> 1) tap anywhere in text to move the cursor?

This behaviour is a mess, IME. iOS makes arbitrary judgements about the word boundary it thinks I'm aiming at and is about 50% wrong. I regularly find words or lines it will refuse to position the cursor into, instead insisting on moving to the line above or below. Line breaks seem to confuse it too. I often have to position the cursor the word before the line break, insert my new text and then reposition to delete the old text.

2) + 3) The rhythm to engage this vs the one to engage selection is completely opaque to me. I still don't know how to engage selection intentionally, successfully. I've owned iPhones since the 3s.

It’s not arbitrary, it’s intentional (though you and I may hate it)

The default UITextInputStringTokenizer prefers to place the caret at word boundaries. I implemented exact placement for my coding app, Codea, and wrote about the text system extensively here: https://sim.coffee/textual-healing/

Exact caret placement is actually surprisingly effective with a reasonable font size. I wish Apple offered it as a preference system-wide

Selection defaults to a double-tap to select at the word granularity. Triple tap will select at the paragraph granularity. This is customisable in your own apps, though the system defaults to the one specific to your current language

I love Codea! I bought it just to play around with it!

Thank you! We build Codea in our spare time, evenings and on weekends. It’s a really rewarding project

> iOS makes arbitrary judgements about the word boundary it thinks I'm aiming at and is about 50% wrong.

For me it's closer to 100% of the time because it is incapable of letting you tap one word over, you have to tap far away then where you want, because it simply will NOT listen when you tap to a neighboring word, it will move the cursor right back to the word it's on.

I’m on iOS 17 and when I tap any word in the text field, neighboring or not, the cursor 100% of the time jumps at the boundary of that word closest to the tap. It is precise enough that I can aim before or after trailing punctuation. Whether there is a word selected or not does not matter: if I previously selected a word by double-tapping, the cursor jump will just un-select it.

I have made a screen recording, but am too lazy to figure out a way to share it.

It almost sounds like a few repliers here are using some other phone, or ignored the point I made previously about the spell checker. I feel your pain but I can help no more.

> or ignored the point I made previously about the spell checker

It turns out I had ignored the point about the spell checker. I had turned off auto-correction, but left on checking/underlining. So I apologise for that.

So I turned off the checker and it's noticeably better, but still not ideal. The first attempt I made got the word wrong by one. I continued with more success but found other strange issues.

For example: If I gently long-press, I get a tiny popup showing the words either side of the cursor magnified slightly. This seems a modern implementation of the old "magnifying glass" feature. This "magnifier" follows the cursor works if you then drag left/right and sometimes up. If you drag down, it disappears. It's smaller than the original magnifying glass, and closer to the cursor (and your finger) so it's less useful... and why close it when dragging down??

> I can help no more

I think you misunderstand the intent of my post. I wasn't asking for help. I was venting, and attempting to show that Apple have handled this interaction badly. Like... really f*king badly. It's a mess. How is turning off spell checking an acceptable "solution"? The fiddliness and erratic experience should not have passed QA. Or... perhaps the company should review the intentions it has for these platforms. I put up with it on my phone because it's small enough that it cannot be anything other than shit for most tasks (especially for people like me with poor vision). But they're trying to claim iPadOS is a serious bit of kit for serious work, and it fails at stuff that was largely solved for 30 years prior on "proper" computers.

I know people here mostly vent, but I was compelled to help because I type in the phone a lot and felt a similar pain after a recent update and it is fine now that I changed the settings.

> and it is fine now that I changed the settings

You shouldn’t have to disable spell checking just to be able to edit text. That’s a workaround that shouldn’t be acceptable.

I’m impressed your spelling holds ip. Props. Mine’s gotten worse as I’ve aged!

This. This. This. THIS. SO MUCH THIS. The "tap away to deselect the original wrong select so you tap back to fix it" has taken at least a day off my life -- half a day for actual wasted time, and another half a day for frustration causing a slightly premature death...

Can’t reproduce any of the issues you describe. Perhaps you are using iOS 17 with spellchecker enabled? Read my comment fully.

As an Apple developer and iPhone user since the 3S, these issues are baked into the OS. That you haven't experienced them speaks to your particular usage. Editing and selecting text has been a longstanding problem with improvements and regressions. As another commenter said, it's a huge annoyance.

Try selecting multiple paragraphs on a website, for example. The behavior is generally unpredictable and requires lots of fiddling. Deselecting text requires yet more work. Double-tapping a word should select the word itself, but that's often not the case. And it's not just websites where the DOM adds complexity; the same erroneous behavior exists for native apps.

For example, open an iMessage text and paste one or more images. Now go back and try to edit existing text. Or add new text. Moving the cursor and text selection is non-deterministic and requires scrolling and fiddling, manually adding line breaks, and then removing them just to get the formatting correct.

In other words, as the OP mentioned, text editing has been problematic on iOS/iPadOS for ages. Interestingly, VisionOS, which perhaps has the most challenging input and editing environment, has managed to resolve many of these issues.

While initial VisionOS releases were buggy and nearly unusable, it's rather striking that you can now use your eyes to move and edit text with more precision than what's possible on iOS/iPadOS--which tells you how much room there is for improvement.

> For example, open an iMessage text and paste one or more images.

I never until today thought of pasting images. I always add them using the Photos button, then just write my message as normal.

I see now how moving cursor around rich text with embedded objects is glitchy, and I imagine if you deal with that on daily basis it could be frustrating.

However, none of the other issues you or others described seem to be reproducible on my phone. Double-tap to select, or tap to place cursor, seem to just work in regular plain text areas.

iOS 16 and I've not used a spell checker for years because it kept correcting my swearing & slang to something I didn't want to say. I did read your comment fully. I replied because I had personal experience that contradicted yours. The "it doesn't place the cursor beside the word I want" gets me a couple of times a week for a couple of years.

I thought you like other repliers are having cursor “misbehaving” all the time, since you wrote it misplaces cursor 50% of the time earlier. That is definitely not my experience.

A couple of times per week it happens for me that the cursor chooses to land on the wrong side of white space or such, but that is infrequent enough and easy to fix that it does not bother me.

> type more text on a screen on either iPad or iPhone these days than any other way. If it was not convenient, I wouldn’t be doing it.

Yes you would just like a lot of other people do - because the device is truly portable, so you can suffer more inconvenience to use it everywhere to communicate in immediate mode

> Finally, you know if you type a lot you can connect your favorite mechanical keyboard and it will work just like it does on Mac, with Emacs-like movement combos and all?

No it won't, I've changed those bad defaults with macos-only apps

> You know you can

Yes I do, and still agree with the OP that the software support is bad and none of the things you list are properly engineered despite the fact that direct analogue finger input has great potential

> you can suffer more inconvenience to use it everywhere to communicate in immediate mode

If it was as awfully inconvenient as some here claim, I would reply to comments or write emails on my laptop. It simply is not.

And if you meant awful inconvenience you should've said so in the previous comment. It simply is ... inconvenient, much more so than with a regular keyboard, but not as awful as to make it completely impractical, so the other benefits can outweigh it and result in plenty of phone typing

> you should've said so in the previous comment

See the comment I originally replied to. “Horrifically broken”, “many steps” and so on.

Also, for me it is often about as fast to type as with a hardware keyboard thanks to swipe typing. Perhaps I think slow enough that it’s not a bottleneck. Pity you all fast thinkers, I suppose.

Editing is sometimes a bit slower, but also depends.

Thank you so much for the PSA. I have been in and out of the keyboard settings screen many times since the update but could not find what was causing the single-tap word selection. Jeeez, talk about an unbelievably annoying feature. Especially bad is how tapping anywhere after the last word in a text area gets interpreted as tapping ON that word, making it impossible to return to the end of an open paragraph with single-tap cursor movement.

Glad it helped. I’m with you, remembering how it was after I freshly updated but before I figured this out is giving me unpleasant flashbacks.

Another annoyance for me is when trying to move the cursor to the end of a long text box like the URL bar in Safari. You basically have to keep using the “hold space bar” method and swiping one inch at a time. I’m sure there’s a better way to do this but I haven’t found it yet.

I find that dragging the cursor to the right is fast enough. However, removing that initial selection of the entire URL takes a couple of frustrating extra taps.

Removing complete selection in a single-line input is a weak point of editing experience on iOS (it is easy in a textarea since you have space to just tap away).

I'm on my first iphone (13) after decades with android/bb/nokia and I cannot explain how much I loathe typing on this thing. It's like it actively goes out of my way to make me not want to copy/paste/edit urls, etc. I also have a terrible time hitting the correct letters and I have scrawny salad fingers.

Every iPhone super user I'm surrounded by (everyone) never talks about how awful the typing experience is and makes me feel like a luddite for not doing it well. I wasn't sure if they were just used to it or they just know how to use it correctly and I don't.

It's horrible. It's helped me a lot to stop pulling my phone out to use social media/web etc to pass time because if I can't click it, if i have to type in a URL or anything like that, I just don't want to even try.

They don't, it's part of the "believer" persona where they will excuse anything and everything, thinking that since it is so expensive and gives so much status that it can't be bad or wrong.

The state of things is appalling, some cheap Android phones give better experience with typing/keyboard than the most expensive Apple phones (you get a proper number row in the first place, avoiding extremely annoying switching when working with numbers).

And I say that as someone who bought the first iPhone (literally imported it before it was even available in France), when the hardware was so superior to anything else on the market that it didn't matter as much that the software could be lacking in some ways.

Nowadays the hardware is still good (overpriced, at least in France) but the software is bad/annoying/lacking on so many levels it's just insane that Apple keeps getting away with selling so many expensive devices with deeply flawed software.

But there has been a slowdown in sales and their chip leadership doesn't matter as much as it used to (at least in phones), so maybe they will start improving their stuff. One can only hope.

Slowdown in sales is inescapable if you make something that doesn’t become obsolete right away. At some point your target audience already has your phones and no strong reason to buy a new one.

> some cheap Android phones give better experience with typing/keyboard

There will always be a phone that beats iPhone in one way or another. There are Android phones with 6000 Hz PWM for low frequency flicker-sensitive people, Android phones with e-ink screens, Android phones with hardware keyboards, etc. However, they suck in other ways because of Android (horrifically insecure, often full of malware from Chinese vendors that requires being a hacker to weed out, lagging in accessibility, etc.) and bad hardware that quickly obsoletes, while iPhones are quite well-rounded and work for everyone on a more or less intuitive level despite what all the haters say about it being “abysmal” in one way or another.

I agree on the slowdown thing, it is normal in a way. But only if you consider that Apple should only do hardware to make 45% profit on it. And this is where I disagree, a lot more Android phones are sold every year because in the end people break/lose their phones, they become insufficient for their needs or they just don't have the means to buying a luxury phone that should be a useful tool first and foremost.

While people are largely irrational when it comes to Apple stuff (the "reasons" people buy iPhone are largely emotional for the vast majority or buyers) they are not entirely stupid and Android phones have become much cheaper for very comparable hardware, when they will have to renew, they may switch. It's definitely a problem for Apple even if you don't think so.

In my country a base iPhone 15 is 970 euros while you can get a Pixel 8 for 600 euros. The phones are very comparable in hardware quality, there is no way an iPhone is 60% better. And there is no way it's going to provide 60% better value over its lifetime, that irrational "thinking" (emotional behavior) that comes with the purchase of luxury products. And I think it shouldn't be a luxury product, it serves no one but Apple to have a tool become a luxury status symbol. It's worse than other luxury products because they don't get a market share as large and they don't influence the purchase of other goods/services as much.

Android is as insecure as you allow it to be. No one I know with an Android phone ever complain to me about Chinese malware. And I'm the tech guy and I get asked about bugs, installation of 3rd party stores, ad blockers, rooting, DNS bypass but no malware. And many have Chinese phones (Huawei and Xiaomi mostly). You just have irrational fears instilled by bullshit marketing and emotional "arguments" from believers. It's a bit like the alarm salespeople who find a way to sell their "solution" that costs more overtime than what it is supposed to protect. Good sales pitch, I guess.

As for the hardware, Android phones do not become obsolete quicker than iPhones (quite the contrary in fact). Since Google and Samsung announced 7 years of support, that cannot be a valid argument anymore. Also, I know from experience that Apple is, in fact, the one to blame. Under the guise of "free updates" they make their hardware become too slow or insufficient in a way that makes it borderline useless while not even providing all the functionalities announced in the update for older hardware. How nice of them to save themselves the trouble of actually supporting an OS instead of conveniently just pushing a single OS on everyone to ease their maintenance burden even though very few will actually want/benefit from the new stuff.

For example, when I sold my Apple Watch Series 3 it became impossible to update it without erasing the whole thing. It received no worthwhile functionality in exchange, most of the new stuff was locked to the new watches (precisely the reason I changed in the first place) and the new software made it slower and have less battery life. To add insult to the injury, it is impossible to go back on an update so you are basically stuck with hardware that is not completely useless but has lost much of its value as a tool. All that to keep the thing compatible with their phone OS.

The only reason I didn't feel bad about selling it is because I sold it cheap to a friend and I take care of the issues for him and he just uses it as a simple watch. He wanted to look cool without spending too much money and he has no use of any of the functionalities, which is the majority of Apple Watch users in my experience. I use it as a sport watch (swimming/running) but my next one will be a real sports watch. Outside of that use case it's pointless and Apple behavior around softwares/update is too bad to invest more money in a product that is lackluster and deeply flawed despite all the years/profits they had.

I think you are largely convinced by emotions about Apple stuff. They have some benefits and are well made but as far as my experience tells me, the major benefit is mostly how people will look at you.

It's a bit like arguing that a BMW is a better car than a Toyota. Yeah sure, but in practice both will let you lose your permit (depending on model, one much faster than the other) and both will carry you to the same places if they are functionally comparable models. But some people still get the BMW, not because there is a particularly good reason for it but because they like how people will look at them and treat them because of it. Unsurprisingly most of this group tends to be young males. The iPhone is basically the same, expect it is a different target demographic, that is larger (younger person, predominantly females).

Perhaps the reason they do not talk about it is because they find it convenient, like me. Could be adjustment period, or you need to play with your keyboard settings (spellchecker and so on).

I find typing extremely easy and fast for the most part, except when swipe-typing gets the wrong word.

1. Open Messages 2. Open any conversation 3. Type "This is going to hurt" 4. Now, in one "tap anywhere," place the cursor after the word "is"

Spoiler -- the cursor will be before the word "going," after the space. It's possible to select after "is" -- for example, you can select after "going" if you're careful (I'd say you have to tap around the "n")

Of course I know about the long tap -- as I said, I've been doing roughly that since at least the deep press days. Open Safari, go to a typically long Amazon URL, and try to get to the end of the URL to edit something. Depending on the URL length, it requires:

1. Tap quickly so the whole URL isn't selected (otherwise you'll drag it)

Then multiple cycles of:

1. Long tap 2. Drag to the right 3. Reach the end of the screen, but not the URL 4. Back to (1)

The spacebar is the same as the long tap. It's better than nothing, but not sufficient.

And adding a keyboard doesn't fix the fundamental issue that Apple hasn't thought deeply about this.

Swipe-typing is a blessing and a curse. Think about what you have to do if:

1. You want to add an "s" to pluralize something 2. You just need to change the last letter or two 3. You want to add any other character right after the word besides the limited set Apple has deemed worthy of special treatment

And that is:

1. Type space 2. Type backspace 3. Type the actual thing you want to type

That's three actions to do one thing. And that doesn't even begin to cover how swipe typing handles alternatives: backspace and do it over? Really? How about automatically popping up alternatives for selection (and then dismissing if the user keeps swiping)?

I'm happy for you that you're happy. I'm not. Apple: hire me and I'll make this better. :-)

What if I need to type "too"? More to the point, with longer words it's entirely possible to put the insertion point after that word. The shorter the word is, the harder it is to do, until at some point it is impossible (? maybe I need smaller fingers?). That alternative use case just fades into impossibility (again, maybe) without explanation or guidance.

To be clear: I'm not saying that every choice Apple has made is the opposite of what makes sense. I'm saying that in many cases they could have increased usability, and that overall usability is bad enough that editing is painful, substantially slower than on other platforms (MacOS) and that I think there are at least some use cases they could address, but they haven't.

Edited (at first I misread your comment).

Yes, with short words like “or” it is difficult to tap cursor to place it exactly before or after trailing punctuation; however, holding and dragging cursor to a precise position needed (thanks to magnifying glass) takes about a second to do.

It takes me repeated taps on a text entry to get the popover that allows me to paste - why isn't there a keyboard shortcut to access the clipboard? Similarly, I often find it impossible to drag a selection to select more or less characters. Moving the cursor is similarly infuriating. On Android, I had a keyboard that allowed me to swipe on the space bar to move the cursor, why can't I have that here?

Wouldn't be as big of a problem if the spellchecker was not absolute garbage and handled multi-language text input, or just worked well for a single language. Honestly, I don't think the team working on the keyboard at apple has any linguists or any kind of diversity to pay attention to nothing but the most milktoast of English language use.

If you tap and hold on the spacebar it essential becomes a trackpad. That let you move the cursor in all directions.

You just changed my life.

This is not in any way a criticism of you: it is positively absurd how many people are unaware of this. As bad as text editing is for those who know most of the tricks, the fact that many of the tricks are unknown to a substantial number of people is off-the-charts bad on Apple.

That doesn’t help with selection, does it?

You can select text this way too; once it’s in “trackpad mode”, tap the keyboard with another finger, and it will start text selection.

Wow, I had no idea! But the selection is not fluid at all and really difficult this way

I’d say the main problem is that it doesn’t work while operating a phone single-handed, when you only have a thumb available, but on iPad I can see it being useful after some getting used to.

I tried on an iPad. That works but it’s really not a good experience, unless I’m doing it incorrectly. On an iPhone it’s also pretty awkward, I don’t think I will ever use that feature but it’s good to know it exists

On an IPhone and I struggle with the trackpad mode as well. I frequently might want to select a block of text, but the OS really only wants me to select to here and no more. Cannot pin down what arbitrary threshold I am missing.

That's a neat trick. It seems to only work to extend the selection to the right? Meaning:

1. Long-tap with your right thumb, drag the cursor to the end of a sentence 2. Tap with your left thumb (to the left of your right thumb) and drag to the left to select the sentence -- nothing happens 3. Drag your right thumb to the right to make sure you understand what's happening and you're doing it right -- the selection extends, yay! 4. Again try dragging your left thumb -- nothing happens.

How could Apple's human interaction people let this ship?!

Thank you. Had no idea this existed.

> why isn't there a keyboard shortcut to access the clipboard?

You can tap and hold with three fingers to bring up the clipboard bar which has icons for undo, redo, cut, copy, and paste. Assuming that's what you mean by "access the clipboard"?

You don’t actually need to hold, just a three-finger tap (anywhere on screen, except keyboard itself) is enough.

Ooh, this is a neat trick, thanks!

Personally, I almost never use it since I often operate single-handed and it is not part of my muscle memory. Tapping the cursor then waiting a second or so for regular context menu (with lookup, translate and other options) is my preferred way.

> It takes me repeated taps on a text entry to get the popover that allows me to paste

I copy and pasted this on an iPhone - I tapped the comment box which summoned the keyboard, and I tapped again and it gave me Paste/Autofill as options.

> On Android, I had a keyboard that allowed me to swipe on the space bar to move the cursor, why can't I have that here?

This is out of the box functionality on iOS. I had a samsung device before, and I had no end of issues with the keyboard failing to summon, certain apps refusing to use my preferred keyboard, password managers not working properly, inconsistent selection/focus/edit dialog behaviour. I don't get _any_ of those issues with iOS.

> It takes me repeated taps on a text entry to get the popover that allows me to paste

> I often find it impossible to drag a selection to select more or less characters.

Your description reminds me of how it felt after that recent OS update I mentioned, until I realized I can turn off spellchecker to restore the previous typing behaviour. Now the copy/paste popover and drag-selection work every time, but I have to really watch for typos.

Like me, you were used to previous behaviour, and the new one is unfamiliar to the point of broken. I agree that Apple has royally screwed up here by making this the default behavior in iOS 17.

However, it’s a bit disingenuous to say it was always broken if it only started working differently in the latest version.

> why isn't there a keyboard shortcut to access the clipboard

On iPad, if you bring up a large keyboard by pinch-zooming the small one, you get those buttons on screen keyboard. (On an external keyboard, the normal macOS copy-paste key combos work always.)