![]() ![]() 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. But, I can hypothesize a few based on whatever little knowledge I have about Apple as a company. Why did it come to such a state? As an outsider, I don’t know the exact reasons for this stagnation. A user had to switch to a separate emoji keyboard every time she had wanted to use one. ![]() Before iOS13, if you had other third-party keyboards installed, using emojis was a painful experience.There is no access to any drawing tools.It was launched in 2019 on iOS13 - more than five years since Google launched it on Android. It took a long time to launch swipe typing.Prediction (outside of the English language) is horrible.I don’t have stickers or gifs to choose from (I can now use Animoji and Memojis outside of iMessage starting iOS13, though).But, here are some of my main gripes with it: I still love the simplicity of the native keyboard. It now supports a lot more languages, is faster, and supports swipe typing, auto-suggestions/auto-correct & emojis. However, the iOS native keyboard hasn’t evolved a lot with the changing times. He doesn’t use laptops and tablets anymore)Īs 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. (I mentioned Jack Dorsey because he runs both companies only through his smartphone. 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. No other technology has come even close to such a level of adoption and become so much intertwined with every aspect of human lives. More than 3 billion people now have smartphones in their hands. However, a lot has changed 13 years since the launch. And Apple excelled in those areas and has improved even further. Second, there should be very low latency between the time a user taps the letter, and it appears on the screen. 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. In those early days of the smartphone era, the expectations from a virtual keyboard weren’t very high. 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. 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. I’d highly recommend it if you want to have an up-and-close look into Apple’s Product Development Process. 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. It wasn’t surprising then that pre-iPhone launch, the virtual keyboard didn’t get adoption to go mainstream. In comparison, resistive touch was jerky and medieval. The capacitive touch technology provided a fluid experience that felt magical. The first iPhone launch in 2007 with a capacitive touchscreen brought the virtual keyboard mainstream. 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. 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. I started taking notes about this post before Apple announced iOS13 earlier this year.
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