iOS Keyboard's Snail Pace Evolution - Part 1

I started taking notes about this post before Apple announced iOS13 earlier this year. After the launch of iOS 13, some of the concerns I had with the iOS keyboard got addressed, making me lose interest in finishing this post. But, trying my hands at the iOS keyboard for some time and thinking more deeply about the use cases have made me revisit and finish the job this time.

The first iPhone launch in 2007 with a capacitive touchscreen brought the virtual keyboard mainstream. The capacitive touch technology provided a fluid experience that felt magical. In comparison, resistive touch was jerky and medieval. It wasn’t surprising then that pre-iPhone launch, the virtual keyboard didn’t get adoption to go mainstream. Apple’s senior engineer, Ken Kocienda, in his book, Creative Selection, has written about the development and design process behind the iOS keyboard, and how he handled some of the challenges on the software side. I’d highly recommend it if you want to have an up-and-close look into Apple’s Product Development Process.

The skeptics had their doubts about the virtual keyboard, but as people laid their hands for the first time on it, all those reservations got washed away. The responsiveness and ergonomics of the keyboard were superior to any other virtual and physical keyboard available at that time - even the Blackberry’s famed qwerty keyboard.

In those early days of the smartphone era, the expectations from a virtual keyboard weren’t very high. First, a keyboard should be able to pick the right letters with a very low error rate as the user presses the thumbs on the screen. Second, there should be very low latency between the time a user taps the letter, and it appears on the screen. And Apple excelled in those areas and has improved even further.

However, a lot has changed 13 years since the launch. More than 3 billion people now have smartphones in their hands. No other technology has come even close to such a level of adoption and become so much intertwined with every aspect of human lives. From a small unknown farmer somewhere in a remote part of the world to a well-known CEO (Jack Dorsey) of two public listed companies (Square and Twitter) with a market cap of $50 billion, everybody relies on a smartphone. (I mentioned Jack Dorsey because he runs both companies only through his smartphone. He doesn’t use laptops and tablets anymore)

As everybody now relies on smartphones to do more and more of their jobs, the expectations of what a keyboard should do have also changed significantly. However, the iOS native keyboard hasn’t evolved a lot with the changing times. It now supports a lot more languages, is faster, and supports swipe typing, auto-suggestions/auto-correct & emojis. I still love the simplicity of the native keyboard. But, here are some of my main gripes with it:

• I don’t have stickers or gifs to choose from (I can now use Animoji and Memojis outside of iMessage starting iOS13, though)
• I can’t search for emojis
• Prediction (outside of the English language) is horrible
• It took a long time to launch swipe typing. It was launched in 2019 on iOS13 - more than five years since Google launched it on Android.
• There is no access to any drawing tools
• Before iOS13, if you had other third-party keyboards installed, using emojis was a painful experience. A user had to switch to a separate emoji keyboard every time she had wanted to use one.

Why did it come to such a state? As an outsider, I don’t know the exact reasons for this stagnation. But, I can hypothesize a few based on whatever little knowledge I have about Apple as a company.

Core vs. Non-Core

One reason could be Apple’s hardware-centric mentality and its focus on a deeper hardware and software integration to provide a world-class “core” experience while investing “just enough” on the complementary experiences to keep customers in the ecosystem. And a keyboard falls more in a “complementary” bucket than the “core” one. Therefore, Apple has invested just enough on the native keyboard - similar to many other non-core native apps, i.e., Notes, Email, Reminders, Weather - to not hurt the iPhone sales.

Any platform faces this perennial question: which part of the experience should be tightly controlled by the platform owner, and where should it let third-parties flourish? Theoretically, such a decision should be easy as the platform owner should own the core experience and let the competitors fight for the non-core components. But, the big assumption in the above statement is that there is a clear demarcation between the core and non-core experiences, and that is not going to blur or shift with time. Having the foresight to navigate those assumptions is very difficult and at times, almost impossible.

The keyboard is the heart of a phone, and, therefore, it took Apple a long time (7 years after the first iPhone launch) before finally deciding to open it up to third-parties. Since then, the availability of feature-rich third-party keyboards has helped Apple address the needs of users who are looking for a lot more functionality than what a native keyboard can or will ever be able to provide.

While these third-party keyboards address many of the shortcomings of the native keyboard, the experience of using and switching between these keyboards is not fluid. The switching experience is jarring enough to ensure that people stick to or keep coming back to the native keyboard, effectively making sure that none of the keyboards become big enough to become a threat to Apple. 

At the same time, these third-party keyboards provide Apple a window into new emerging consumer behavior, giving Apple an opportunity to bring some of those features on the native keyboard thoughtfully. But, I don’t think Apple has leveraged this advantage to the fullest; it has been too slow to bring some of the features that went mainstream long-time back. For example, it took Apple 5 years to launch swipe-typing on iOS 13 since opening the keyboard to third parties in 2014. 

Devotion to simplicity and elegance

The second potential reason could be Apple’s devotion to simplicity and elegance. The majority of the users still use the native keyboard (thanks mostly to the power of defaults) and are comfortable with it. Therefore, Apple doesn’t want to rock the boat and thus keeps the keyboard simple by not cramming too many use cases on it. But, when a user was forced to switch to a different keyboard for using an emoji, I’d myself question this hypothesis - that experience was preposterous until iOS13.

The dilemma of privacy and its implications on AI

The third reason could be Apple’s steadfast position on privacy and, therefore, its inability to leverage artificial intelligence to improve the experience as much as other competitors can. While Apple trains machine learning algorithms in the cloud and deploys them locally on your device, but its reluctance to collect and store user data in the cloud and run it through machine learning algorithms to provide better predictions comes in the way of delivering the superior user experience. This approach has implications across all the use cases of keyboards: picking correct words while typing or swipe typing; suggestions correct words based on typing history; picking the cultural context of the user behind the keyboard, etc.

Let’s pick the auto-suggestions feature to show how much Apple lags behind Google’s third-party keyboard on Apple - GBoard. The experience of auto-suggestions is so unreliable outside of non-English words on Apple keyboard that I was forced to try multiple third-party keyboards to figure out which one best fits my needs.

It is not, by any means, a comprehensive evaluation. Still, it will give you a glimpse into my frustrations with the Apple keyboard.

The above examples show you how the dismal prediction rate of the iOS native keyboard is in comparison to GBoard. I can’t trust it will predict the words with a very low error rate while swiping or trying fast. The cognitive friction of going back every time to correct the wrong word is too high when you’re in the middle of a conversation with friends or are responding to an email.

This twitter thread shows many more examples of how bad the auto-suggest is in iOS13, even for the English language words. Some of the auto-corrections will make you ask: Are you high, Apple?

After trying multiple keyboards, I finally settled on GBoard. It solved many use cases for me. It learns quickly based on my previous typing habits - irrespective of whether I’m using an English or Hinglish or any other keyboard; It supports multiple keyboards at the same time. Swiping feature is excellent; It remembers unique words that I have used in the past. I can also search for gifs, emojis and can create my stickers within the keyboard. There is also an ability to access other Google products that have many relevant use cases during communication - google search, google maps, google translate, and youtube.

Do you use any other third-party keyboards that you find better than the iOS keyboard? What pain point it is solving for you that iOS doesn’t?

Thanks Anil Kundu for reading the drafts