Paul Alvarez

Autocorrect is truly to blame, but swiping gets the brunt of it.

It has been a running joke on iPhones for years that its autocorrect on the keyboard has gotten worse and worse over the years. There are some hilarious failures on Reddit showing people sending what was an innocent text turned into a nightmare by a simple misused word in a sentence. This is especially bad for those sending texts to parents or bosses.

Sometimes autocorrect seems okay for me, except when I try and use the swipe feature on iOS’s stock keyboard for the iPhone. So many times, it will use the wrong word when I clearly swiped over the correct letters. This is one of the best features Apple added to their OS since one-handed use on larger phones has got more difficult.

A few weeks ago, as I was running errands with my son, I sent her a message trying to say: “he woke himself choking again,” but instead sent, “he woke himself choking Shaun.” Before I continue, don’t worry about my boy, I wanted to tell my wife that this happened again because we think we need to adjust his car seat. He’s recovering from a cold—his thousandth this year, my god—and we believe the position of his car seat when sleeping is causing fluid to agitate him.

I was parked when I sent this, so it wasn’t like I was at a stop light in a hurry, but I did use just one hand to swipe it out. This could easily be human error, but why the name Shaun? Why, of all the words I am typing in that sentence, would iOS think that the next word is someone’s name? Let alone a name I don’t believe I’ve ever typed before in my phone, nor do I have contact with that name in my Contacts.

iOS 16 did come out with a new feature allowing you to edit texts, which I have used before, not just because of the swiping autocorrect unreliability. Still, in this instance, I wanted to be quick to correct so she knew what I was talking about. Typing the correct word seemed faster. This was my last straw in using swipe with iOS’s keyboard, and I was ready to just not use it anymore until I remembered that I first used this feature on Android.

I missed a lot of things when I went back to the iPhone from Android after a couple year run. One of those things was the swipe keyboard that my Gboard keyboard offered on my Nexus 5 and Moto X. I also forgot that I used Gboard on my iPhone for years before iOS was adopted swiping and felt, at the time, it was good enough.

Boy, was I wrong. Now that I have been using Gboard again, I can swipe-type with one hand with practically no errors or autocorrect mishaps. I would prefer not to have all the Google stuff at the top of the keyboard, but it has been worth the ability to now swipe more reliably.

When I first downloaded and enabled Gboard, I was worried I would lose My Favorite iOS 16 Feature, which was the haptic feedback while typing, but a keep trip to the Gboard setting allowed me to enable it, and all is pretty great right now. I wonder if Gboard always had this feature and iOS 16 just now adopted it, another reason I probably should have stayed with Gboard.

If you are like me and love the swipe feature on the iPhone, I would seriously recommend you check out Gboard. Most people probably already use it. It is a very popular third-party keyboard. But with haptic feedback and more reliable swiping, this will be my new default keyboard on my iPhone for the foreseeable future.

I love and use these features on my iPhone 14 Pro daily.

One of the features that I, and many others, miss dearly was 3D Touch on the iPhone. The ability to push into your screen slightly harder to get a Menu from an app, change settings in Control Center more quickly, or use a cursor with the space bar on the keyboard was so intuitive and futuristic.

You still can do a lot of these things, but you instead have to long press. It is slow and unreliable. I sometimes imagine how fantastic it would be to touch into the Dynamic Island to control my music or see more details for my directions without having to jump into the app.

Long press is fine. But 3D Touch would be so much better. Not only was this a feature required to be added to iOS, but you also had more hardware in your display to support 3D Touch. The last iPhone to support it was the iPhone X, which made that phone seem even more advanced at the time.

The features that 3D Touch brought are still there in the software, but as I mentioned earlier, the only way to access these features is by long pressing on the screen. You can still dig deeper into Wifi or Bluetooth in control center. I can still access the menu list from an app on my home screen, but instead, I have to do the boring and frustrating long press of my finger.

Not only was this feature useful, but it felt fun and whimsical. Apple, over the years, has stopped some of its whimsical features and opted for more straightforward and boring options as its user base grows. It makes sense at a high level to make things simpler and clearer so you can maintain a larger user base using your products.

That is why I was so pleased that Apple introduced a Haptic feature for the iOS Keyboard. Many years ago, when I worked at a credit union in Central California, I was confronted by a co-worker and later friend about having my sound on my keyboard on my iPhone. He was appalled that I could put up with the sound and make others put up with it too.

Looking back now, I think he was joking, but since that interaction, I turned off my keyboard sounds for good on my current and future iPhones. Usually, when I put my iPhone on silent, it would also silence the keyboard sounds. Still, I turned it off completely after I felt I was bothering others, and weird to enjoy it. But I did enjoy it and looking back, I was sad that I turned it off.

Over the last year, I have turned it back on when my iPhone is not on silent, but I rarely have my phone off of silent. A ringing iPhone and noisy notifications are just not my thing. I would rather feel a buzz or just get to it later. I rarely miss a phone call, but I sometimes miss other notifications, which is okay.

What Apple did in providing the Haptic Feedback in iOS 16 was me getting that tactile feeling I used to get with sound from typing with my iPhone Keyboard but without any noise or awareness of others. It brings back that old feeling of what it was like to actually type on a full-size keyboard when the first iPhone came out, but also some whimsy.

Typing on my keyboard, whether on the iPhone 12 Mini or my now iPhone 14 Pro, feels so good. The sensation feels like I am actually clicking on physical keys. The feeling is far from actual physical keys on a keyboard. Still, the attempt it is making is so satisfying. And the biggest bonus of all, it bothers no one.

I don’t think I should worry about my future keyboard sounds, regardless of whether people are around or not. Still, it is nice to know that I have a keyboard that I am not only satisfied with using because Apple did a great job in implementing a full-size keyboard on a small screen, but it is also nice to have some fun with it again too.