no more "phonetic" Russian keyboard in ios8

Are you talking about using a bluetooth hardware keyboard?

The screen keyboard provided by Apple for iOS has never been anything other than Russian. Russian PC and Russian Phonetic options were only available if you were using a hardware keyboard.

Sabauda wrote:

I use the phonetic keyboard regularly.

Perhaps you mean the Bulgarian screen keyboard? That one, unlike the one for Russian, is phonetic.

Sabauda wrote:

If you click "Russian" in the keyboard options in an older ios, you will see 3 options for Russian - "Russian", "Russian -PC" and "Russian phonetic"

But don't you also see that those three options are under a heading called HARDWARE? That means that these options are only available when you are using a bluetooth keyboard. Under the top heading, called Software I think, there is only one option: Russian. That is what is available when you are using the screen keyboard.

If you look at the screen keyboard on your old 4S, isn't the second row of keys фыва? For Russian Phonetic it would be асдф.

It is still true that Apple seems to have eliminated the Russian Phonetic keyboard -- in iOS 8 there is no longer any HARDWARE category. So what happens to someone who is using a bluetooth keyboard and wants to type Russian Phonetic? I don't know. Nobody seems to have complained about it yet....

Sabauda wrote:

I am thick headed

No, Apple is thick headed for not including a Russian Phonetic screen keyboard, which I am sure many users have requested for years now. Especially when they have done so for the relatively marginal Bulgarian...

Good news — I just made one! Translit Keyboard is a custom keyboard that lets you type phonetically in a number of languages, including Russian. Bonus: letters that don't map to a single character, such as sh/ш, work just as well. (It's two bucks, but I hope that isn't egregious for functionality that has been missing for so many years.)

<I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.>

Just made another keyboard, this one with the straight Russian phonetic layout: https://appsto.re/us/ZoT33.i

I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

<Edited by Host>

Archagon,

Thanks a lot for the keyboard, it's great for those of us who haven't mastered the native Russian keyboard's layout. But there is one big problem that I think you should know about: the "x" isn't properly recognized as a Cyrillic character. So you end up not being able to find words like "ходить" or "сахар" in RU-EN dictionary apps. Even Google returns "Did you mean 'сахар' instead of 'сахар'?"

I've never had an iAnything before, and your app has been an indispensable asset for taking advantage of the many resources available to learners of Russian...unless the word contains an "x," that is.

Thanks again!