iOS glitch makes using the iPhone's keyboard a nightmare
Apple Messages is one of the iPhone's killer apps, streamlining text messages and making the iPhone almost impossible to abandon — but texting is infuriating if all the letters don't actually work.
We became privy to a new iPhone keyboard glitch after a few Mashable staffers recently started having issues with their iPhone keyboards, specifically with vowels. The issue started when iOS 11's predictive text feature began to display an odd character in the place of the letter "I," offering up "A[?] instead and autocorrecting within the message field. The people were running iOS 11.0.3 and 11.1, using iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus devices.
The bug was also covered by MacRumors, but it appears that my colleagues have even more issues than just the letter "I."
One reported that they were also seeing the glitch with the letters "U" and "O" as well, making the problem strictly restricted to vowels. They also said the letters showed up oddly in iMessage on Mac devices, and shared some more screenshots of what the glitch looks like when they went through with sending a message.
The glitch wasn't just limited to iMessage, however. My colleagues shared screenshots of their increasingly futile attempts to type out messages on Facebook Messenger...
... and Twitter.
MacRumors reported that the glitch can be bypassed by using third-party keyboards or turning off the predictive text feature in the iPhone's keyboard settings, but we didn't get the same result when we tested the solutions here at Mashable HQ. The glitch persists.
We reached out to Apple to get to the bottom of the keyboard issues, but haven't heard back. Until the bug is patched, my colleagues and all of their friends will have to communicate without vowels.
Brett Williams is a Tech Reporter at Mashable. He writes about tech news, trends and other tangentially related topics with a particular interest in wearables and exercise tech. Prior to Mashable, he wrote for Inked Magazine and Thrillist. Brett's work has also appeared on Fusion and AskMen, to name a few. You can follow Brett on Twitter @bdwilliams910.
