iOS 18 and iOS 26 Autocorrect

Because I make bad puns and assume I am harming the database, I reset my keyboard database twice a year. I don’t know if that actually helps or makes things worse.

Incorrect words in the personal dictionary has definitely been an issue for me, and has caused this kind of behavior.

Mac OS X circa 2010, or even Microsoft Word 5.1, is better at correcting my spelling mistakes than modern iOS or macOS. How did a feature that was basically a solved problem become so unreliable?

I've been getting lags since at lags iOS 18, and not just when the keyboard first opens. I have also absolutely see behavior where visually, one letter was displayed, and yet a different letter was typed. And I've noticed cases where no feedback appeared for a keypress, and yet a letter was typed. These seem to be related to lag.

But it's not just that. Accuracy of key presses seems way off sometimes. I've attributed this to the way iOS (to my knowledge, still) adjusts touch targets based on predictive behavior. If this goes wrong, it becomes difficult to actually type a correct word, even if you've theoretically hit the right spots on the screen.

I don't have autocorrect enabled, but spell check corrections in general have been broken forever, frequently failing to offer any corrections for obvious mistakes. For instance, I typed "oredictibe" in the above paragraph. When I tapped it, the word just highlighted and then sat there, with no corrections displayed. Swapping "o" for "p" and "b" for "v" should have been an easy option to offer, considering these are all adjacent keys.

Then there's weird text selection behavior. Outright broken copy/paste where bits of text are inserted into the wrong locations, and sometimes portions that were not highlighted on paste get deleted anyway. I do not understand why all this is allowed to languish without fixes for multiple releases.

I've noticed. For a year or more. Since I use an iPhone mini I chalked it up to my fat fingers. Maybe I should reconsider? Personal dictionary? Nah. But.... I'll check this out. Maybe reset it even.

AI? Sounds better. Particularly if it's *Apple* Intelligence, which I wish I could block more than most.

For now I think I'll call it "Ass' for "Apple spelling syndrome".

I don't get the issue typing "Thumbs" on my iPhone 12 mini (iOS 18.5) or iPhone 13 mini (iOS 18.7.1), What I do notice is after typing Thum the 12 primarily suggests Thumbs while the 13 suggests Them.

The keyboard in iOS 26.x is especially egregious for me. I can't put my finger on it exactly (sorry, bad pun), but it seems laggy, where keys take time precious ms to respond, and often the wrong keys are triggered, either by some sort of drift or inaccuracy due to the latency. Ever since I noticed I am way less accurate with the keyboard since installing 26 on the phone, I've been watching the letter popups, and I just catch it. I think it happens more often when the main thread is busy, but I am assuming it was busy before iOS 26, and was handled better. All of this is before the absolutely retarded autocorrect system takes perfectly fine words and just decides to replace them with words that have a different meaning altogether. Clowns are running the show at Apple. The idiot with the hair can make silly intro videos all he wants, but under his supervision, every facet of the software stack has gone downhill in unbelievably bad ways. Shameful.

Since iOS 26, I’ve noticed I’ve frequently been typing “the” with the e missing (I dare not type the bad result for fear of further poisoning autocorrect), and I’m not sure how or why that is happening.

One theory is that when I tap the e, sometimes the keyboard is thinking I tapped the leftmost autocomplete suggestion instead, which changed in iOS 26 to always be the “just keep what I’ve typed so far” option.

But it could be lag instead? Not sure.

While typing this message, I saw “for” get corrected to “of”, perhaps for the same reason. (i.e. the r got dropped and then the autocorrect swapped the two existing letters to make it a word)

The thing that truly drives me nuts is the Randomly capitalized Words that come up when using swipe keyboard. It’s been happening for years without any improvement and it doesn’t make any sense

Second comment - both (like always) fro my MBP.....

I really only use the iOS keyboard for message texting. And have been for a few year embarrassed by typos I never would have done. (This comment properly suggested a second "m" for comment... fat fingers I guess.)

Let *my* stupid typos alone!!!! By this I mean, don't give me "self-correction" in *any* form. All that does - and on my MBP it includes thinking about my grammar - is forces me (on my iPhone) to s-l-o-w down because I need to see what it thinks and then re-read what I typed. Sure, that may be a good thing. Probably is. But ultimately people I text know me and know what I meant to say. Don't "suggest" emoji. Don't suggest correcting what I want to spell. Don't - PLEASE - suggest what I intended to say. (I fear that is where this is headed.)

@Dave If you don't care about having typos, you can just disable autocorrect in keyboard settings. It's just sad that in 2025, this is even an option to consider.

This wouldn’t be so bad if we could long press a suggestion and say never suggest this again. I swear we used to be able to do that. Maybe it was on Android.

For example every time I type my name here, my phone is sure I mean the San Francisco train system. Even though I have never ever typed that on purpose and likely never will, suggests it every single time and if I’m not careful inserts it automatically.

I wish Apple hadn’t released token third party keyboard support and then immediately completely abandoned it. It was always mostly broken and worked terribly and soon even Google gave up making an iOS keyboard.

Missed letters, bad autocorrect, random capitalization and insertion of superfluous commas, useless voice transcription even in ideal audio environments.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the dramatic decline of Apple’s software quality over the last several years. And I’ve yet to see the company even acknowledge the issue, let alone demonstrate any efforts to correct it.

@Léo, done, and thanks. I consider this an "opt out" action, as iOS turned it on... maybe years ago. Had to dig to find it, and there were 11 on - and 2 disappeared when turning them all off.

Let me type. If I'm too lazy or bothered to check my own spelling/grammar, so be it. If I need to "seek" what thing are turned on by default, don't Instead let me discover what thing I can!

For me, I love it when I type "the" and it expands to "Theresa" for some reason. I do have a contact with that name, but I don't communicate with them very often. I can't think of a reason why it would do this. It's very frequent and random.

@FreeDiverX the irony is they did address it, even recently. I think it was 2023 or 2024 when CFed specifically said "for when you just want to type a ducking word."

I'm pretty sure he doesn't use his own software though.

I disabled iOS autocorrect years ago because it was changing words just before I hit send, and I'd had enough. I'm currently on iOS 17.x and I've had trouble hitting keys in the last several versions of iOS: I regularly get the wrong letter, even on multiple attempts, which is odd after 15 years of using an iPhone. It's not been clear to me if the keyboard has gotten worse or if autocorrect masked this just enough that I didn't notice my own missed keystrokes as much, but I'm starting to believe the keyboard is just broken. And yeah, that would be typical Apple at this point, and the reason I don't bother updating anymore.

>This wouldn’t be so bad if we could long press a suggestion and say never suggest this again. I swear we used to be able to do that. Maybe it was on Android.

I missed this if it was available on iOS. It does sound like a good idea.