I've been observing iPhone users and there's one thing they all hate

Published Oct 27, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT Joe Fedewa has been writing about technology for over a decade. Android and the rest of the Google ecosystem have been a focus for years, as well as reviewing devices, hosting podcasts, filming videos, and writing tutorials. Joe loves all things technology and is also an avid DIYer and food blogger. He has written thousands of articles, hundreds of tutorials, and dozens of reviews. Before joining How-To Geek, Joe worked at XDA-Developers as Managing Editor and covered news from the Google ecosystem. He got his start in the industry covering Windows Phone on a small blog, and later moved to Phandroid where he covered Android news, reviewed devices, wrote tutorials, created YouTube videos, and hosted a podcast. From smartphones to Bluetooth earbuds to Z-Wave switches, Joe is interested in all kinds of technology. After several years of jailbreaking and heavily modifying an iPod Touch, he moved on to his first smartphone, the HTC DROID Eris. He's been hooked ever since. Apple fans are infamous for defending the company's every decision. The notch, sticking with the Lightning cable for too long, the price of extra storage, etc. But bring up the iPhone keyboard in a room full of iPhone owners, and the mood quickly turns. I'm not an iPhone owner myself, but I'm interested, and I regularly scroll through r/iPhone and MacRumors forums. People have different opinions about most topics, but when it comes to the stock Apple keyboard, there's a very clear narrative. iPhone users do not like the iPhone keyboard. A complaint that's older than most iPhones It's not a recent problem The thing is, this isn't something that started with a recent iOS update. Around the time of iOS 12, Apple writer Dan Moren said autocorrect had become "both worse at fixing legitimate typos and more aggressive about taking actual words and turning them into nonsense." That was seven years ago. MacRumors threads about iOS 13 start with absolutes such as "We all know autocorrect has been terrible." Fast forward to iOS 17, and an autocorrect thread on MacRumors reads like a support group. The original poster said the autocorrect in beta 1 was actually better than the final release. Replies piled on. One person said autocorrect had gone from mediocre to a nightmare. Another said it had become so aggressive that they were fixing words in about half or more of their messages. In that same thread, a German speaker said the keyboard turns one particular word into a different one every single time. They'd even erased their iPhone completely without restoring a backup, and it still happened. And one commenter said they had only just started trusting the on-screen keyboard at all, after calling it a disaster since the iPhone 6, 10 years of frustration. Reddit is where the real complainers go Reddit is the place where I see most iPhone users go to air their grievances. A thread from last year about a YouTube video titled "It's Not Just You - The iOS Keyboard is Broken " has over 700 comments. The most common issue, again, centered around autocorrect rewriting correctly typed words into nonsense. Several people also mention that the keyboard has slowly gotten worse with every update. One of the hottest threads about the iPhone keyboard is from just six months ago — "I used to be able to type on iPhone keyboard without looking at it. Now, I have to watch myself type and still somehow make mistakes on almost every single word." Simple sentences such as "Do you want to eat pizza?" were autocorrected to "Do you want to emancipate slipper animals?" What. Sometimes, people point to technical reasons for the issues. A now-removed Reddit thread from earlier this year blamed a bug where some keystrokes weren't registering. Those missing characters then confused autocorrect about what the person meant to type. This particular issue seems to be present on the brand new iPhone Duo as well. Of course, we can't talk about autocorrect complaints without mentioning its most infamous problem. iOS 17 was supposed to make swearing easier and address the annoying "duck" autocorrection. Whether it actually works that way for everybody is another question, and plenty of people on the forums would say it's still an issue. Apple needs to fix this More than just participation bias Now, it's easy to assume that issues mentioned online are bigger than they really are. It's called "participation" or "self-selection" bias. The people who have the problem are most likely to actually post about it, and you never hear from the people who don't have the problem. However, when the reports are this overwhelming, it seems to be genuine. Let's focus on Reddit as an example. As I'm writing this, the iPhone Duo is brand new, yet when I sort r/iPhone by "Hot," the second thread I see is about how the keyboard was better on old iPhones (500+ comments). Meanwhile, over in r/iOS, one of the top posts of the year is about speech-to-text mistakes. No matter which Apple-related subreddit you visit, you're going to see keyboard complaints. These complaints span years, iOS versions, languages, and phone models. Apple has created a system that technically supports third-party keyboards, but does so in a way that's really not a great experience. Every time I've used an iPhone, I try to use Gboard, but I always end up back with the stock keyboard due to various little things. The majority of iPhone users only know the stock keyboard. Clearly, something needs to be done to improve the iPhone keyboard. Autocorrect seems like the main culprit, but layout and voice-to-text could also use some work. When this many iPhone users agree on something that's negative toward Apple, you know there's a real problem.