“Please do not make it public” (Tencent’s Sogou Input Method)

It is a lot better now, but the Chinese keyboard used to be so not-as-good on iOS that Baidu's official help for people (and even for a while an advertisement on their home page!) suggested they jailbreak their phone to get a better keyboard.

phone native pinyin->character input seems fine now? Google keyboard and iphone's keyboard for pinyin->characters works fine. If you're using normal mandarin.

Windows OS pinyin->character input.... I don't know if I've ever seen someone use something other than Sogou lol, so honestly I can't say how good or bad windows native is at this now.

It's a hard problem, because of the 1:many fanout for any given pinyin input. "bao" can mean like 40 different things - bread thing, weak (?), hug, violence (?), treasured-one (think like "my precious", like a pet name for a baby?), etc etc. Sogou had a big leg up for a long time because it figured out the correct words from context much better than other alternatives, requiring fewer manual selections.

(semi-related note, google's voice->text still fails pretty hard for regional mandarin. For example it really doesn't like the hard Rs at the end of words in far northeastern mandarin. It can't seem to figure out that "baoERRRR" is actually just "bao". That problem doesn't exist for pinyin->characters though)

> I'm surprised that Microsoft, Apple et al provide such a sub-par service in China that over 450 million people were bothered enough to install a third-party keyboard.

American companies man. They really don't care. So much stuff just breaks or does the bare minimum if you're using any kind of IME, or if you're not using UTF8, or even if you're not using ASCII. There seems to just be a general cultural incomprehension that there's any other way of writing on computers. (It's not even limited to companies - there's a whole bunch of Linux stuff with the same problem, e.g. Snap/FlatPak just break everything and don't care)

The privacy environment in the PRC is pretty different to here (I'm in Australia, but speaking for the West in general). In the PRC there is an expectation by everyone (government and citizen) that the government will have access to your data if it wants it and trying to keep that data away from the government is itself criminal. Foreigners are held to a different standard, but the takeaway is that for the vast majority of PRC internet users security from government invasion of privacy is "not a concern"; it's essentially known that it will always be the case, so why be worried about it?

On the consumer privacy side, talking about consumer data safety from companies using it for commercial exploitation, that's where there is allowable space to be protective, and the laws reflect that in the PRC. If Tencent was found to be doing something that was seriously exploitative of user privacy in a way that made enough Chinese very angry, it would be almost certain that Tencent would be breaking some law to do so, and depending on the circumstances you could see anything from mandatory "make it right" directives from the government to the execution of Pony Ma as a result. PRC citizenry expect that if they are seriously harmed, en masse, by a company, the government will make it right.

This is a very different environment and culture from what we have in the West. In general, if I was the victim of significant harm (alongside many other people) by a large corporation, I would not expect justice. The CEO or those who made the decisions that harmed me wouldn't be executed, the company wouldn't be forced to push an update making my device safe to use again or pay a full refund to everyone, etc. As a result, if I care about this issue I'm not really thinking about the consequences for big companies of harming me, I'm just thinking about how to protect myself. What software can I individually use to protect my privacy, what companies should I individually avoid because I know I don't like what they're doing, etc. These are philosophically quite different approaches to privacy concerns - we have a lot more individual freedom in the West if we choose to use it, when it comes to individual net privacy, but the general attitude of PRC is that they don't have to worry about the privacy thing because the government will handle it one way or another.

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