Missing Magnifying Glass in iPhone text editing.

The larger line isn't nearly as useful as the magnifying bubble, since my finger is covering the text I'm trying to edit so I still can't see where the cursor is located. Please bring back the bubble! It was my favorite feature when I switched over from Android earlier this year.

Thank you rbrylawski for posting the feedback information. I have given apple feedback to hopefully notify them in a positive way that it would be beneficial if they brought the bubble back (and also some changes to Find My Friends, which we use for business purposes, need tweaking). Hopefully more people will give feedback and maybe we will see some good results....

Apple please return the magnifying glass. I too hate not being able to insert into the middle of a word to edit it. I really miss this attribute and it is a terrible shame to have no choice in the matter. Please restore the function!!!

Once you click the text area, if you continue to gently press, you can move your finger anywhere on your screen, and you will be able to see exactly where you drop the cursor. Nothing blocking it at all. It's actually easier than the magnifying glass.

No. Especially if you are selecting from small readonly text (e.g. webpage) it is nearly impossibile to correctly set the bounds of selection, at least without skewing your phone to see what's under your finger

@teejay87, I've since learned you can press and hold the space bar, and that lets you move the cursor around like a trackpad. Better, but still crap compared to the intuitive magnifying glass from before. See link above in a previous post to feed back directly to Apple.

I use the "keyboard-trackpad" a lot.

With 3D Touch, you can also press a little more to begin a selection and re-press to end it.

The problem is mainly for non-input text, e.g. text in webpage, where you don't have a keyboard.

I have been SUPER frustrated about the missing magnifying glass & not being able to see where I was under my thumb, but played with it after reading some of these post & discover thee trick!

Hold your thumb/finger down to magnify the cursor then slide around without lifting off the screen. Once you start moving, the cursor rests above your thumb/finger so that you can see where you are. You can see the larger cursor clearly & just lift your thumb/finger when it’s placed where you want it. I actually now think this works better than the magnifying glass!

That's why I came here. With the size of my thumbs I simply cannot find ANYTHING anymore and I hope they fix this ASAP. They are really trying to lose customer as fast as they lose stock value with dumb decisions like this.

I thought the function was gone too but it’s not! Instead of pressing and holding onto the word that you want to edit, press and hold on the line that exists at the end of each word we type. The vertical blue line. It will then enlarge and you can drag it to anywhere in your text that you want to edit. The enlarged line is quite big so your thumb won’t be covering the word/letter you want to edit. Hope this helps!

I was also struggling without the original magnifier but after reading the post by SravanKrA I personally find the new method quite simple and consider this equally good when texting.

The only problem really is the frustration of dealing with the consequences of numerous software changes and this is applicable to all systems where you finding ‘improvements’ are implemented without any simple way of explaining things to the millions of users. (In the case of the magnifier, I guess it has taken me a month to find this discussion.)

Big thank you to SravanKrA

I actually had someone show me how to use the trackpad version and it works ok (so yes I am not as up in arms as I was) but I still think the bubble was better.

if you hold and continue to hold the space bar without lifting off of it it turns into a track pad. The trick is not to lift your finger/thumb after engaging the trackpad till you are done moving the cursor where you want it.

Hope this helps others as I was having a huge problem with it.

Am so fed up with Apple ruining things that worked just fine. Removing the text magnifying glass is a HUGE mistake, but there are lots of other things too. OS 13 is a nightmare. Once this phone has died I’m moving over to the other side ...

@Leo Breuss, ummmmm, no, the long thin line you move around is NOT called a cursor. A cursor is what's immediately after what you are typing or inline in the text. The long thin line is an INDICATION of where the cursor will end up when you let go.

As far as personal workflow and productivity goes, it's a big step backwards from the simple magnifying glass that easily let you position where you wanted the cursor to end up.

Only one finger or thumb is necessary. Also one step that people were missing when explaining this process is don’t remove that finger once the 3D Touch kicks in or it turns off. Just touch (harder than usual to activate it) and hold then move that same finger or thumb to move the cursor!