Definitely ridiculous and mostly an exaggeration on my part. There is some truth to it because the features of iMessage group chats are fun (stickers, message animations, etc.) but more generally I just like the Apple ecosystem.
My personal devices are usually Apple products and they all work together pretty seamlessly. Then I have all my other Linux servers, Windows desktops, random tablets, etc. for my hobby projects which generally require more manual configuration to work together.
I just like having my “personal” things within an aesthetically pleasing, relatively privacy preserving ecosystem but I get my kicks outside of that ecosystem aplenty.
Not sure if Google just gave up on updating the iOS variant or if Apple holds it back intentionally (probably a bit of both) but they pale in comparison to their Android counterparts.
I’d prefer a useable stock keyboard but I take your point.
SwiftKey also crashes daily. There's no good keyboard for iphones, at least for my stubby fingers. I've literally won local mobile typing speed contests (so it's not user error I dare say) and the last five-ish years that I've been on ios have been a total and utter misery. If I had some cash floating around I would be back on android.
I see where you’re coming from, this was an impulsive creation after months/years of frustration without any expectations.
For anyone curious of my experience here are my main pain points:
- autocorrect failing to correct minor mistakes
- autocorrect “correcting” a mistake with another mistake
- autocorrect “correcting” correctly typed words
- swipe to type is painfully behind Gboard (third-party keyboards are universally under-supported and inferior to Android equivalents)
- “Select All” is often hidden away
- Selecting/unselecting text in general is a pain
- keyboard seems to run out of steam after hitting a certain word count in applications such as Apple Notes or iMessage and take forever to register taps
- The Big Daddy: key taps registering incorrectly in one of two ways: 1. Clearly tapping a letter “taps” a different letter (hot spots poorly calibrated) 2. A correctly tapped letter (keyboard highlight indicates correct letter) but incorrect letter is rendered on document
Anyone irl I’ve discussed the iPhone keyboard with has described frustration so I figured this as more a “some of us are annoyed” flare than a technical manifesto.
As another commenter noted I put a tiny link to my slightly more detailed blog post once this started gaining traction but I’m just having fun here really.
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!
On top this my own language is Englishifying so it’s understandable it gets confused. But still, the whole thing is infuriating when you type something correct and boom, it becomes a word in another language.
> - autocorrect “correcting” correctly typed words
This brings up so many emotions. I disabled autocorrect. I don't give a damn if my words are spelled wrong but they should not be words that I did not type!
I will add: text prediction was so much better before that I could be very sloppy and it would still figure it out. Now I have learned to be more careful with the keyboard.
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.
> Clearly tapping a letter “taps” a different letter
My iPad Mini 6 sometimes gets into this state, especially after deleting something, when tapping one of the keys in the lower right corner becomes completely impossible, it always registers as this different key (I don't have the iPad nearby to check which one), and it stays broken like this until I press a few other keys. It's incredibly frustrating and it's been there since day 1.
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.
> Clearly tapping a letter “taps” a different letter (hot spots poorly calibrated)
FWIW I encounter this in Android every so often (using gboard). Anecdotally I don't know what causes it (I swear sometimes it's worse and sometimes it's better), but Android isn't entirely problem free.
I have genuinely considered if my (and perhaps everyone on hn) life calling should be just to make a better touch keyboard.
Bearing in mind the amount of constant pain and torment the current best keyboards inflict upon the world, can there be any more urgent problem to tackle?
Forget climate change guys. Make a keyboard. Save the world.
There already was one. For all its faults, Swype for Android ~12 years ago was better than any swiping keyboard available now - both in its interpretation of swipes, and in its other features like "squiggle over one letter to indicate a double letter", "run your swipe above the keyboard to indicate a capitalized word", and the incredible editing features (it had an editing keyboard!). The Swype key, located in the bottom left? You could Swype-A to select all, Swype-X to cut, Swype-C to copy, Swype-V to paste. Swype-space brought up the editing keyboard.
Sounds great. When you say 12 years ago do you mean newer versions weren’t as good? Or was it discontinued or something?
I think the really puzzling thing about these keyboards is we all seem to remember typing being easier - even though phones back then were so much smaller. It makes no sense!
I still use it on iOS, and I've tried to remove all other keyboards, but Apple still just seems to "make up" keyboards I don't know are installed. Or switch keyboards on me mid-typing a word to a weird native one I also don't show as installed. It used to be very occasionally this would happen but now it's so repeatable since 26 I can almost not use my keyboard.
One caveat, I have an Icelandic keyboard installed on there. Sometimes web controls will force an input box to a US english keyboard (or numpad), which is annoying but at least that's sort of covered by a spec. What really drives me nuts is when I'm mid typing on the swype keyboard and suddely it switches to a completely square grid keyboard with up and down quotes in the autocomplete (which is not actually autocompleting or correcting(which while technically correct has almost completely fallen out of popularity since the dawn of the internet)
I quit using Android ca. 2016 (not because I hated it, had other work-related reasons why) and Swype for iOS was only around for a brief period before Microsoft killed it (and most of the things that made it great).
I never used the much-vaunted tap-only iOS keyboards of the earlier iPhones. I have large hands (the OG Xbox Duke controller was very comfortable) and typing on those small screens always felt painful even though I was so often told it was great.
Too lazy to learn is a bit harsh and your statement lacks empathy.
Coding has been free to learn for a long time and the quality of education resources has only improved overtime. But that does not mean it’s easy and it doesn’t decrease the time to learn.
I’ll use myself as an example. I’m pretty creative, I have a lot of ideas and interests, but I struggle a lot with the logic and syntax of coding. I find it interesting at the surface level but every time I’ve tried to learn I just can’t get it to click. And, to be frank, I don’t find it very enjoyable.
But at the same time I have random website and app ideas quite frequently. I’ll use apps that have terrible UI/UX and imagine ways it could be better or maybe even design something in Figma if I’m feeling frisky. But actually making an app? Always just way too out of my wheelhouse. Plus I work 40-50 hours a week and prioritize socializing on the weekends, a lot of those ideas have to be relegated to just ideas on a list in Obsidian. Does that make me a lazy person? Maybe to you but I don’t think of myself that way.
The tools available now have unlocked something new for me. My ideas can start to come to life because the coding part doesn’t hold me back anymore. I’ve made silly websites with domains I’ve owned for years. I’ve made apps that solve an annoying issue I’ve had forever like a file media viewer app for my iPhone since file viewing sucks with Files/Preview and every app on the AppStore is infested with ads and didn’t fit my use case. I just for fun made an app that can play against me in MTG by using the continuity camera from my iPhone to my Mac to read the playing field.
I get where you’re coming from but you probably think every vibe coder is lazy because you’re good at coding. Not everybody has the talent/time/desire to learn how to code. Does that mean we can’t let our ideas come to life?
Honestly stories like yours are the best part of this whole AI revolution. It’s genuinely cool that the technical barrier is no longer killing creative ideas. You’ve essentially skipped the "coder" stage and jumped straight to orchestrator (Product Owner + QA rolled into one), with AI acting as the diligent junior dev. That is a totally valid model
The only downside is that sooner or later, you hit the scaling trap. When a project grows from a silly website into a real product with users, not understanding how exactly the AI stitched those code blocks together becomes a critical risk. AI is great at putting up walls and painting facades, but the foundation (architecture and security) still needs human verification, especially once other people's data gets involved
Trying to fix broken architecture with the same AI that wrote it leads to recursive technical debt. AI can rewrite code, but it cannot make strategic decisions if the operator doesn't understand the problem. In the end, instead of a fix, you get a Big Ball of Mud, just built 10x faster
For the foreseeable future until maybe we systems that can predict what someone will need/want for an app at any given time (a prospect as horrifying as it is awesome imo), there’ll be plenty of people, maybe even a majority, that don’t know what they want or need until it’s shown to them.
There will be many more niche applications vibe-coded by people with lots of knowledge and no coding experience/desire that people will use rather than thinking of an app themselves to create.
Then there will be people like you, me, OP and 99% of the other HN community that have a million ideas they want to create, use, and sometimes share.
There are a lot of things I don’t know about and even more I don’t know I don’t know about and in those cases, there’s still a wide open door for people to create applications and experiences that share their knowledge/vision.
I could ask Claude Code or some other future platform to build be a financial calculator every time I need it but why would I do that when someone with the benefit of prior knowledge and experience has already done that for me?
They probably included calculators I didn’t even know I needed.
This is a great post. I’m thankful that many of the comments here reminded me why this website’s comments section is not worth reading, ceaseless negativity. Not wasting any more time reading them!
No, they're correct. I was downvoted for a reply to a comment further down. I appreciate it. I visit the site mostly for the comments as well.
Some of the things the post mentions are possible to do and good and some are not. There's much to be grateful for yet there are still many problems to solve if we could focus as a society...
50/50 for me. I've had significantly impactful reads here, leading to experiments with new IDEs, to-do systems, ADHD management techniques, and insight into political ideologies I disagree with.
Whereas on Reddit for example it's just yelling at each other all the time.
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