Autocorrect is one of the most common complaints I see about the iPhone. Whether it's professional reviewers or normal users, there seems to be a consensus that the stock Android keyboard and autocorrect have now surpassed their iOS counterparts.
I'm not sure what your friends were doing or which phones they had, but as others have said, Android at least offers you the ability to switch keyboards if the stock keyboard doesn't fit your personal typing style. If the stock iOS keyboard doesn't work for you, tough luck. No keyboard will work for 100% of the population, so the ability to customize it is a clear winner in this situation.
I am an Android user, and I complain about the autocorrect (and keyboard) frequently. Maybe the iPhone would be the same for me, but others appear to breeze through typing on the iPhone, while I encounter a constant stream of backing up to fix typos, etc.
And regarding third party keyboards, how about Google do a good keyboard that doesn't require installing a third party app? Is that too much to ask? It seems like an important enough feature to do right instead of abdicating responsibility to others.
Which phone are you using? I have a Nexus with the stock 4.1 (Jelly Bean) keyboard and it corrects everything as expected -- proximity errors, misspellings, contractions, hyphenation, capitalization, etc.
Android also shows you a list of potential matches for what you typed, and you can add new words to the dictionary on the fly just by selecting the word you've entered from the list. Not to mention it only takes a single backspace to undo a bad autocorrect on Android.
> And regarding third party keyboards, how about Google do a good keyboard that doesn't require installing a third party app? It seems like an important enough feature to do right instead of abdicating responsibility to others.
No keyboard will please 100% of smartphone users. The only way to make everyone happy is to let them pick the keyboard that suits them best.
I have a S3 and have all kinds of auto-correct issues I didn't ever have on my iPhone4. For example, it will auto-correct numbers. I will input something like 5 and it will default autocorrect to a phonenumber e.g. 5605432760 that begins with a 5.
Just the other day I tried to type in "damn" and it was constantly auto-corrected to "Damon". Never had anything like this happen on iOS.
I'm not sure what your friends were doing or which phones they had, but as others have said, Android at least offers you the ability to switch keyboards if the stock keyboard doesn't fit your personal typing style. If the stock iOS keyboard doesn't work for you, tough luck. No keyboard will work for 100% of the population, so the ability to customize it is a clear winner in this situation.