Comment by srmatto
10 days ago
The recent changes to the iOS keyboard and text editing in general have been very counter productive for me as well. Tap to select doesn't really work the same way anymore and the logic of it isn't clear to me which makes it unpredictable. Typing accurately itself has gotten really difficult. I used to be a pretty quick typist on the iOS keyboard but now I find myself looking for my Mac to send a message from there or using voice to text more.
Folks can thumb their noses at Reddit but the top comment in every post about iOS updates since 26.0 was released is some variation of "fix the keyboard." The problem seems very real for a lot of users.
Also why did they get rid of select all? Is there any excuse for that?
Select all always appears if you have no text selected and never appears if you have some text selected. Insane UI decision by apple but that's how it is.
Which means you can't select all on text which isn't editable - insane!
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In editable text fields you can tap a word a few times and it'll select the whole paragraph, if that's any help.
What drives me insane though, is double tapping a word is supposed to select that word. But I think starting in iOS 18 it started selecting the word and a random amount of surrounding words, but only about half the time. I couldn't tell you what it could possibly be trying to do but it's maddening.
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It's still there, it's just difficult to know when it will appear. Sometimes it takes one more tap than expected, or sometimes one must deselect a word and tap again, or change focus away and back again. Very sloppy UI.
Yeah, it is still there, and there is a pretty clear cut logic for when it will appear.
If you tap while a word is selected, it won’t appear. If you tap on the cursor while a word isn’t selected, it will appear.
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My favorite ( /s) IOS hassle - aside from running around on 12% battery at all times, didn’t I buy a pro max for the extended capacity ? -
… is not being able to paste into an empty box unless I type a letter there and select it/clobber it/overwrite it
And I just LOOOOOVE not being able to tap a URL in safari and get to the end of it to add parameters or change a path anymore…
Just gave my MacBook that hasn’t been turned on in months away(i haaaaate Tahoe) and been using GrapheneOS on a pixel 7a.
so far I’m not in love with it but I’m getting used to it and starting to like downloading apps anonymously (if I name the app, I’ll probably get scolded) anyway this might be the end of the line for me and Apple.
They're a modern tech company. They need to changes things every so often no matter what downsides come with the change.
YES. WHY?! GOD WHY!?!!?!?!?! I'M GOING INSANE!!
Autocorrect not getting simple character substitutions is beyond frustrating.
Do you know a corrector that "understands" a typo at the third or fourth character?
If it's 1st or 2nd, then it's ok.
What I don’t get is why it can’t tell I’ve gone back and edited a suggestion or correction it gave me and correct itself in the future.
The same things are happening on Android too, no coincidence.
It's not just apple - windows and android autocorrect are more auto incorrect these days.
Your statement isn't incorrect - but I think it needs a slight qualification of "And none of them are acceptable". Both Apple and Android have regressed in quality and it's only possible because of a duopoly.
Is there a windows autocorrect? I thought that was a feature implemented by the individual program, not any sort of OS functionality.
I can't tell about windows - never used autocorrect there - but GBoard became laughable. I don't think I was able to use its suggestions since a few years. For instance, it will NEVER but really never put a uppercase I when I'm talking about myself. Never. I could select it from suggestions if I feel like, but I kinda gave up (this is written in Windows, that's why you see capital Is). Or my name, used quite often right, is also never spelled correctly - although it's there in the suggestions. I am using a yahoo email, GBoard knows the username, but it will ALWAYS suggest a gmail extension, which simply doesn't exist. I don't know any other keyboard which can properly handle multiple languages, so I'm stuck with GBoard, but it's nothing to be proud of.
I have the same email @yahoo.com and @gmail.com (one is mostly for online shops etc), and the amount of time GBoard thinks it needs to recommend @gmail.com, it's obnoxious...
But the correction offers are still okay for me, I can mash keys around my email username and one of the corrections offered will be my username...
SwiftKey can handle languages, but it kind of sucks too , lol. It crashes all the time
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It's not just the keyboard. My iPhone 15 is often so unresponsive I am tapping twice as much.
Example but the issue not limited to web browsing; Safari will do nothing, I tap again, it does the thing, then it does the thing again due to the second tap. I have to tap back to get to where I really wanted to go.
Sounds like the liquid glass animations are so heavy that if the system is busy with anything else for a second then everything simply breaks.
I remember seeing the videos about cpu usage spiking over 40% just to show the control center.
And similarly, even on a Mac I find myself clicking on links and button multiple times, just for things to work. It has a dedicated keyboard, how is it that they messed it up so much that a physical keyboard stops working. It's an interrupt based interface, it takes less than a millisecond to process things, how can someone mess things up so freaking stupidly.
That was basically the whole point of it.
Apple makes money selling hardware; they have a vested interest in making things slower/worse to incentivize people to buy newer hardware.
This is why you can never really trust Apple and also why no matter how bad Windows gets, it's still a better deal because at least you can count on the fact that PC businesses will compete on the hardware front to get your money.
Choosing Apple is a lot like being in an abusive relationship; you can't leave because the switching cost are quite high, so you tolerate a lot more abuse than you would be willing to otherwise.
And this is the reason people try to not rely on Apple software too much; if you do, they truly have you by the balls.
Shortcuts run but often do not trigger all the stages in a pipeline. No issues with same shortcuts prior to installing iOS26. These Shortcuts do not trigger UI transitions. They send data over network.
Sounds like Apple management enabled a quality assurance failure that is fostering so many distractions for users it's turning people against Apple.
Tim Cook handing his replacement a dumpster fire.
Extremely common pitfall in UI engineering. If you treat all input as a queue that's divorced from output, you end up with situations like this.
It's kind of a paradox, but in many cases you need to actually discard touch inputs until your UI state has transitioned as a result of previous inputs. This gets extremely nuanced and it's hard to write straightforward rules about when you should and shouldn't do this. Some situations I can think of:
- Navigation: User taps a button that pushes a screen on your nav stack. You need to discard or prevent inputs while the transition animation is happening, otherwise you can push multiple copies of that screen.
- Async tasks: User taps a button that kicks off an HTTP request or similar, and you need to wait on the result before doing something else like navigation or entering some other state. Absolutely you will need to prevent inputs that would submit that request twice. You will also need some idempotency in your API design to handle failure/retries. A fun example from the 1990s is the "are you sure you want to make this POST request again" dialog that Web browsers still show by default.
- Typing: You should never discard keystrokes that insert/delete characters while a text input field is focused, but you may have to handle a state like the above if "Enter" (or whatever "done" button is displayed in the case of a software keyboard) does something like submit a form or do navigation.
Essentially we're all still riding on stuff that the original Mac OS codified in the 1980s (and some of it was stolen from Xerox, yes), so the actual interaction model of UIs is a mess of modal state that we hardly ever actually want to fully realize in code. UI is a hard problem!
This analysis ignores the fact that the user experience has regressed from a previous version which didn’t have these issues.
So it’s not like some longstanding industry-wide UI issues they’ve ignored forever, it’s that Apple has introduced new tradeoffs or lowered their quality standards to the point that some users feel their experience has worsened.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Debounce
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Just to correct a common error, nothing was stolen from Xerox. Apple gave Xerox stock (which they later sold too early) for demos and access to the Parc work on Smalltalk and GUIs.