Special character selection on ios26 keyboard

When you touch-and-hold a key to expose the alternative/secondary characters, slide your finger to the character that you wish to select.

This functionality may become a little more obvious with some other keys - such as "e" - where you have many other alternatives from which to select:

For keys that have multiple alternative characters (such as the example "e"), you have always needed to slide to the chosen character. Arguably, the keyboard is now consistent in its behaviour across all keys for selection of alternative characters - regardless of having one or multiple alternatives.

For single character alternates, the downward flick remains available.

There are third-party keyboard Apps that provide alternative key layouts for iPad and iPhone. On of the more popular, well liked within these forums, is Typefinity. Here is a direct link to the Apple App Store:

https://apps.apple.com/app/typefinity/id1512009869

For the leftmost and rightmost characters, the behavior indeed changed. The hit area was significantly reduced, and now you must target the symbol exactly instead of just moving your finger to the right. The same applies to the top direction. Alternate characters now require a much tighter finger position, which makes the default Apple iOS keyboard unusable on normal iPhones. @LotusPilot screenshot is from an iPad, so it might not be that painful there, but on iPhone that's what is happening.

On the screenshot below, blue is the previous hit area, red is the new one (approx.)

You can let Apple know you would like this changed via

http://www.apple.com/feedback

Include a link to this discussion so they can see your helpful image.