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bad ui ux

Why's there no automatic keyboard language switch on iOS?

I like autocorrection and completion on my iPhone. It helps me type way faster with way less typing errors. I’m missing a feature that would probably improve typing even more. It happens quite often that I switch between the german and english keyboard on iOS. I message in german and write technical notes in english, my todos are a mix of boths. Writing a todo in german with a english word in it, such as function, results in an word correction by iOS. This is not what I want. I want to use english words within a german sentence. I do not want to switch to the english keyboard just for the word function and then switch back to german. Especially, when the keyboard switch is quite slow1. There should be an option to prevent auto correction for words in the languages that you have activated as keyboards.

I would even further extend this and implement an automatic language switch when the os detects that I write in a different language. Similar how all these text programs are doing it. From a UX perspective I’d expect it like this:

  1. Type english words while the german keyboard is activated
  2. The autocorrection corrects my english words to german words
  3. The os detects that I write in english after I typed a few words
  4. The os automatically switches to the english keyboard
  5. The os prompts me to revert its autocorrection for the last few words that I wrote. This way, I could ignore the autocorrection in the beginning and continue typing until the os detects that I write in a different language and automatically reverts its applied word correction.

If there are situations in which the switch is not useful, step 4. could be replaced as follows:

  1. The os prompts me that it detected that I write in a different language and asks if I want to switch language and undo the autocorrection.

I believe this a quite reasonable and important UX improvement. Maybe somthing like this exists already with other keyboards from the App Store or on Android.


  1. Thankfully, there was a bug fix for that to faster switch between keyboard. A while ago it took at least 1 second for the keyboard language switch to complete. ↩︎