Comment by EdNutting

At least for editing text on the iPhone the key to moving the cursor is holding down the space bar: the keyboard transforms into a trackpad for cursor placement. This doesn’t really help for selecting text though, but it makes typing longer responses much more bearable.

Wait till you realize with Samsung Android phones, you can pretty much replace your laptop with a lapdock, or any TV + bluetooth mouse and keyboard.

Android stuff has been ahead of apple since like 2014. Apple is really good at optimizing the one thing that they use in advertising, while the rest of the stuff falls by the wayside. Was the exact same thing with Apple silicon and battery life. Sure, your laptop battery lasts a while when all you do is browse web and watch movies, specifically because of dedicated hardware for that. My phone with a similar capacity battery bank does the same. Once you start actually supersizing the cpu, the battery life drops significantly.

Android isn't any better, every new version every year, it's becoming a buggier and buggier Tamagotchi that demands attention every half an hour, and has a gazillion contradictory settings that never work. My phone, model 2023, has night mode that turns on automatically. You can turn it off for 30 minutes, or permanently. There are clocks that work independently. I wanted a better one, because this one would reset all its widgets every minute, and no app could play music or radio in the background.

So I got a newer one, from 2025. Fortunately, radio & media do work. But product managers wouldn't have been product managers without spoiling something. Somebody decided the alarm and night mode must work together in unison, and also they dropped the turn-off-for-30-min feature, and they decided to make night mode smart, that it doesn't turn on if the phone was active at the time. So, now you can get spam calls or sms make it ring loudly at night, because night mode didn't turn on, because you used the phone. Next time when you notice night mode should be on, but isn't, you turn it on. But now it's permanent -- till the end of the universe, unless you turn it off. And alarm clock won't ring, because deep in there, a "waking up alarm" box is unchecked, that should have made it work despite the night mode. Did any human actually test it work on themselves?

I submitted this YouTube video (not mine) a while ago here that demonstrates typing issues that I also encountered on several iPhones:

[It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken](https://youtu.be/hksVvXONrIo)

And they had it solved! 3D Touch worked perfectly – you pushed the screen hard to get a cursor, moved it to the start of the selection, and pushed hard again to drag to the end. They killed it because "not all iPhones had the hardware to support it" or something.

Years ago, someone demonstrated an improved mobile text editing system called "Eloquent" [1] and I wish this would be the default today.

However, my biggest issue with mobile text selection is accidental scrolling or scrolling too fast/far while dragging on the screen to select longer text parts. This is especially annoying in landscape mode when there is just a tiny gap between the visible text and the touch keyboard. I don’t know how to solve this, but it just makes the text editing process feel incredibly insecure/slippy and annoying for me.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9YPm0EghvU

YES Typing is a horror show (perhaps only for me as I don't daily-drive and iphone but only have an ipad for home usage which may "under-train" me to The Way).

Text selection is cute, with the magnifying lens. It seems like this should work. Though the rest of the process is unpredictable and The Bad Kind Of Magic: Nick turns self into toad, poof!

REFERENCE - from the site:

* "iOS Text Selection is Pure Chaos"

* You just wanted to move the cursor. Now everything is selected.

* You want to position the cursor at the end of a line. You tap. It selects the last word. You try to grab the handle — it doesn't respond and deselects. You tap again, now it selects the whole sentence. You tap blank space to deselect — nothing. You tap five more times. On the fifth, it selects all. You switch apps hoping the selection disappears. You tap and hold — sometimes text selects, sometimes a menu appears, sometimes nothing. Got a Magic Keyboard? Good luck — trackpad selection just doesn't work half the time, but touching the screen does. Eventually you select all, delete everything, and retype from scratch. Apple has had 17 years to figure out touch text selection. This is where they landed.

you can enable cursor control by holding space, and then you can move to selection mode by touching anywhere else on the keyboard.