Apple Please Listen - Sort out Text Selection on iOS10

[GadgetBen]

I thought it was just me getting frustrated at how increasingly difficult it is becoming to simply select and copy text on my iPhone 6s.

However, I just googled the topic and plenty of people have been venting their frustration on Reddit about it, so why has it got worse with iOS10? (I'm on iOS10 PB)

It seems since the introduction of force touch, simple highlighting, selection and pinpointing the cursor has become more temperamental.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

Please note: I do not have fat fingers!

 

[Mlrollin91]

Have you submitted feedback to Apple directly? Posting here won't help resolve your issue if you believe its iOS related.

Personally, I do not have issues with copy, paste, cut and text selection on my 6s or Air 2, both running iOS 10. I find the 3D touch 'track pad' feature extremely useful and use it quite often. But, I can use the old-school way of holding the text to get it to highlight without a problem as well.

Now with that said, it does require some patience, if you try to 'rush it' or do it quickly, then it can be temperamental.

 

[Feenician]

I thought it was just me getting frustrated at how increasingly difficult it is becoming to simply select and copy text on my iPhone 6s.

However, I just googled the topic and plenty of people have been venting their frustration on Reddit about it, so why has it got worse with iOS10? (I'm on iOS10 PB)

It seems since the introduction of force touch, simple highlighting, selection and pinpointing the cursor has become more temperamental.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

Please note: I do not have fat fingers!

It's degraded horribly over the years. Sometimes it's literally impossible to select a sentence or paragraph - the selection will either fold down to a word or encompass an entire DIV and there is no amount of finessing that will help it. Said it in another thread; easily my biggest issue with iOS

 

[Floris]

I thought it was just me getting frustrated at how increasingly difficult it is becoming to simply select and copy text on my iPhone 6s.

However, I just googled the topic and plenty of people have been venting their frustration on Reddit about it, so why has it got worse with iOS10? (I'm on iOS10 PB)

It seems since the introduction of force touch, simple highlighting, selection and pinpointing the cursor has become more temperamental.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

Please note: I do not have fat fingers!

The force touch when you are more GRR LETS DO IT, will be a lot more forgiving and works better. Precise operation of just those 2 short words requires Dr House.

It's not balanced well, at all. Once something is selected, just getting it deselected is tedious sometimes. I've reported back through their feedback app on both iPhone and iPad, with screenshots or where it goes wrong and explanations to why. Hopefully it's something more people do.

 

[GfPQqmcRKUvP]

It's degraded horribly over the years. Sometimes it's literally impossible to select a sentence or paragraph - the selection will either fold down to a word or encompass an entire DIV and there is no amount of finessing that will help it. Said it in another thread; easily my biggest issue with iOS

How bout copy and paste? Not sure how a copy funtion that only works ~70% of the time has made it through multiple OS releases...

 

[Feenician]

How bout copy and paste? Not sure how a copy funtion that only works ~70% of the time has made it through multiple OS releases...

Paste works just fine but selecting text successfully on even a moderately complex webpage has been aggravating. What particularly annoys me I think is the unpredicatability of it. Sometimes it works on a given page and sometimes it will singularly refuse to do so. I've given up making more than one post on MR because of it, or just ended up replying to the whole post, rather than trying to quote the part of the post I'm interested in. Copy works fine everywhere else for me.

 

[RiderX]

Actually it is slightly better than it used to. It was a nightmare for some months with ios8 I believe. Now it is acceptable, but never without bugs.

 

[Cougarcat]

Did they fix that bug in safari where if you select down sometimes you can get the page to scroll by itself, and you can't stop it? That's been there since I can remember.

 

[TurboPGT!]

It's degraded horribly over the years. Sometimes it's literally impossible to select a sentence or paragraph - the selection will either fold down to a word or encompass an entire DIV and there is no amount of finessing that will help it. Said it in another thread; easily my biggest issue with iOS

I agree completely. This is one area that has definitely gotten worse than it used to be. It is very hard to select text, and I often run in to these scenarios you describe where I'm selecting whole divs, or nothing at all. It is infuriating.

I am hoping that 3D Touch can be used to improve this, so that the OS can better know what I am trying to select.

 

[GadgetBen]

Have you submitted feedback to Apple directly? Posting here won't help resolve your issue if you believe its iOS related.

Personally, I do not have issues with copy, paste, cut and text selection on my 6s or Air 2, both running iOS 10. I find the 3D touch 'track pad' feature extremely useful and use it quite often. But, I can use the old-school way of holding the text to get it to highlight without a problem as well.

Now with that said, it does require some patience, if you try to 'rush it' or do it quickly, then it can be temperamental.

You're right. I'll submit feedback via the feedback app. Was hoping to drum up enough people to give their opinion on here - you can be sure Apple have eyes and ears everywhere.

 

[Mlrollin91]

You're right. I'll submit feedback via the feedback app. Was hoping to drum up enough people to give their opinion on here - you can be sure Apple have eyes and ears everywhere.

Not really a related topic, but are you also experiencing keyboard problems in Safari with the stock keyboard? When you click the '123' keyboard and then type a number, comma, or question mark, it doesn't go back to 'abc' after hitting the space bar? I noticed you said you have a 6s.

 

[Feenician]

I agree completely. This is one area that has definitely gotten worse than it used to be. It is very hard to select text, and I often run in to these scenarios you describe where I'm selecting whole divs, or nothing at all. It is infuriating.

I am hoping that 3D Touch can be used to improve this, so that the OS can better know what I am trying to select.

Glad I'm not just going crazy!

One thing I'd like to see (as well as this actually being returned to the level of accuracy it used to have) is better support for hardware keyboards in selection outside of text input areas. Keyboard selection works well within text boxes but it'd be good if you could initiate selection in other places, such as web pages, then refine it using shift/option cursor. Since I nearly always have the keyboard attached to iPad it'd solve 99% of my issue.