This behaviour is a mess, IME. iOS makes arbitrary judgements about the word boundary it thinks I'm aiming at and is about 50% wrong. I regularly find words or lines it will refuse to position the cursor into, instead insisting on moving to the line above or below. Line breaks seem to confuse it too. I often have to position the cursor the word before the line break, insert my new text and then reposition to delete the old text.
2) + 3) The rhythm to engage this vs the one to engage selection is completely opaque to me. I still don't know how to engage selection intentionally, successfully. I've owned iPhones since the 3s.
It’s not arbitrary, it’s intentional (though you and I may hate it)
The default UITextInputStringTokenizer prefers to place the caret at word boundaries. I implemented exact placement for my coding app, Codea, and wrote about the text system extensively here: https://sim.coffee/textual-healing/
Exact caret placement is actually surprisingly effective with a reasonable font size. I wish Apple offered it as a preference system-wide
Selection defaults to a double-tap to select at the word granularity. Triple tap will select at the paragraph granularity. This is customisable in your own apps, though the system defaults to the one specific to your current language
> iOS makes arbitrary judgements about the word boundary it thinks I'm aiming at and is about 50% wrong.
For me it's closer to 100% of the time because it is incapable of letting you tap one word over, you have to tap far away then where you want, because it simply will NOT listen when you tap to a neighboring word, it will move the cursor right back to the word it's on.
I’m on iOS 17 and when I tap any word in the text field, neighboring or not, the cursor 100% of the time jumps at the boundary of that word closest to the tap. It is precise enough that I can aim before or after trailing punctuation. Whether there is a word selected or not does not matter: if I previously selected a word by double-tapping, the cursor jump will just un-select it.
I have made a screen recording, but am too lazy to figure out a way to share it.
It almost sounds like a few repliers here are using some other phone, or ignored the point I made previously about the spell checker. I feel your pain but I can help no more.
> or ignored the point I made previously about the spell checker
It turns out I had ignored the point about the spell checker. I had turned off auto-correction, but left on checking/underlining. So I apologise for that.
So I turned off the checker and it's noticeably better, but still not ideal. The first attempt I made got the word wrong by one. I continued with more success but found other strange issues.
For example: If I gently long-press, I get a tiny popup showing the words either side of the cursor magnified slightly. This seems a modern implementation of the old "magnifying glass" feature. This "magnifier" follows the cursor works if you then drag left/right and sometimes up. If you drag down, it disappears. It's smaller than the original magnifying glass, and closer to the cursor (and your finger) so it's less useful... and why close it when dragging down??
> I can help no more
I think you misunderstand the intent of my post. I wasn't asking for help. I was venting, and attempting to show that Apple have handled this interaction badly. Like... really f*king badly. It's a mess. How is turning off spell checking an acceptable "solution"? The fiddliness and erratic experience should not have passed QA. Or... perhaps the company should review the intentions it has for these platforms. I put up with it on my phone because it's small enough that it cannot be anything other than shit for most tasks (especially for people like me with poor vision). But they're trying to claim iPadOS is a serious bit of kit for serious work, and it fails at stuff that was largely solved for 30 years prior on "proper" computers.
I know people here mostly vent, but I was compelled to help because I type in the phone a lot and felt a similar pain after a recent update and it is fine now that I changed the settings.
This. This. This. THIS. SO MUCH THIS. The "tap away to deselect the original wrong select so you tap back to fix it" has taken at least a day off my life -- half a day for actual wasted time, and another half a day for frustration causing a slightly premature death...
As an Apple developer and iPhone user since the 3S, these issues are baked into the OS. That you haven't experienced them speaks to your particular usage. Editing and selecting text has been a longstanding problem with improvements and regressions. As another commenter said, it's a huge annoyance.
Try selecting multiple paragraphs on a website, for example. The behavior is generally unpredictable and requires lots of fiddling. Deselecting text requires yet more work. Double-tapping a word should select the word itself, but that's often not the case. And it's not just websites where the DOM adds complexity; the same erroneous behavior exists for native apps.
For example, open an iMessage text and paste one or more images. Now go back and try to edit existing text. Or add new text. Moving the cursor and text selection is non-deterministic and requires scrolling and fiddling, manually adding line breaks, and then removing them just to get the formatting correct.
In other words, as the OP mentioned, text editing has been problematic on iOS/iPadOS for ages. Interestingly, VisionOS, which perhaps has the most challenging input and editing environment, has managed to resolve many of these issues.
While initial VisionOS releases were buggy and nearly unusable, it's rather striking that you can now use your eyes to move and edit text with more precision than what's possible on iOS/iPadOS--which tells you how much room there is for improvement.
> For example, open an iMessage text and paste one or more images.
I never until today thought of pasting images. I always add them using the Photos button, then just write my message as normal.
I see now how moving cursor around rich text with embedded objects is glitchy, and I imagine if you deal with that on daily basis it could be frustrating.
However, none of the other issues you or others described seem to be reproducible on my phone. Double-tap to select, or tap to place cursor, seem to just work in regular plain text areas.
iOS 16 and I've not used a spell checker for years because it kept correcting my swearing & slang to something I didn't want to say. I did read your comment fully. I replied because I had personal experience that contradicted yours. The "it doesn't place the cursor beside the word I want" gets me a couple of times a week for a couple of years.
I thought you like other repliers are having cursor “misbehaving” all the time, since you wrote it misplaces cursor 50% of the time earlier. That is definitely not my experience.
A couple of times per week it happens for me that the cursor chooses to land on the wrong side of white space or such, but that is infrequent enough and easy to fix that it does not bother me.
This behaviour is a mess, IME. iOS makes arbitrary judgements about the word boundary it thinks I'm aiming at and is about 50% wrong. I regularly find words or lines it will refuse to position the cursor into, instead insisting on moving to the line above or below. Line breaks seem to confuse it too. I often have to position the cursor the word before the line break, insert my new text and then reposition to delete the old text.
2) + 3) The rhythm to engage this vs the one to engage selection is completely opaque to me. I still don't know how to engage selection intentionally, successfully. I've owned iPhones since the 3s.