Text - ios 17 & 17.01 upgrades - cursor jumps around

I have been reporting this bug to Apple since August 29th using the Apple Feedback App.

Here’s the bug ID and title

FB13082449 (Can’t place text cursor is long iMessage)

Please add to my post or post your own.

This issue is driving me insane. It’s 100% reproducible . I’m on an iPhone 11 Pro Max. My partner is on an iPhone 14 Pro. She just updated to ios 17 and now she’s getting the bug.

I’m so surprised that there’s not been more reports of this because it basically makes iMessage useless when it happens.

I now have to type long texts in notes and paste into iMessage.

Thanks,

Mike

I was having a terrible time aligning the cursor in the Wordle tool of The Free Dictionary by Farlex.

Today’s release of iOS 17.1 fixes the cursor alignment-jumping issue about 90% of the time. It’s not perfect, but neither is it uber frustrating like it was before iOS 17.1.

It’s still not as intuitive and precise as it was before iOS 17.0 (when everything seemed to work as expected.) But it’s much, much better.

Even now… with iOS 17.1… if I align the cursor dead center between letters (where I want the cursor to land), the cursor still often moves way to the right… usually after the end of the target word.

But a slight change in how I place the cursor makes placement more controllable and workable. (This may be an issue with just the Wordle tool. I see better results in other applications.)

In the Wordle tool, I get the best results by moving the cursor from right to left, and aligning it jusssst right-of-center of the letter after which I want to place the cursor. For example, placing the cursor just right-of-center of “A” in the word “BLAST” will now almost always result in the cursor being placed between the “A” and “S”. Before iOS 17.1, the cursor would almost always jump to just after the “T”. It was so frustrating that I frequently just gave up and retyped the word from scratch, including whatever changes I wanted to add.

It’s much better now. Thank you Apple.

Finally some good news to report. The issue is much better in iOS 17.2 you can place the cursor anywhere in a long message. The only remaining issue that I see is you can’t touch and drag on the blue dot grab handle and extend either above or below the visible area on the screen, you can accomplish this in steps by selecting a block of text in the visible area, and then dragging to expose more text, and then you can continue selecting, so it takes several steps, but it does work.

But, once again, the big issue seems resolved!

Turn the onscreen keyboard into a trackpad

You can turn the onscreen keyboard into a trackpad to easily move and place the insertion point.

1. Touch and hold the Space bar with one finger until the keyboard turns light gray.
2. To move the insertion point, slide your finger around the keyboard.
3. To select text, touch and hold the keyboard with a second finger, then adjust the selection by moving the first finger around the keyboard.

Google gboard for iPhone seems to work much better. Was easily able to edit texts. Seems like a fix to me

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gboard-the-google-keyboard/id1091700242

17.1.1 has sort of resolved the issue for me. I now can place the cursor anywhere by scrolling up and then touching the screen. The cursor will be placed, BUT it won’t be blinking. So I would have to start typing something in order for the cursor to appear. The good news is that I can now scroll up from the bottom of the text to anywhere up and then the cursor would remain showing. So that would be an alternative to placing the cursor by touch.

It's a real bother. So what I do when that happens is I switch to the scroll method which you must all know: holding down the space bar until the keyboard disappears. Then I scroll like on a trackpad. Otherwise it is is really frustrating since when placing the cursor at a spot, not only might it not go there, but when it does a whole word gets highlighted.

This issue has been made somewhat better with iOS 17.1.2. But it is still an issue.

The cursor seems to be placed more predictably if you hold it over the location you want to place it for a few seconds; then release it. Doing this seems to make the cursor more likely to stay in that desired location. But… not always.

It still seems to help if you place the cursor just slightly right-of-center of the letter before the desired location.

And for whatever reason, it also seems to work better if you are dragging the cursor from the end of a word located to the right of your desired cursor location. I don’t know why, but it seems less predictable if moving the cursor from the left of the desired location.

Whenever the cursor highlights the whole word (instead of moves between words or letters) just tap the spacebar. Once cursor is between any letters/words, hold spacebar down and drag cursor left or right (like a touchpad on a PC)… Hope this helps!

I did a hard reset. So far so good.

Press and release volume up

Press and release volume down

Press and hold right side button until the Apple logo appears.

Just long press the spacebar and move your finger around to place curser wherever you want 😊

I’ve been reporting this issue to Apple for almost 3 months.

The Status on my Feedback report now says:

“Recent Similar Reports:More than 10

Resolution:Potential fix identified - For a future OS update”

At least we know it’s in the works…

The latest update 17.1 of today has resolved the issue for me.

Yes, this fixes the problem... but the problem still exists and it's very time consuming to have to fix it this way. The cursor should simply go where you tap: every sane touchscreen device behaves this way. Having to follow up the tap with a hold-and-slide on the spacebar is an irritating waste of time that isn't necessary on Android phones.

By accident, I found that it will let me put the cursor at the end of the line where I want to make a change, then I hit return, and then it’ll let me move the cursor where I want it. Don’t know why, but give it a shot!