Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android • Hacker News Board

Re: Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android

#271

Post by lolpython » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 5:56 PM UTC

latexr wrote: post #204

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another random blog post about the broken iOS keyboard would not get any traction. This is getting traction. I'm pretty sure the author realized that Tim Apple isn't shaking in his boots, looking at the numbers going down. That's not the point, the point is that it's funny and interesting and thus getting attention.

> Another random blog post about the broken iOS keyboard would not get any traction. Nonsense. Complaints about Apple’s declining software quality get a lot of traction on HN. Here’s another example from today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46997008 And lookie here, what was submitted within one hour of that post? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46996575 This exact same submission! Which didn’t get any tr…

Why so agressive? You're making a conclusion from a tenuous correlation. I upvoted TFA because I've been annoyed with my Apple keyboard and them not fixing it. Not becaue I saw some other post on window resizing. Judging by the other comments here a bunch of people are in the same boat. I've been complaining in my social circle about it and have partially switched to Android as a result.

Re: Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android

#272

Post by bigyabai » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 5:56 PM UTC

MarioMan wrote: post #247

singpolyma3 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair my iPhone spys on me in much more actively creepy ways than my android ever did. Showing ads for nearby pizza places at lunchtime on the homescreen. Telling me at about the time of my son's soccer that I may be interested in going to the place where his soccer is about now (despite me never using navigation on my phone) etc

Not sure where ads for pizza places are coming from, but the suggested maps trips are part of the “Significant Locations” feature. That data is end-to-end encrypted across your devices and is unreadable by Apple. It can be disabled if you don’t want it tracked.

> That data is end-to-end encrypted across your devices and is unreadable by Apple.

Sure, Jan. Next you'll tell me that Google isn't evil and Apple truly does care about human rights.

Re: Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android

#273

Post by dylan604 » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

nozzlegear wrote: post #267

dylan604 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the majority who aren't just have nothing to say because it all works fine. This is a bad way to go through life with this reasoning. It is pretty well understood that in normal situations the vast majority of people are not vocal even if they feel the same way about things the vocal people are saying. As an example I use a lot, congress critters use a formula to get the pulse of the constituents. If they receive a…

> As an example I use a lot, congress critters use a formula to get the pulse of the constituents. If they receive a hand written letter (yes, I learned about the formula when people did that), they'd multiply that by some factor knowing that if one person felt strongly enough to send in a letter that others also felt that way. Phone calls were the same, but with a smaller multiplier as it was easier to make a call t…

> This is an extremely popular bit of apocrypha that's repeated ad nauseam across reddit.

This is so tiring of a lame excuse. I don't use reddit, so I don't know what that has to do with anything. As a high school kid, I volunteered with my congressman in his office and heard this directly from people working in the office. You can try to snipe anonymously from the internet, but it doesn't make me wrong.

Re: Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android

#274

Post by sequoia » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

I have a lot of issues with dictation as well which I feel has gotten much worse as it gets "smarter." It used to take literal dictation & I could say "comma" "period" etc. to insert punctuation. Now it tries to guess when commas or full stops should be added and it's horrible. If I pause to take a breath it puts a comma or period, sometimes entirely changing the meaning of the sentence.

Recently I said "I ran into this too earlier on the project" and it wrote "I run into this tube earlier on the project." So now I'm running into a tube... because this makes more sense than "too"? And it can never write the names of immediately family members I text about every single day, and it has 5th grade vocabulary so if I said I demurred or that something was germane or any other word beyond the 500 most common words it butchers it.

What I want: 1. let me handle the punctuation manually 2. assume a broader vocabulary 3. let me specify how people's names are pronounced!! How are we this many years in and it still misinterprets my wife's name on a daily basis?

Re: Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android

#275

Post by Someone1234 » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 5:59 PM UTC

vzaliva wrote: post #262

Someone1234 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3rd Party Keyboards exist, but they don't have the same rights/abilities as Apple's native keyboard, directly resulting in some features/functions being impossible to implement.

Interesting (I am Android user myself). Any examples of such features?

- Apple's keyboard has richer context; third-party keyboards are largely limited to the text proxy (surrounding text/selection) and cannot inspect the host app/see the underlying context of where the text is used/what for.

- No caret/cursor control; cannot reliably set the cursor to arbitrary positions

- No custom dictation pipeline inside the keyboard; must rely on system dictation (or move voice input outside the keyboard).

- No camera access from the keyboard extension; blocks scan-to-type (OCR), QR/barcode capture, etc.

- Can do basic text expansions, but cannot implement privileged automation/macros that interact with other apps/UI or run broadly in the background.

- Due to aggressive lifecycle + tight resource limits constrain large language models/dictionaries; cloud sync/personalization

Re: Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android

#276

Post by nozzlegear » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 5:59 PM UTC

meatmanek wrote: post #188

nozzlegear wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote but I've never had issues with the keyboard, or with Siri mishearing me (just to touch on another common pain point that people talk about re: Apple tech). I've always interpreted stories like this as the people who are most affected by it being vocal and speaking out (as they should), while the majority who aren't just have nothing to say because it all works fine. > Worse, it seems that proprietary means y…

anecdatum: I've encountered the dumb keyboard behavior and haven't written any scathing blog posts about it, I've just grumbled out loud and upvoted the ones I've seen. So consider the possibility that many people are affected but haven't reached the threshold of writing something about it.

I'm definitely willing to consider that. If it wasn't clear from my original comment, that was just my own impression based on my own experience and observation of HN/Reddit's anti-Apple trends over the past few years. It wasn't meant to be a rigorous assessment of all opinions regarding the state of apple devices.

Re: Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android

#277

Post by pickleglitch » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 6:00 PM UTC

You send an email to customer service to complain. I build a whole ass website to complain. We are not the same.

Re: Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android

#278

Post by Zak » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 6:00 PM UTC

CodeMage wrote: post #259

Zak wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not quite how it works. You can't have a group chat that's mixed iMessage and SMS/MMS. If an iMessage user creates a group chat where not everyone is using iMessage, then it's MMS. I suppose now it could be RCS if everyone's using a device and carrier that supports RCS, but I haven't kept up with that. MMS has a bunch of limitations relative to any modern internet messaging app, so people don't want to use tha…

Thanks. I don't actually have an iPhone, so my freshly acquired "knowledge" of this was based on reading about it on the Internet and I misunderstood what I read.

I don't either, but I'm familiar with the situation from talking to people who do.

The obvious answer is to just use any of the many third-party messaging apps, but in the USA it seems like there's always someone who thinks a one minute setup process and tapping a different colored icon is too much effort.

Re: Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android

#279

Post by zem » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 6:00 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #214

LollipopYakuza wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your point, but for an issue that's been addressed so many times, it doesn't sound necessary to get into details. The issue doesn't seem to be that Apple doesn't know but that they don't care. However, if I, as the author cared to justify that "it's not only me", I would have listed more posts and feedback. I feel like I have read at least 4 times about the broken keyboard, it should not be hard to find…

It does make me wonder if Apple's own employees actually dog-food iOS day-to-day. It just seems like, you could stop any iPhone user in the street and ask them "How do you find the keyboard?" And get a consistently negative response, but yet nobody within Apple seemingly has noticed for YEARS. Everyone says iOS 26 did it, but I strongly disagree, I disabled most options in General -> Keyboard like three major iOS ver…

if my experiences at google are any indication, when it comes to "regular user" facing features management pays very little attention to negative feedback from the engineers. it always seems to be assumed that we are atypical in our dislike for things.

Re: Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android

#280

Post by bombcar » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 6:00 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #214

LollipopYakuza wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your point, but for an issue that's been addressed so many times, it doesn't sound necessary to get into details. The issue doesn't seem to be that Apple doesn't know but that they don't care. However, if I, as the author cared to justify that "it's not only me", I would have listed more posts and feedback. I feel like I have read at least 4 times about the broken keyboard, it should not be hard to find…

It does make me wonder if Apple's own employees actually dog-food iOS day-to-day. It just seems like, you could stop any iPhone user in the street and ask them "How do you find the keyboard?" And get a consistently negative response, but yet nobody within Apple seemingly has noticed for YEARS. Everyone says iOS 26 did it, but I strongly disagree, I disabled most options in General -> Keyboard like three major iOS ver…

It's so bad that I have to assume that Cupertino is filled with people who "hold the phone differently" and tap with their long fingernails or the very tip of their fingers or something.

I'm always mistyping and I don't know how to fix it to do what they want.