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.
>autocorrect is also unimaginably better on the Pixel
Pixel user here. That depends on the language you're typing. Autocorrect and spellcheck, not just on Android but other Google products, will change correct danish to incorrect danish. It's infuriating. The issue I encounter most often happens because Google apparently assumes english grammar is universal, and insists on splitting compound words, which is never done in danish.
Danish is already being heavily eroded by foreign influence, and this isn't helping.
I personally haven't found any keyboard that works better than gboard. And exactly because it's the only keyboard that just lets me type in two languages without having to "switch", and it does that well. Right now my spacebar just says "NL - EN" and it lets me combine Dutch and English just fine.
From my experience it is much worse than it used to be 5 years ago. I have been writing English, French, and to a lesser extent German on an iPhone since ~2008. Initially, the dumb autocorrect would just correct to the closer word in the dictionary corresponding to the current keyboard, but over time it would pick up more and more words I used regularly. At some point around 2018 or so, it was nearly flawless. I think it changed the dictionary depending on the language or the sentence, because I had different suggestions for the same mistyped word in the same document. Also, I assume that by then my personal dictionary was quite extensive.
And then they bragged about a new machine-learning improved keyboard and it went downhill. First, all keyboards became monolingual, which was a 10-years regression. And even in that language, it was very flakey. They added multi-language keyboards somewhat recently and it got slightly better, except that for some reason it changes the keyboard back to the English-only one regularly for no reason I can see.
It is maddening. For a couple of years it was fantastic.
And that’s not the worst. On the Apple Watch not only is the multilingual keyboard completely broken, but worse than that: if you change the language of the keyboard by long pressing the space button it shows the new language, but the autocorrect proceeds to just ignore it completely and autocorrects everything as if I were typing in the system language rather than the one I selected.
And contrary to the iPhone you can’t even disable autocorrect! This + the super-aggressive autocorrect of watchOS (the screen is small after all so you are likely to make a mistake and we better fix it automatically!) makes it an absolute NIGHTMARE to type on an Apple Watch in multiple languages. Your only option is to use speech to type because that one for some reason works when you change the language whereas the keyboard doesn’t care.
Edit: the language switch bug on watchOS seems to have finally been fixed on watchOS 26.1. The bug was already long present on watchOS 11, so not something that watchOS 26 introduced.
Completely agreed. Apple seriously regressed the multi-lingual experience. They probably have a model per language. If you have to mix languages in a sentence, well, good luck!
I just want to talk to the folks who made the language switching logic so complicated instead of just a constant rotation like desktop IMEs. It seems like they expect the user to remember the previous language or prioritize languages in a clear order, but did it not occur to them that I might switch languages chaotically (A->C->D->B), keep it there, then hours later when I forgot what $previousLanguage was and press switch, I might as well be spinning a roulette?
> And exactly because it's the only keyboard that just lets me type in two languages without having to "switch", and it does that well. Right now my spacebar just says "NL - EN" and it lets me combine Dutch and English just fine.
I can't stand keyboards that do this - especially those that don't let you turn it off. If you write in another language that doesn't use the Latin alphabet, you end up with nonsense suggestions - common English words like "the" or "and" will get replaced with obscure words in another language that just happen to sound vaguely phonetically similar. I almost never switch languages mid-sentence when typing, and yet the keyboard can't seem to grasp that.
This. I use romanian, english and turkish at the same time. Sometimes goes sideways because we mix a lot of words in english and romaninan in the same sentence, but it's ok. No other keyboard comes close.
Multilingual typing is a godsend. I did have to tweak settings though, like disabling the "suggestion strip" (because sometimes I'd be typing fast and accidently click the GIF button, then an image, which in many apps sends it immediately without a draft which was extremely annoying).
I've switched to GBoard on the iphone. I don't like the fact that I need to use a third-party software for something that's so crucial. But GBoard is so much better than the default iphone keybaord.
It's abandoned and buggy. I'm surprised google hasn't just removed it from the store. I suspect as soon as it actually requires an update because of a change in the OS it will disappear.
Yes, I loved it, but it crashed in too many apps and I had to switch to the Apple one :(
Yes! I miss it very much. When I was on Android, I used to have it set to 100ms. I used to very quickly send well-punctuated text. On iPhones, it seems like the digitizer has 100ms of hysteresis built in.
now i just Lettuce my iPhone sden whatever it wants with no punctuation its not real good
Unfortunately, MacOS doesn't have settings (which I am told it had) for animation scales, like Androids have. The interface is sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow.
Yeah I tried it and it doesn't stand up to it on Android in my experience. I figured I'd rather not give Google any data if the experience isn't going to be the same.
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.
Really? If you swipe "kill" and then try "yourself" or "myself" does it ever get it right or provide it as one of the options? Doing it right now myself and I can't get it to do either. I have manually entered those words and hit the "myself" in the suggestion box to try and convince it that that's an acceptable correction to no avail.
> I inevitably do the "wrong thing" and fall victim to the editing again, or tap something wrong, or.. I don't know
Every. Time. I like to think that I'm not an idiot and can generally pattern recognize, but it just feels so inconsistent that I'm always doing the wrong thing.
Further, iPhones are so bad if you exist anywhere outside the mainstream and language orthodoxy.
Their voice recognition stubbornly refuses to acknowledge Linux, instead transcribing Linux.
Typing "tboy" or "transfem", common terms in the trans community, gets changed to "toby" or "transfer". I can understand "toby", but the latter is especially bad, as the "r" and "m" keys are nowhere near each other. I'll type these words several times a day, every day, and it'll never get recorded. But one typo of the form "unbeleivalbe" gets permanently etched into the autocorrection.
Any intentionally unorthodox english gets invisibly censored and editorialized. You can say "here come dat boi" nowadays (which is good if you're a fan of 2016 memes) but not "wrasslin". Phrases like "what you doin today" has its tone and informality stripped when it's changed to "what are you doing today".
I would at some point throw my phone out the window if it worked like this. Instead I choose to have zero help correcting anything I type on my phone. I proofread, and fix any errors before I hit "send". I'm also on a folding android phone with a large screen and a 3rd-party keyboard app with adjustable size keys, so it's very easy to type.
But you can not disable predictive button resizing.
Predictive text replacements are very bad, but they mitigate the worse issue of the fact that the keyboard is incessantly shifting with every single keypress.
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.
The workaround is to add fuck as a shortcut for fuck. They intended the translation for doing things like translating omw to "On my way" but it works as a hack to let you use profanity without autocorrect killing it.
Fun you should mention this - I do have a few shortcuts but I find I don’t use them anymore because it tends to not recognize/expand them. It’s faster to just type the whole thing than to type the shortcut, realize it didn’t expand, curse at the thing, backspace over it, and have to retype it all anyway.
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.
"3D touch" was always marketing wankery. Every capacitive touchscreen and touchpad can sense pressure.
No android phone needed a trademarked name to have that feature. If modern iPhones no longer allow you to easily move the cursor around for editing, that's a software engineering decision. Android's implementation was not as nifty, you could only move "linearly" along the text input, rather than freely in two directions, but the intent is you just place the cursor roughly at the place you want and drag the space key for exact placement, though IMO it's too sensitive. Constraining axis in that context is a good thing.
Meanwhile, my Mac's "3D touch" keyboard functionality only results in it insisting to show a dictionary definition for most of the words I click and making it so "drag this file onto an app to input it" doesn't work half the time because dragging a file from Finder just doesn't work sometimes!
"Mac touchpads are so much better than everything else" people tell me as I yet again cannot do the one interaction that is the killer app for multi-window graphical workstations and that we figured out in the 80s on computers that couldn't even do color.
I'm not just grumpy, I'm baffled. Suddenly, when there is an URL or number input, when the hold-on-spacebar UX doesn't work because there is no spacebar, how could you even move the cursor left or right? Tapping in-between tiny letters is borderline impossible, and it isn't always in the right place to do the hold-and-slowly-move thing either, because the magnifying glass doesn't show up, so you can't see where you end up... It seems to me like for the last 5-6 years, the people who do decisions at Apple doesn't actually use the products themselves, or actually understand functional UX. Jobs would be ashamed.
This was changed, and it is pretty easy to think the feature got removed.
When it was pressure-sensitive, you could push harder anywhere on the keyboard. But now that it’s tap-and-hold, it only works on the space bar. Most other pressure-sensitive actions just got replaced with tap-and-hold with no changes. But doing that on any other key brings up letter-specific accents, so they moved it down to spacebar.
It also used to be faster. Now you have to wait, but before it was pressure sensitive. You could trigger it instantly with more pressure. Edits were so fast and convenient, but now it’s a slight pause each time
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.
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.
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.
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?
Do you have an example? I type in Polish in GBoard regularly and haven't noticed too many anomalies (although I do have the right language pack installed, and the keyboard is set to it, and I "add to dictionary" occasionally).
what do you mean by this specifically? iOS (and I'm guessing Android) both have dictionaries. I can select a word I've entered and look it up in nearly any text area.
> Does Pixel somehow have a good keyboard? I use GBoard and find it atrocious
I use Google Pinyin Input. Since it was discontinued in favor of (the much worse) GBoard, I have to keep a backup of the apk and sideload it onto new phones.
Google does not appear to think of input methods as something that should be convenient for the user to use. Not sure why.
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
Is this some sort of psyop to get me to use siri to send texts?