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.
