The process for teaching it a word depends critically on not hitting the space bar or return key or any other punctuation.

If you pause at the end of the word, either the first time or after correcting it, and don’t hit any key, it’ll throw up the “suggestion X” popup. Tapping X on that popup teaches it the word.

I, and a lot of others, will backspace to correct a word, then hit space, and then it immediately undoes the correction, because hitting the space bar is indicating “you can go ahead and autocorrect this as you would in everyday typing”.

This training method isn’t documented anywhere that I know of, has worked for years (perhaps for all time?), and is the opposite of well-known. I am really upset with Apple for that last one especially.

I agree this is infuriating. This was the reason that made me finally ditch autocorrection altogether on my iPhone. I still make mistakes but at least now they're mostly my own mistakes, and when I correct them they stay corrected.

This how I operated for a long time as well, but made liberal use of text replacement for frequent things like il -> I’ll.

Unfortunately, when I got a Mac laptop, those replacements were synched and for some reason can’t be disabled on just one device.

Now I’m back to autocorrect, fighting with the AI to learn technical terms and command line entries for when I need to talk to colleagues over chat.

Why would you use autocorrect on a keyboard?

GP is saying he would like not to but cannot shut it off because they’re not using autocorrect but text replacements. It does make sense in the general case to sync text replacements, just not if you’re using it in place of autocorrect

You’re correct, sorry for the confusion.

Phase 1: iPhone w/o autocorrect but with text replacements.

Phase 2: iPhone and macOS, but text replacements are synched without option to disable. I don’t want autocorrect or replacements while typing on a real keyboard.

Phase 3 (reluctantly): iPhone with autocorrect, macOS without it, and no text replacements.

tl;dr it would be nice if I could disable text replacement on a per-device basis.

One solution is to disable autocorrect, then tap-type when you want no correction and swipe-type when you do (since swiping necessarily uses autocorrect)

I would recommend switching to GBoard, which doesn't have this infuriating behavior

Thanks but I'd rather not use Google's keylogger. Also, if it's anything like Android's keyboard I find Apple's sans auto-correct superior.

This particularly infuriates me when it corrects words I've already fixed prior to the one I'm typing. There's a better highlight animation when it does it in iOS 16, but I still miss the animation most of the time (because I'm focused on the word I'm typing, not words back).

I want an option to disable that, but right now there doesn't seem to be a way other than turning off autocorrect altogether (which I've been alternating it on and off lately trying to figure out which one aggravates me least; I also briefly returned to SwiftKey [RIP] to see if its ancient less recently trained ML autocorrect model was better).

  > Worse is its insistence on continuing to autocorrect words I’ve just gone back to fix.

its really bad... so bad (except the pop-up suggestions) i just turned auto correct off completely a few versions ago

  >i just turned auto correct off completely a few versions ago...

I don;t use autocorrect at all. Never have. But I do use 'swipe-to-type' [or whatever it's called] on Android and run into the same annoyances, as it will also chooses the wrong word, for a swiped pattern, every time --no matter how often I correct it.

> I don;t use autocorrect at all.

We're gonna need to see some proof.

I'm sure there's a sub-clause in Murphy's Law which states that "No matter how many times you proof-read, any discussion on the subject of grammar or spelling will include typos"

PS --you misssed "it will also chooses"

I agree with this. Having the device "correct" something that you've just gone back to fix is extremely frustrating.

That said, there are times when retroactive correction is useful. If I type "new york," it's appropriate for the phone to automatically correct it to "New York" and not "new York"

Yes! I can ignore suggestions, but when the autocorrect corrects my correction I feel like I'm in a game of whose's on first? Eventually you need to tap another button to keep the spelling you want.

This may be the most confoundingly and consistently irritating thing about using an iPhone, to me.

many versions of iOS ago - if you deleted the autocorrect word, it suggested above the keys the original word it replaced, which made it very easy to get back to where you originally were.

they then removed this a few years ago.

utterly baffling how over-engineered and regressive it has become

Just one more core in their neural engine and maybe the AI will get smart enough to let you fix words it autocorrected erroneously…