It was much better when you could get phones with physical keyboards. Only recently has swipe on android gotten to the accuracy of typing on a physical phone keyboard, but not the accuracy.
But, that was lost because of the iphonification of the whole smart phone sector.
There was a near-perfect solution on Android for years: Swype.
Why the people that bought it buried it, I can never understand. It was so much better - even ten years ago - than modern swiping keyboards. It even had a layout that was just for editing.
swype was so damn good and nothing comes even close. too bad it got killed off.
windows phone keyboard was good too. the key "hitbox" would grow or shrink based on predictive text and typing speed, so if you're writing something from the dictionary you could just slap the rough area of the button and it would register the most likely one. You'd feel it though when typing in something from outside the dictionary, suddenly it felt like you forgot how to type. Once you slowed your typing down it returned to behaving like a standard keyboard.
Also, it had a little trackpoint-type nub on the virtual keyboard which you could drag for moving the cursor. It was significantly more accurate than anything else in any mobile OS.
Apple lets you do this, too, but it's really not better than Swype's method. The Gboard/Apple method resembles the description in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy about radios that could be tuned by pointing - "[it] meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme." Take your finger off the screen too roughly and you get a last little bit of motion.
That's not necessarily an everyone problem, but for all the people who complain about how big phones are and how they would like a smaller one, I have big hands and find an iPhone Pro Max to be a comfortable one-handed fit (I also found the OG Xbox "Duke" controller quite comfortable).
On Swype, you could click over two spaces to the right, or left, or up, and konw that it wouldn't move.
Did I mention the Swype key? Swype-A, Z, X, C, V worked exactly like you expected from computers. Swype-space did something, maybe bring up the edit board? Capitalize a word by going up above the keyboard before finishing the word, and double a letter (as vs ass, for example) by squiggling around on it before moving on to the next letter.
It had one fault for most of its life: the word "me", which is very common especially in text messaging, was frequently interpreted as "nee", which given that I'm not a wedding planner doesn't come up often. And yet even that was better than the horrendous Apple swipe misread that gives me "Abbas" when I mean "and". The only Abbas I know is the Palestinian politician, and he's not in my contact list. And I don't ever write about him except to complain that Apple just keeps doing this substitution.
> It was so much better - even ten years ago - than modern swiping keyboards.
Unless it learned too much about you. I found that regularly clearing all data from it improved swiping accuracy… It’s just like with all automated personalization, it doesn’t work.
But, that was lost because of the iphonification of the whole smart phone sector.