Switched from pixels to iphone in the last year or two and the keyboard is the biggest pain point by far. I tend to use swipe, so this particular issue isn't something I've come across. What I do run into is weird censorship issues where I'm trying to type "kill myself" or something similar and the phone will do anything to not provide that as an option. Then, when I try to manually change it, editing is a nightmare. Inevitably trying to change the ending of a word results in the entire word being deleted. It inserts spaces where I don't want them.

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

Similar switching story. I'm very happy with an iPhone overall, but god damn they keyboard took some adjusting. The default keyboard on Pixels (GBoard?) is excellent. The autocorrect is also unimaginably better on the Pixel. It's embarrassing how bad the iPhone's autocorrect is. Not just missing obvious cases, but actively sabotaging correct cases.

The key is to work around the text input. If you want to say "kill myself", you input "kill my" then complete the "self" portion by pressing delete (remove space), then s-e-l-f. I feel like most of my typing time is spent making these corrections, as it's very quick to swipe but corrections are almost always necessary and they are an order of magnitude slower. Yesterday for example I tried to swipe "succession" but it really wanted to output "secession", so I change my strategy to "success" (it really liked this word), then delete (remove space), i-o-n.

I think every time I swipe I need to do at least one correction like this, where I type one similarly spelled word with as minimum an edit distance as I can think of in the moment, then do a manual correction.

I've never noticed the "censorship issue", but once it gets a word wrong once, it's game over. Editing is awful. If I'm trying to replace the word entirely, I inevitably do the "wrong thing" and fall victim to the editing again, or tap something wrong, or.. I don't know, but I either have an undiagnosed brain injury, or the "correct" thing to do to get the phone to just take the damn word you typed changes every day.

I switched from Android to iOS like five or six years ago and still think about this almost every day, how much I miss the Android keyboard because the iOS keyboard is so, so, so terrible. Years later I still find it a frustrating, type-inducing mess.

Same for me. My Pixel magically fixed scrambled words (and was very fast doing it). iOS is terrible, even without described bug.

I am now much faster typing with the speech-to-text feature. Maybe that is what they are pushing. Maybe Apple wants to remove the keyboard and it is slowly increasing the friction so people use it less and less? Similarly how Chrome degrades browser performance until it gets restarted to force an update.

> Then, when I try to manually change it, editing is a nightmare.

It feels like the editing and cursor process has gotten exponentially worse over the last few iOS versions. I do not understand what anyone is doing on the Apple side with this, but every change they make, makes it significantly worse.

Haha sometimes I want to type f*ck and it gets auto corrected to duck. But once I was trying to type “pura” (pure in Spanish, I do have Spanish enabled for auto correct) and it auto corrected it to “puta” (look it up). Shrug.

In spite of the manufacturing drama it introduced, 3D Touch was an insanely great feature for editing alone. Push a little harder on the keyboard and have a cursor to easily place where you need it.

I was real grumpy when they took it away. Editing had only become even worse since. I’d love to know what they’re trying to achieve.

The iPhone keyboard is a living he'll.

I don't think it's "censorship" so much as it's defaulting to less-problematic phrases to avoid the opposite happening (you meaning to say "fill myself" or something). That could be jarring and lead to embarrassing situations.

Maybe 99 times out of 100 someone means to type "fuck" instead of "duck", but it's a completely legitimate UX decision to optimize preventing that 1% case, even if it's annoying the other 99% of the time.

I didn’t pick up on the censorship issue. I just spent a few minutes trying to swipe type “kill myself” and found myself completely unable. I wonder if this is intentional. If so it feels like an embarrassing waste of time.

it's not just you.

the iphone keyboard has gone to shot.

and auto-correct has lost me data. I've typed in something important to remember and later when I go look at it ("call spaghetti before 5pm!"), I can't figure what I typed in.

In the end, I learned to disable auto-capitalization, auto-correction and smart punctuation.

and editing is a nightmare. Getting the cursor in the middle of a word is just about impossible, like highlighting just the characters you want to cut or copy.

My phone loves to tell people they V are fat instead of ask them about their day. Also loves adding random v s everywhere

Similar story here as well. Why is editing only a nightmare when it's something salacious or off-beat?

theres a setting to turn off whole word delete. So if it does the wrong word when you press delete it will only delete the letter by letter not the whole word. It helps but iphone keyboard is still horrendous.

just turn autocorrect off. You can learn to type pretty quickly without it, and you aren't subject to mind control.

I recently learned of the early 20th century cult called the Royal Fraternity of Master Metaphysicians. Their best known stunt was attempting to raise a baby to become immortal by never exposing her to the concepts of death or disease—our ability to contemplate death being the thing that dooms us to die, in their worldview.

Big Tech's attempts to shape us by conforming our capability to express ourselves to "algospeak" seems similarly misguided... though not out of character for Big Tech. (AI can be seen as a form of hermetic magick: an attempt to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth by first constructing a machine-god.)

Does Pixel somehow have a good keyboard? I use GBoard and find it atrocious: for English it's ok, but it doesn't know basic declensions in Czech nor Polish and autocorrects them to something nonsensical. This happens every time I try to type something, so I avoid writing on the phone.

It's the age of LLMs! Language has been solved! LLMs are great at both Czech and Polish. This problem is orders of magnitude easier. Why doesn't my keyboard even know these words exist?? Is there an Android keyboard that actually... knows basic forms of basic words?

It refuses to type "white people"!

It's also infuriatingly difficult to type "and" (I get "ABs" all the time)

[dead]

You're on Android. If the keyboard is censoring you and you don't want that, install a different keyboard from any store/repository you like

I've also got a Pixel from work and the keyboard doesn't even support swiping. It's a nightmare. I don't really want to install another one due to paranoia related to the work I do, but on my personal android phone, replacing the OS keyboard with Swiftkey (for which I have a data folder with over a decade of training in it) and denying it internet access is the first thing I do after rooting. I'm amazed that so few people seem to even realise that software is replaceable (also the launcher, which is an even-more-commonly-heard complaint after changing/upgrading phones)

Edit: wait I misread which way around you switched. Nvm and good luck