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.

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.

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.

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.

> They were arguably the pioneers in OS UX

Who is "they"? The employees at Apple when the HIG was first published in 1986, 40 years ago? That Apple is dead, what you see before you is an empty and rotted husk.

First is not the same as best. First is not even the same as good. First is only first. Just because someone was the pioneer doesn't mean they should be considered a positive example.

Introduced a concept decades ago in no way implies that their current implementation of the concept is at all ideal or market leading.

The people at Apple who were the pioneers are long gone. The people at Apple now have killed them and are wearing their skin.

> You could do worse.

Perhaps you shouldn't encourage them. Based on recent software releases from Apple they might see it as a challenge.

As long as we are ranting: I have many multilingual converstations. At some point iOS started offering the "German/English" keyboard option. I assume it also does "French/Swahili" or whatever, but for some reason it didn't auto-create a combination for "Hungarian/English" which I use more than German/English.

This sounds like a great idea, but in practice it just autocorrects incorrectly in two languages instead of one. Which is a shame, since even the German government uses a lot of Denglish these days, you'd think it would be trainable.

Meanwhile, when the chat gets stuck in the wrong language, it's a comfort to know that selecting another (or trying to press Shift for that matter) will take me to Keyboard Settings at least 80% of the time. Because who knows when you might need to change those!

Come on, the 6th word after 5 English words is obviously going to be a rare word in your second keyboard language, not another common English word.

Yes this behaviour is infuriating, the surprise autocorrect! Can result in some really embarrassing messages being sent..

Try typing

Other times were not so bad.

I got anxious about autocorrect potentially inserting the wrong words and what kind of social fallout that could cause, so I just disabled it entirely. Takes longer to type everything manually but at least my anxiety has gone down.

that is the worst! i hate that so much!

there must be some kind of event trigger on text focus being removed or keyboard hiding that does that... ughhhh

The keyboard actually does this all the time, and many assume they are the problem (making typos, etc.). A few have recorded videos to show what is actually happening and it's wild. If I had a link handy I'd share it. The user directly taps on a letter, and the system picks what it thinks the user actually meant, even when the key hit was dead on.

Turning off slide to type in settings improves the situation, however it still happens.

Yes to both. That and Safari reloading the page you were just on (from the cache, sometimes) if it can't reach a URL

[dead]

Apple is allergic to admitting anything. They go straight from "there is no problem" to "this update brings improvements".

I feel like the people who could move the needle don’t actually type on their iPhones, they pay someone to do that.

Its presence on Hacker News and Reddit tells you that the folks who use Hacker News and Reddit are fed up with the keyboard. Most people don't care. Tech nerds do, and that's not nothing, but it's not necessarily a majority either. No one I know outside of tech brings up the keyboard to me, ever.

I was "ideologically tied" to using products created by people who clearly cared more about creating them and my experience using them than their competitors. That era seems to have finally passed.

If this phone dies before they right the ship, I'll be looking around for the first time in almost 20 years.

I get what you're saying; but the thing is you can kinda-sorta ignore the Liquid Glass stuff (performance not withstanding on older devices); but the keyboard is a "touch surface" people are actively using every single day.

Kind of a big deal that something you'll likely use every time you pick up your device has been broken now for going on years, with no real movement on the issue.

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.

That's the joke.

I've been a lifelong Android user and still find this a glaring omission. As far as I can tell, copying an image in a browser and then pasting it elsewhere results in a character.

There are some things that are hugely better on the iPhone, like accessibility setting that can be set on a per-app basis. Overall though, I expect the whole UX feeling to differ, but I am surprised that both camps have sort of given up on feature parity. Back in the days when "pull down to refresh" was novel it seems like iOS and Android meticulously copied each other's innovations.

They dont enforce the centralised settings. That is why it is maddening. Some apps have the settings in the settings app. Some do not.

They're both emphatically not fine from any erudite informed perspective of what has been better in the past.

I've used small-form factor DOS luggable-bricks, miniature Windows7 7" diagonal laptops (Fuji B112, B2131) obsessively since the epoch, also exotics like Fakespace NDOF dataGloves, yada~ and my usual combination of trackball magicMouse and 3D connextion SpaceNavigator on my desktops. Now I've got an Android tablet and an iPhone which are decidedly not 50 years better.

Neglecting the exotics, UX experience in DOS sometimes was better than, e.g. explicitly touching (yes DOS could do that) somewhere in the middle of a paragraph only to have the cursor leap to the beginning, end, select the entire paragraph (iOS18 or so..) or invoke some unintended 'gesture', and then require twenty more touches of adjustments to getthe selection right.

Using external near-fullsize BT keyboards which actually make typing tolerable on my iPh and DroidTab, I'm constantly taken 'aback' (to memories of the past) by having to remove a finger from the keyboard to the screen to accomplish some cursor positioning that might just as well be done with less trouble with a keyboard touchpad or mouse. I do use a tiny tactile feedback BT keyboard with it's own tiny thumb-trackPad which works nominally better than on-screen keybooards when I'm crunched for space and can't use near fullsize kbs.

  Oh.. there's speech-to-text these days. Something about my present set of afflictions is holding me back from venturing forth into that void. 

  Auto-spell correct, anything that interrupts the cadence of typing, because  waiting for CPU cycles or accomodating network delays - none of those 'helpful' things 'intruded' into UXs historically. These Gaffes could be easily wiped away by local high-priority code executing on handhelds which actually pays attention to the people trying to use devices these days, andm actually, timely respons to that.   

 One can see this pathologically simply by repurposing some old, deprecated thing like a Nexus4 phone not as a thermostat but as a Web client for music steaming. The Nex4 actually has a 1/8" mini audio-out jack!! Web pages are so hopelessly loaded down these days the Nex4 struggles, rendering them only slowly. Button presses may go completely unacknowledged for seconds until the button glyph actually changes. Almost like delays in auto-correct!!

  In an epoch of no tactile feedback on glass (maybe audio clicks..) Devs, frameworks, dn toolkits largely ignore all except 'the most recent browser' on 'the latest hardware' case, doing nothing and likely relying entirely on someone/thing esle (is there an acronym ofr this, like DNRY? It's someone ele's problem? >>ISEP<< to acomplish 'low level' requisite confirmations real humans depend on and use to see they've done something that affects the UI, and can continue on, e.g. type-ahead as was the case as of old. Gesture forward!, perhaps.. the UI will catch up. 

  MacOS (as of Monterey, haven't gotten fa/urther) yet - has that 'application' (read: not _user_, nor _context_, nor _task_ centered behavior, _by design_. all AAPL genius, I'm sure. Yes I really want to see *all* my textEdit windows in Spaces. That makes a lot of sense when I have half dozen different unrelated tasks going on and need only another textedit window. Sure, hide *ALL* an applications windows when I hide only a single one. Like I don't exist and it won't take me half hour to find the one I need again. Forget that in X-Windows omg that's _dead_, Jim!! one could push a single window to the bottom of the window stack to get it out of the way and not have to minimize it to go search for it later in a micro-dock stripe with only enough room for half-dozen minimized (oh and fully descriptive)  window icons beside all those appicons. 

  The iPh sub-oops automagic rearrangements of screenfulls of colorful bouncing icons is particulay visceral insanity, All rearranging unpredictably when one is stuck amongst others, like some kind of entertaining visualization of a cocktail party. Android tries to rise to this level with some obscure thing in settings which completely obliterates perhaps tens of minutes of careful arrangement of multiple screenfulls of icons- all gone!  with what of course what is de-regeur in mobile smart-space now, no hint of 'back' or 'undo', anywhere. 
 
   If you want a summary, put an iPh1 next to a Droid, neglect the fact they absolutely will not talk to one another without multiple intervening clouds and laborious and error-prone interactive shovelling of 'takeouts' and exports of data involving visting dozens of WebPges, and likely only though some full sized PC/Mac intermediary, and simply contemplate how wildly baroquely different they are.

  Before I actually got one, I literally was incapable of using an iPh1, despite years of experience with Android and dozens and dozens of prior systems. I could say I'm yet pretty incapable now, a year on. a dozen years of OSX time doesn't help either. So many colorful icons I _NEVER_ use, filling my tiny little screen, glaring at me like they are hoping to induce a seizure. 

  Most glaring - what is abjectly absent with both Android and iOS. 'Messages' well there are different Icons, who wrote the App? Is that Meta's, or Apple's, or Google's, or someone else's messages? Oh my phone buzzed; some notification appears then disappears, irretrievably. Does one have to go the the AppStore, Play, or 'settings' to find out these things in the middle of trying to figure which app to use to reach someone?? 


  No 'info' hover-over (no hover over ever, I guess for touch, yet an uninvented 'gesture') Obscure and infuriating and undocumented (guess one has to buy the book, or read the mags, and fawn for a while) things like the phone UI changing such that the button to hang up a call, even the entire phone UI disappeared over on some other appView perhaps.. That one might search and find three identical names in contacts, none which can be edited with all the data of all the others still visible. None which can usuall be edited _AT ALL_ unless one is deep within the bowels of 'Contacts'. A name but no a phone number displayed. Which of that persons phones am I calling?

  DNRY - a mantra of devs, seriously the bane of UX. forced modeful dives into app ratholes when something is right in front of you and you don't have ten minutes to go into its' 'responsible' app to fix it. And Certaianly *NO WAY* can you edit it right then and there.  No one ever would think some magic invocation might be possible to enable doing literally anything which is possible to to with something that's right in front of you, displayed on your device. Sort of the non-authentication triple-A: anywhere, anytmie, anyplace.

   I've used some remarkably baroque UIs  - seems every single CAD package of any sort has it's own. Some like Blender resembling the empty bridge of the NC1701 Enterprise void of helpful crewmembers. Want to know hoa to use something? Nothings' 'idempotent' anymore - gotta go Google it.

No drag-and-drop, have to thumbsType everything character by character. Copy/cut/Paste selections when not impossible, barely controllable. Time is displayed but not the date. <eyes wander, sees clock at top of screen>

Gotta go.

Do you mean that new action button thingy above the volume controls? You can reassign to perform something else in the settings. Only a few options to choose from, but it's totally possible.

As for powering off, you can tap the ⏻ symbol in the upper right-hand side corner of the control center.

If you long press the lock button and volume increase at the same time you can turn the new iPhone off. I can’t imagine doing 5 clicks to do this!

Back tap is an accessibility feature, not intended for general public use.

Why is the toggle allowed at all? Presumably, sometimes we don't want apps to know where we are and record/share that to the highest bidder.

International travellers will know that some apps will alter behavior or refuse to work based on your location, if it's provided. If I use a VPN, I want the app or website to use only the IP location*, not the radio location.

If you are not actively benefitting from GPS, why let the man get a constant lock on your location? Make them suffer with cellphone tower pings.

I too keep GPS off unless I am navigating.

Increased privacy and decreased battery use when disabled, presumably.

I have this feeling for every software out there.

The problem isn’t so much that the original people aren’t there anymore - that’s just a fact of life, and is unavoidable.

The problem is that software design as a discipline has changed fundamentally in terms of core values. “Old school” designers had a bit more of a human factors training and would think about things like discoverability, information hierarchy, error recovery, etc. And the software from that era tended to be stable for many years in terms of design, in no small part because it shipped in boxes.

Current day designers work almost exclusively from a visual bling/marketing angle - what’s going to look good in a 5 second sizzle reel? And because software can be updated 5 times a day if you want, design is much more subject to the whims of a random exec/PM wanting to push their feature/whatever AB test is popular that week rather than stable, proven foundations.

The web, rather than desktop, being the primarily delivery vehicle for software also changes what kind of design gets built.

And with more and more software being AI designed in the years to come, this won’t get much better I’m afraid.

IMO Apple grew too much it became another slow megacorp, more connected to their quarterly reports and shareholders than their consumers and engineers. The growing Apple was the one that gave us innovation.

I'm not saying it's dead, not by far, but it has become stale. The biggest innovation it has made in 10+ years was using their mobile processors in laptops.

I think the problem is actually political capital.

Someone who deeply understands how to qualify the product.

But with enough political sway to tell entire orgs of 1000s employees to shred their timelines and planning docs and go back to the lab until it’s right.

Without those two pieces, the problem is that individual devs and leaders know that there’s a problem. But the KPIs and timelines must lurch onwards!

I don't think vibecoding is the solution to software quality problems, regardless of what tools/models you are using.

"Quality" and "features you happen to want" are two different things.

Their hardware is world class. Software? Not so much.

The most frustrating aspect of Siri's quality decline is that super-basic things inexplicably stop working. For years I have been able to say "call <wife's name>" and Siri called my wife. A couple weeks ago she started dialing another contact I haven't talked to in 15 years with a similarly-pronounced name (but different spelling). I had to delete the old contact to stop that behavior from happening.

I'll sometimes ask Siri to take me to a local address, and it'll instead pick some random address in a city 2500+ miles away and start routing me there like that's obviously what i wanted

I’m not sure if gitfriend is a typo.

I’m lonely and really want a gitfriend to push and merge with! Please tell the story of how you got one!

/s for the /s impaired

I had an iPhone for three months until I switched back to Android because the keyboard was trash. The one thing I could not believe is how even SwiftKey on iOS is horrible, even though it's my default keyboard on Android, and I've been very happy with it.

This comment explains why:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1l2gg3r/thirdparty_ios...

tl;dr: gatekeeping by Apple. Yes, it would probably be embarassing to Apple if someone built a way better touch keyboard.

3rd party keyboards are frequently banned from some of the bank apps, delivery services and so on.

This way you have to keep the default one anyway and make even more typos when yet another app forces you to get back to Apple’s keyboard.

I can’t even search stuff in my local delivery with SwiftKey

I’m still using iOS 18 as well. This issue happens randomly and usually through Apple Watch.

Honestly, I don’t care how complex and advanced the Siri is, I want simple tasks to work 100%.

It made me remember how Siri used to turn on the lights when you say “Let there be lights”. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work anymore either. It was a cool gimmick that made us chuckle.

In the US, of course, our government loves to let citizens be the product for corporations. America: by the corporations for the corporations.

Even more true now than it has been in maybe 100 years.

I'm in the US, I never experience any of the issues people complain about. Just checked and I don't have the setting disabled that that one guy talked about up thread. But I do have all notifications off. Maybe that is why?

I'm in Canada. I do have the pro version though; maybe that makes a difference.