Text - ios 17 & 17.01 upgrades - cursor jumps around

When I touch screen to relocate the cursor in the middle of text, it relocates itself to the bottom of the entry.


I relocate it again and touch longer, it jumps to another part of the text.


It takes me at least 4 times just to get the cursor to stay where I touch!


Earlier versions didn’t relocate the cursor like this.


Very time consuming & I try not to edit..

iPhone 11, iOS 17

Posted on Sep 24, 2023 1:18 PM

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Posted on Oct 12, 2023 10:17 PM

Same here. Cursor acting very weird since iOS 17 upgrade. Placement is random; it would select entire words while I just want it to placed in the middle for instance.

It’s a real nightmare; Apple needs to fix this asap!

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62 replies

Oct 26, 2023 10:42 PM in response to Jubilee2005

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.

Oct 27, 2023 1:45 PM in response to Jubilee2005

The fact that this has existed since before the new iPhone launch, and even afterwards, and through every single update since is ridiculous. Every single Apple device on the planet has this issue, even the devs, and they haven’t fixed it … that is how NON-customer-centric APPLE has become.


As of today, in this very moment, nothing has changed.

Oct 30, 2023 1:08 PM in response to mbork

Glad to hear this. The issue isn’t as bad for me since the update but I’m still experiencing the problem intermittently. Random cursor placements happen on long messages but I am now getting it closer to where I want to make a change. Regardless… it’s absolutely maddening. Making me miss iOS 16!

Nov 7, 2023 9:12 PM in response to Jubilee2005

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.

Nov 19, 2023 9:33 AM in response to 99Luftballon

Thanks 99luftballon for your post.


You are correct that you can now place the cursor in a long text by scrolling up and then touching where you want to start editing. What is still super annoying is that as soon as you touch the text scrolls to the bottom of the message so it appears like it’s still the same issue. However, as you reported, as soon as you start typing it does scroll to and add the new text where you touched to insert. Thank you!


But…. This is still a terrible user experience and you still can’t touch and drag to select a block of text in long messages.

Nov 22, 2023 4:54 AM in response to Jubilee2005

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.

Nov 30, 2023 11:37 PM in response to Jubilee2005

WTF???

Has Apple even replied to this inquiry??

I see I am not the only one with this issue. Which is just one of many typing text issues since updating to iOS 17.

****, just typing this meagre message has been triple time consuming, due to issues with:

keyboard, cursor movement, keyboard accuracy / sensitivity, spelling/vocabulary/grammer, etc…


Steve Jobs would be overwhelmingly proud at the Luring, entrapping, spyware, which his vision and company has been replaced with.

haha.

Dec 6, 2023 8:32 PM in response to beezap

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!

Dec 6, 2023 9:08 PM in response to beezap

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.

Jan 4, 2024 1:39 PM in response to Jubilee2005

Regarding iOS update from September, and not being able to reset your cursor in text messages… If you press your finger into the spacebar without success, I have found that it just may correct this problem if you literally slide your finger over the text WITHOUT pressing on the spacebar, I have surprisingly actually been able to reset the cursor successfully several times now without pressing on the spacebar! I messed around and discovered this by accident. Until I do it again it’s very difficult to describe exactly what I did. I think when I found the spot, I wanted the cursor to be. I pressed my finger down, and it may have just moved the cursor to that spot. We all know that it does NOT work when you press the space bar down and slide your finger across the text while you are pressing on the spacebar.

Jan 6, 2024 10:28 AM in response to Jubilee2005

Since uprgading to ios17 I've had this problem and I simply cannot understand why Apple have not sorted it out and corrected it with the ios updates!?

I wish I had never upgraded.

It's so difficult to type correctly/insert the cursor to correct typing and then it highlights a word which is not what I wanted - and even worse - it highlights & wants to amend my CORRECTLY SPELT WORD to one that is NOT SPELT CORRECTLY!!

What on earth is going on at Apple?

Its now so hard to type text correctly.

I've tried changing the various settings in Keyboard but nothing seems to resolve these issues.

If things like this are allowed to continue as they have then Apple will lose a lot of trust and followers.

FGS please sort this out Apple! 🙏🙏

Text - ios 17 & 17.01 upgrades - cursor jumps around

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