YHK - yet another hacker news clone

To clarify, you can type these out, but you need to manually do it. If you try to use swipe typing, it won't work if it's in the blacklist.

Anybody who’s ever used it has known this for years.

Skip the article.

Swipeblocked: The phrases your iPhone won't suggest

https://swipeblocked.com/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50394070

How the hell can they defend banning “Trayvon Martin” of all things. Are they now the arbiters responsible for quashing social movements?

This is an _insane_ lever for censorship. Does Israel pay them to omit “the occupied territories”? Is that internal Apple policy irrespective of nation state pressure?

It's not just madness that these exist, but that they are hidden, unexposed to the user, and have no justification or rationale.

> Apple’s iPhone will not autocomplete references to drugs, sexual acts and, perhaps in the spirit of corporate protection, “iMessage isn’t working”.

I suppose ditching Apple is "two birds with one stone" :)

Direct link to project and discussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50394070

When you ask me, thats a kind of good. When I see how people use autocorrect and autocomplete without thinking, I wouldn't wonder when someone is put into jail because a sentence that he never planned to type but send it without knowing because autocorrect has changed it. This feature protects people that mindlessly use autocorrect/complete from jail, bad discussions with their employer or political correct 'friends'.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg for the iOS Keyboard's issues. They've tried to fix it multiple times, and while it is undeniably better than its lowest point - it is still staggeringly worse than Google's native offering on the Pixel range. Swiping is just so painful, and Microsoft's Swiftkey keyboard is on life support.

Considering arguably the keyboard itself is one of the most common "touch surfaces" on iOS, the level of neglect and level of overall quality is staggering. There's some serious incentive problems at Apple if nobody is tasked with making one of the best digital keyboards in the world.

PS - Whoever came up with the concept, on swipe-style touch keyboards, of the "Tap Map"/Heatmap wherein keys visible location doesn't match their touch area - so that BY DESIGN it always provides an inconsistent user experience needs to be fired into the sun. You literally cannot disable it on most mobile keyboards. It is on iOS's native keyboard AND Microsoft's Swiftkey.

Do you enjoy the feeling of a stranger's fingers poking around in your brain? I sure don't. So don't buy Apple products.

For every trick you catch them at there are a thousand you didn't

Any company that is concerned about their PR image has to do some filtering of this sort, otherwise they get hit pieces like [1][2] though in both cases, it was (aggregate) human behaviour that was beneath said issue.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/google-autocomplete-vile-suggest...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)

I hate the way Apple thinks we want to type "ducking".

This seems entirely reasonable to me. And to people complaining that this is censorship, it is absolutely not. You can still type these words just fine, it's just not going to interpret swipes that are inherently probabilistic and often ambiguous as potentially risky terms.

This seems like a feature, because I swipe all the time and send messages without realizing I got a word wrong, especially because the word it chooses is usually with the same first letter and approximately same length.

All this is doing is avoiding high-risk words and terms, and making you type them out letter by letter to ensure you aren't sending an accidentally sexual/swear/political message to your Mom/boss/colleague.

This would be problematic and censorship if it were preventing you from typing the phrases at all. It's clearly a helpful feature, however, to prevent you from accidentally typing risky phrases when using something as error-prone as swipe typing.

Not jumping to something controversial when doing predictive text isn't censorship. You can still type any of these things. When I swing my finger around wildly it's making a best guess; not jumping to a phrase that makes me look bad or get arrested (in some countries) isn't an awful design choice.

funny to think about the guy who thinks his keyboard is broken because he uses so many slurs day to day. the volume of words seems a touch excessive

Reminds me of "System Update" in https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/16/letters-from-t... (on invisible updating of Apple’s macOS dictionary)

> Santa isn’t real

Well I just swyped it into this comment, and double checked in iMessage, although hilariously, it types “isn’t” correctly, but then when I type “real” it “corrects” it by removing the apostrophe.

and all I wanted to do was make a bad joke about how I’m thankful Apple won’t let me ruin my five-year-old’s dreams by sending her an accidental soul crushing text.

On a real note, though, if they could just find a way to fix the issue where every time I type an “i” to say “I“ it instead types an “o” all by itself like I’m some kind of 17th century bard, and then anytime I want to type “a“ as an indefinite article, it will type a single “s” by itself, which almost never makes any grammatical sense in the English language unless you’re talking about the letter “s” itself.

Related:

Apple's predictive text restrictions include 'Dictator Trump' and 'Sleepy Joe'

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50391486

I dumped Apple's word list

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50357782