A while (about two years?) ago I went from a 5+ year old Samsung that wasn’t a particularly new model when I got it that survived a lot of abuse to a secondhand old Iphone 13 Pro Max from my partner who treated it well. As expected after a full factory reset it was way better by simple virtue of being a way newer model that hadn’t been abused for so long.

Despite being happy with a pretty new phone I will never ever buy another Iphone unless someone can help me fix the absolutely mindbogglingly bad systems they have for typing. When I say that this looks like some students did a rushjob at the end of term to get this out and still failed despite getting all functionality in I’m not exaggerating.

On my old Samsung typing was exceedingly simple. If you put the cursor over a word it would be placed exactly where you put it and contextual menu’s would pop up for spelling corrections, selecting the word or everything etc. Every single option I would want was one to three taps away.

Iphone doesn’t, period.

For starters selecting something. If you want to select a word its different if your keyboard is up or not. Why is it different? I mean the functionality is there but there’s no point in making it different just because the keyboard is up or not. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Lets say I want to select a word to change its spelling. Wait I can’t, the cursor is still at the front of the word, I first have to place the cursor somewhere else, THEN select the word. Why? Why is this a thing?

Then lets say the word is spelled wrong so I place the cursor in the middle by tapping once. Haha nope the suggestions for new words pop up while the cursor is placed at the back of the word. And the suggestions are bad, so bad. Often when a single letter is wrong the Iphone comes up with no words or different words. Why? And if I start typing to correct the word it just removes it entirely because it selected it in its entirety. And to put the cursor there I have to tap and drag it into the correct position. Why not put it where I tap?

And how about selecting everything? I want to select everything I first have to make sure my cursor is on an empty alinea. If its somewhere else the option doesn’t pop up and if I try to drag the selection bar around it doesn’t scroll on all apps. Why? Even my 5 year old phone could do it, but not a much newer Iphone?

Or the incessant zooming. Like on Youtube when I want to type, it zooms in so far that I can’t see the entire sentence I write, but if I zoom out the Iphone says “oh you don’t want to type?” And the keyboard goes away. And in other sites or apps it has different zooms, and sometimes does work nicely like on the notepad I’m writing this on. I tried finding a letter size and zoom that didn’t do this but gave up when I saw all I was doing was move the problem to another app.

This is an absolutely unacceptable horroshow of a design problem that should not be in one of the major smartphone producers. It can do everything, but its needlessly complicated and has many tiny little contextual things that make it semi-random what will happen if you try to type or different apps.

Now I have a bit of a curse with software, like somehow since High school I’ve had two accounts to log in at every place I worked or studied with some functionality exclusively on one account or the other and no one able to fix it, or code failing on my machine (even if I switched machines) but saving that code on a stick and putting it on someone else’s machine and it works fine, so I thought this curse was happening until someone else recently said they had the same problems.

Can someone please tell me if I can download something with normal functionality? So I can use this without having to constantly be aware of what tiny contextual nuances I have to take into account just to get everything done that I want done?