I've had an iPhone for almost 10 years now. Since last year I've been using a 12 Mini, before that I had a first generation SE (best phone I ever had).
In the last year or so I feel that typing using the touch keyboard has become unbearable. I constantly make typos, and even with auto correction turned on, the corrections don't usually make sense and I am forced to delete and retype.
I believe that the major change had something to do with the text selection and cursor placement change that was made somewhere between iOS 14 and 15 (or 13 -14, or whatever, who can remember).
Nothing feels intuitive anymore: trying to select a word rarely works, and selection ends up being snapped on to unrelated stuff. There are at least three different types of displays falling under the category of "suggestions": auto-complete (three words above keyboard), spelling suggestions (red wiggly line+tooltip), and another kind of tooltip that sometimes appears but I still haven't figured out.
And above all, cursor scrolling using either the spacebar trick or a hard press on screen is a complete mess and usually snaps to some random part of the text, and it is apparently variable and depends on the UI context (behaves differently within URL bars vs. multiline text).
I find myself more and more often preferring not to use the phone and waiting to get to an actual computer with a keyboard to type anything beyond a few words.
Am I just getting older/going through some cognitive decline or is the mobile typing experience actually getting worse?
What I remember is that it sounded like pretty simple lookups. As you typed, the software compared your word to, essentially, a weighted dictionary to guess what you were going to type next.
If you typed “b” it was flummoxed. But if you typed “behav” it knew the next letter was almost certainly going to be “e” or “i” (for behavior). It may have been more complicated than that, but probably not much. It was 2007 and the phone CPU was not powerful.
One interesting thing I remember is that they said the phone enlarged the touch targets for highly predicted next letters. For example it would be easier to type an “e” than a “w” after you had typed “behav”, because the tap boundary expanded around the “e”. Cool stuff!
And if you did type behavw and hit space, it would autocorrect to behave.
At some point I recall Apple announcing that they had switched autocorrect to a full machine learning implementation. Rather than a simple deterministic look-up, it was trained on a huge corpus of text, and reads the whole chunk of what you’ve written so far to make predictions. Everyone does this now, it’s how they deliver the (incredibly annoying and stupid IMO) one-tap suggestions for email and text replies. “Thanks!” “Noted.” “I’ll get right on that.”
In my memory, that’s when typing got a lot more annoying on iPhones. The quality of suggestions went either down or weirdo or both. For example it just tried to sub-in “Quaker” for “quality” in the previous sentence. Why??