a little time maybe 20 minutes or so to stop making easy errors on the OnePlus 11. However, going back to the smaller iPhone after being on the OnePlus for awhile, there's not really an adjustment, I can hit all the letters accurately.

I have large hands, I still want the smaller device. There is extra work to need to move your hand and eyes across a larger device. More space to misclick on.

Swipe to type is enabled on android/ios for me. I use it sometimes, if you are hesitant at all on iOS or have a tendency to drag fingers at all don't enable it or it will mess up your typing. It's of course enabled by default like autocorrect. Some people have issues with it.

Dictation is underrated on iOS at least. It just works better and faster than the shitty autocorrect for typing. Obviously not applicable to a lot of situations but when I don't feel like typing it works really well.

EDIT: And I really have to have it off, I switch between devices too much and even with them learning my style of writing, I write differently for different contexts and each OS does its own thing differently. I don't want to spend the extra mental bandwidth correcting the autocorrect or having to think of how that specific autocorrect will behave.

I installed SwiftKey on iPhone too but even it seems sluggish.

I also did a few other experiments that I unfortunately haven't had time to explore further[2]

[1] https://www.typenineapp.com

[2] https://medium.com/porsager/a-better-iphone-typing-experienc...

iOS supports third party keyboards. Surely anybody this bothered by it should investigate those and pick a better option?

There was an absolutely mind-blowing keyboard which supported multi-finger swiping called Nintype, but development on it has stopped.

Then it seems like they’re started teaching to the bottoms of the class and added a bunch of terrible decisions: Substituting touch to select instead of touch to move cursor was a genuinely awful decision that now makes typing a constant chore, and it seems like their autocorrect is overcompensating so hard that it prevents me from writing perfectly good words simply because they’re not common ones.

Side note: anyone else have moments where you can’t press delete once predictive text has shown up?

sent from my iPhone

When i hit send, i want to send the message that is on my screen, not the message iOS thinks i meant to send.

(And that you cant just click into the middle of a word to edit one letter)

I havent found a root cause yet, tentatively chalked it up to advancing age.

I may have inadvertently selected a different keyboard (Samsung vs Google ) or wrong layout/settings when switching to newer phone.

I wonder if this is related to the fact that every Apple app shows up as “recently accessing” contacts in App Privacy Report. And I don’t mean only photos (face recognition), but: Safari, Camera, Shortcuts, Mail, Health… why? I’ve never even configured a Mailbox. Why are these apps all accessing my Contacts?

But I also think having this many keyboards enabled makes iOS basically throw up its tiny virtual hands in frustration and nullifies most fancy predictions.

(This was mostly swiped in on an iPhone 15 Pro running iOS 26 with very minor hiccups)

I'm working on this keyboard substitute with larger keys and split up keyboards: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/icantext/id6748927092. Give it a try if you want.

Apple's is by far the worst. All feedback is private. There is no way to show or advertise support for feature. Like I want to go upvote the feedback from this video, but all I can do is file my own feedback, which is more work, and therefore more people will choose not to give any.

Both Apple and Google and Microsoft have "users help users". These are infuriating as there is no official answer or help. There's just some fan with an often completely wrong or irrelevant answer. There is zero indication that any of these companies look here to see what's broken.

I've also had trouble getting rid of pop up menus (copy, etc). If I want to click on text, but it has decided to pop up a menu, it can be a real pain to get rid of it. (I had no problem on previous versions of IOS).

There's a fundamental law of features: Every feature you add may may make it better for people who use it, but it makes it worse for everyone else.

If you keep adding features, anything will eventually become unusable.

I want an iPhone but without a touch screen. Give me a damn real physical keyboard.

- You're in the middle of writing a sentence.

- The phone is trying to guess how that sentence will eventually be constructed.

- It goes back 3 words and changes one to match its guess.

- Its guess is @)%(*%@ WRONG

My biggest gripe is that when I say "want to" it replaces it with "wanna" unless I specifically enunciate "want to".

"Wanna" is NOT a word in english but there is no way to exclude it.

Frustrating.

Not sure how it works. Maybe it looks at touch surface area movements during the couple milliseconds that I'm pressing down for? Or dynamically adjusts hitboxes as this video says iOS does? Whatever the method, it works very well after like fifteen years of training (I copy the data folder between devices and never update it or let it access the internet, so I'm sure it's just me training it and not anything else, nor incompatible versions ever throwing data away)

Note that this is different from the context-based autocorrect since that only triggers on spacebar or suggestion selection

The iOS keyboard "just not working" is something I gripe about pretty much every day as a symptom of the world getting quantifiably worse than even five if not ten years ago, alongside a whole laundry list of enshittification transgressions.

LLM HUD displays can annotate ads, marketing copy and shopping carts with customer usability feedback.

Tim Apple really needs to let go the clowns who managed to regress the keyboard input functionality.

This particular problem manifests as: you're conversing in one language (say, French) and then use a single English word, at which point the spell-check and auto-correct permanently switches to that language, mis-correcting pretty much everything from that point onward.

(Classic) Outlook on Windows is pretty much entirely broken for me these days (even if I repeatedly mark the entire message as being in the majority language), as is Safari on MacOS: even in a completely-Dutch conversation, it always insists on auto-completing 'lang' ('long' but can also be 'tall') to 'language' and it's absolutely infuriating, and with no apparent way to disable the madness... (and, interestingly, no mechanism to detect that I dismissed the auto-complete for the 100th consecutive time, and that it's possibly not a desirable substitution)

In prior versions, you could long press to open the choices, then letting go would insert the default (eg .com)

With iOS 26, the touch target seems to be slightly different for triggering the options vs selecting them. I now frequently long-press, see the TLD choices with the default selected, and then releasing incorrectly inserts a single . instead of the TLD. This is infuriating when typing fast.

The autocorrect does help sometimes. But it fucks things up that were previously fine just as much as it helps so overall it’s probably worse than it used to be. Now You need to constantly monitor every key pressed to make sure it hasn’t screed it up later.

Does no engineer at Apple use iOS or they never face this problem ?

I don’t know wtf it thinks I’m doing because it doesn’t do any other action.

And liquid glass is still ugly and buggy. Apple has become enshitified.

>Who knows? Maybe they're just trying to simulate the butterfly keyboard in software.

Apple truly has some incredibly incompetent people working for it, obsessively focused on cosmetic style instead of substance and usability.

Alan Dye voluntarily leaving certainly won't solve the root problem that they didn't fire him years ago.

Bad Dye Job:

https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job

Gruber: Apple employees ‘giddy’ about Alan Dye’s departure:

https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/04/gruber-apple-employees-giddy-...

- Random invisible touches and phone calls - BUggy Glass UI - Stupid battery management ..to say the least.

- As mentioned, keyboard input is offensively broken. Whiffed inputs, the entire text selection/cursor manipulation model sucks (not being able to select in the middle of a word is inexcusable unless you have Stockholm syndrome for the bandaids), the cursor manipulation is broken, keyboard gets stuck open or closed, etc. etc. I'm convinced the input design for this phone is a CIA psyop designed to drive you to madness so they can recruit you as a sleeper cell.

- Passcode inputs are also broken. Trying to enter your passcode at easily achievable speeds results in dropped inputs.

- Above point wouldn't be a big deal if it weren't for fingerprint scanning being given up for Face ID, which is complete dogshit that constantly fails-to-passcode trying and failing to scan my ceiling, or my face when it's against a pillow in the morning. It's also completely worthless when I'm unable to fully point my face at the phone (working on vehicles or in some other enclosed area) or am trying to use the phone completely off of muscle memory.

- The gesture navigation system is a fundamentally bad idea. I'm an average-sized man and reaching over to the left hand side of the screen to make back inputs requires me to shift my fingers on the back of the phone just to make the reach for the input. This is on a base-model iPhone 16, which is already a touch too large for many hands to deal with this input system. The hitboxes for navigation inputs are too small and many of the inputs are often shared with actions in apps, resulting in taking all sorts of actions you didn't want to. Android style 3-button navigation at the bottom of the screen solved this many years ago. As an aside, the 60 FPS screen on an $800 phone as a "fuck you" push to upgrade to an even fatter pig of a phone that suffers even more from the bad navigation is funny.

- The GPS is fucked up, at least on the iPhone 16. It takes forever to find its bearing, after which it usually holds onto it until losing its mind again at the most inconvenient time. The only phone I've seen with a worse GPS is a Unihertz Jelly. Being in the same league as a $150 niche night market special is shameful.

- I have a frustrating number of calls get dropped. I don't know exactly where this issue comes from but it's noticeable, I run into it a couple times a week. My previous S24 on the same carrier never dropped calls under the same circumstances, so I know not having this issue is possible.

- The flashlight implementation sucks. Being able to tap it off with screen input is incredibly frustrating when I'm fumbling around trying to do something in the dark. And of course, it turns the screen on so you can make this accidental input every time you turn the flashlight on with the assignable side button. Being able to adjust the brightness is something I've never found any use for and mostly just serves to annoy me when I accidentally turn it down with another unintended input, but maybe somebody somewhere gives a shit about this, I guess.

- The split notification/settings menu is incredibly annoying. The settings menu is already a reach on the smallest mainline models, the notifications menu basically requires whole-hand movement. 20% of the space in the notifications menu is taken up by a fuckoff huge clock that you can't configure the size of. The lack of notification icons results in me having to actually unlock the phone and check things instead of just being able to know at a glance (I know they wanted to distance themselves from the roached Android notification tray look but I don't care).

- Liquid Glass looks like shit. So does a lot of the rest of the phone but I don't really hold some moron designer's bad visual taste against a product unless it affects the usability of the product. And of course, it affects the usability of the product. I actually laughed out loud having a literally unreadable lockscreen clock after the iOS 26 update, with the factory-provided moon background to add a little more salt to the wound. It reads poorly and is tacky to boot.

- This is pretty minor but the constant nags about iCloud are very funny. These assholes just couldn't resist hounding you for 99 cents more after you bought their $800 fuckup. It's like getting nagged about a Sirius XM subscription in a Lamborghini.

Individual points may be taken care of, but the disease is terminal. The iPhone's success at this point is driven by network effects, marketing, and its posturing as a premium product. Grown adults have an emotional attachment to the brand and the lifestyle statement. Android vendors are aping this stuff now. The memories of quality software and the ability to recognize it is being actively erased from the collective memory. Hoping that any of this is going to change at this point is just pissing in the wind.

I've been using it for years- much better at recognizing and more performant.