@cassidy @scottjenson Having jailbroken iOS since iOS 5-ish days, SwipeSelection habits are just ingrained in me, and in recent years the 3D Touch and iPadOS versions, but IMO that only solves 1 part of the issue which is cursor placement. On Android I specifically choose third party keyboards that have SwipeSelection built in, like FlorisBoard.

If I want to select text, I still find that I stumble on the iOS “selecting on the text area” sometimes (I double tap the start or end word and start dragging immediately), it’s either my fat finger, I’m too quick in my actions for the OS to respond in time, or iOS itself incorrectly selected text. But I’d say 70-80% of the time it’s alright. Using the iPadOS 2 finger on-keyboard cursor to select text, as well as Android (GrapheneOS) in general, just a massive headache to select text with.

IMO iPadOS does well in the text actions regard, the onscreen keyboard has the undo/redo and paste actions in normal mode, and switches to cut, copy, paste in text selected mode (visual mode? LOL). I just wish it had a “Select All” button too.

The other annoyance is deleting text on both platforms. Whole word deletions with OS native solutions are inefficient in terms of both speed and finger movement required. The most optimal solution I’ve used is Nintype (third party keyboard) on a hardware 3D Touch compatible iPhone, as I can have a normal per-letter backspace on tap, swipe from backspace to fast backspace with pretty precise stopping (this was also a SwipeSelection feature), and 3D Touch backspace to delete a whole word under or just before the cursor. This is the fastest combo of deleting text I’ve used, and I’m pretty happy with it.

Unfortunately, that (and the whole of my Nintype setup for efficient iPhone typing) relies on the hardware 3D Touch (so no new iPhones or any Androids, I’m still on iPhone X), and on Nintype, which 1. hasn’t been updated in years and it’s a lucky gamble that it still mostly works on iOS 16, 2. is buggy and not working well on Android 13 (GrapheneOS) for me to begin with, 3. doesn’t work that well on iPad since it doesn’t have a tablet layout.

On iPadOS, I suck it up with the finger travel and use the “selecting on the text area” then backspace to delete, like I said above it’s mostly reliable. On Android, I either use the swipe from backspace with FlorisBoard, or I suck it up with the bad selecting and then delete while feeling annoyed. I’m guessing this will be the same if and when I upgrade my iPhone to one without hardware 3D Touch.

@scottjenson If you haven’t looked at Nintype with a hardware 3D Touch iPhone yet as part of your study/assessment, I’d recommend trying it out… until I realize as I’m typing that it’s no longer available for purchase on the App Store and only available for redownload for users who already have it. Well, if you ever get the opportunity to, I’d go for it. Could be some valuable lessons there, it does a lot of things.

@cassidy @scottjenson in nemo we had a thinkpad-style trackpad that moved the cursor. Windows Phone also added this later (I like to think they copied our idea, although unlikely)

http://web.archive.org/web/20160406191430/http://play.qwazix.com/grog/?p=626