Popular 'Gboard' Keyboard App Has Had a Broken Spell Checker For Months 54
The popular Gboard keyboard app for iOS and Android devices has a fundamental flaw. According Reddit user SurroundedByMachines, the red underline has stopped appearing for incorrectly spelled words since November of last year -- and it doesn't appear to be limited to any one device. Issues with the spell checker have been reported on multiple devices across Android and iOS. A simple Google search brings up several different threads where people have reported issues with the feature.
What's more is that nobody at Google seems to get the memo. The Reddit user who first brought this to our attention filed several bug reports, left a review, and joined the beta channel to leave feedback there, yet no response was given. "Many people have been having the issue, and it's even been escalated to the community manager," writes SurroundedByMachines. Since the app has over 500 million downloads on the Play Store alone, this issue could be frustrating a lot of users, especially those who use their phones to send work emails or write documents. Have you noticed Gboard's broken spell checker on your device? If so, you may want to look into another third-party keyboard, such as SwiftKey or Cheetah Keyboard.
What's more is that nobody at Google seems to get the memo. The Reddit user who first brought this to our attention filed several bug reports, left a review, and joined the beta channel to leave feedback there, yet no response was given. "Many people have been having the issue, and it's even been escalated to the community manager," writes SurroundedByMachines. Since the app has over 500 million downloads on the Play Store alone, this issue could be frustrating a lot of users, especially those who use their phones to send work emails or write documents. Have you noticed Gboard's broken spell checker on your device? If so, you may want to look into another third-party keyboard, such as SwiftKey or Cheetah Keyboard.
Hoo kneeds spel chek neway? (Score:2)
U shud not kneed sell chek neway. Y can't U spel righte withut it? I kan.
Abandonware (Score:5, Funny)
An abandoned Google software? No way!
Re: (Score:2)
I which I had moding point for you.
This is too much true, Google doesn't suport any software outside it's chrome web browser because it'S the one whom give them advertising revenu and socio-ecnomic information on people....and I write that from my google chrome browser...
Re: (Score:2)
Not just an abandoned Google project, but an abandoned Google project followed by a Slashvertisement article on replacements. Whaaaaaaa? Am I in an alternate reality or something?
Re: (Score:2)
Not just an abandoned Google project
Well since there was over 20 releases in the past 4 months some may say not an abandoned project at all.
https://www.apkmirror.com/uplo... [apkmirror.com]
Re: (Score:2)
The way Google handles bug reports and feature requests is the worst aspect of their apps. You never get feedback, let alone actual engineers. It feels like screaming into the void.
Sometimes they listen but it takes years. They removed the "just drive" feature from Maps, and then after a massive outcry and no feedback a few years later it came back.
Re: (Score:3)
An abandoned Google software? No way!
From the Google Play store:
"Update May 17, 2018"
Don't confuse Google's non-existent customer support with it's non-existent product lifecycle process.
Re: This is why (Score:2)
What do you think this is, Soylent News? Went on ancient Slashcode here. They even backed out the mobile cookie fix when they moved data centers, so we're on even older Slashcode with the new owners.
This story is absolutely false (Score:4, Funny)
Google is too busy (Score:5, Informative)
Google is too busy doing evil to care about spelling.
Re: (Score:1)
So what? Users should see their own spelling mistakes, they don't need an app to do this for them.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly. "Live" spellchecking - wiggly underlines or whatever -- is only a distraction and serves no good purpose whatsoever. Best thing to do is turn it off in every app that has it. I hate it worse than I hate Clippy.
Re: (Score:2)
Why would GBoard be able to spell, hell it can't even do the alphabet, the ABCs, even when they are owned by Alphabet, Google permanent beta it's now a feature, 'er', no it's not Google it is starting to look real amateur hour. Google single true focus, advertising, and that is of questionable worth, google having diluted it to futility, ads drowning under ads.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Yup. Android is fucking shit through and through.
Re:You should have supported other ecosystems (Score:4, Insightful)
you kept with the green robot and now you see the consequences of duopoly.
Who is that "you"? And what should those guilty people have done instead? Specifically buy a product with a tiny market share for the purpose of supporting a collectively diverse phone ecosystem? And how would they have coordinated their buying decisions to make sure not to create any kind of duopoly?
See, you're just blaming a large vague group of people while really all we're seeing is market forces. Numbers show that as the mobile market grows, a vast majority of people prefer higher quality and more cost-effective devices, while a somewhat steady group of loyal brand lovers prefer a unified if a bit stiffled ecosystem that comes with a higher price tag and less advanced devices. There's nothing of significance in between because there's no offering that is more valuable or attractive than the main two.
There could have been a viable third option (Windows phone), and anyone who has owned one will tell you that the metro tiles and the overall experience was great on mobile devices. But once again Microsoft squandered that opportunity by failing to provide an attractive and convenient platform for developers. You can't really blame customers for that.
Ah, Google (Score:5, Interesting)
Google lost any sense of reality about 6-8 years ago: there's no way to report bugs in their apps or phones (they are completely ignored), there's no way to get in touch with their dev team, there's no official forum which is frequented by Google employees, and no support of any kind.
It would be great if they had a resemblance of bug tracker in Google Play where people could vote for bugs or propose/vote fot features but I guess Google just don't want this kind of publicity because they "know" better what their users want and secondly, their development practices and the real attitude towards their audience will become apparent.
Every time they act on something is not because their completely dysfunctional groups attract hundreds of responses, it's because someone from the media also gets fed up with the issue and publishes a post/news which then gets attention probably from Google's PR department which then forced the dev team to take action.
It's all quite bleak really.
Re:Ah, Google (Score:5, Informative)
Totally this. I found a bug where a 6 mile stretch of a road in Google Maps would all geolocate to the exact same coordinates when searched for (basically 1000-6000 house address on a street would all locate to a completely different part of the city, all the EXACT same location). Took over a year of "reporting" the issue to get is solved. And how did it get solved? I finally found a mutual friend with a GMaps dev and contacted them directly. Or how about when my name was fucked on my Google Fi account, preventing me from purchasing a phone? Yeah, this took about six weeks of back and forth emails to get resolved. Or what about the time Chrome broke printer support. Yeah, not too many people print to paper these days, but it absolutely crippled a business that uses it to print invoices. This one took about two months to resolve.
In *ALL* of these cases, plus the countless others I've dealt with in concerns to Google's products, their response is ALWAYS the same: "its user error" - they always and instantly default to "Google is PERFECT, users are idiots", regardless if those "idiots" are software engineers with significantly more industry experience than the people responding to the requests. They just don't care one bit at all about their users.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, but they DO have support for their customers. No, not you and I, but their advertising customers. We're just the product, remember?
Never knew it had that (Score:1)
1) 500 Million downloads. You do know that GBoard is installed on all android devices by default now, right?
2) So, I just switched over from Swype to GBoard when it was announced as being discontinued. This was a few months ago.
I never knew it had an underline thing, but given how android breaks something all the time, I'm not surprised.
Anyway, not a feature that's been missed by everyone. I have more issues of GBoard picking the *wrong* word from what I meant, than correcting my *own* mistakes.
Re: (Score:3)
"I have more issues of GBoard picking the *wrong* word"
100% THIS. I NEVER had these issues with Swype back in the day. Can we just get some competent devs back!?
With GBoard, I'm absolutely tired of typing/swiping a word correctly, it shows up correct, and then the word AFTER it, GBoard thinks shouldn't follow the previous correct word, so it changes that previous word. This is by far the most annoying feature I've ever seen in a keyboard for any device and is honestly the #1 cause of "typos" in all of my on
Re: (Score:2)
This drives me up the wall as well. It'll often replace a perfectly appropriate, logical word that I just typed with one that makes no sense in the context of the sentence, several words later. Its grammar analysis blows. I seriously, seriously doubt the Google engineers who work on that project have English as their first language.
The other kicker is the lack of reasonable, logical suggestions. Any verb (like "raise") that can be made present tense by appending an "s" or past tense by appending a "d"
"fundamental"? (Score:1)
How is this evidence of a "fundamental" flaw?
User error (Score:2)
Canâ(TM)t be a programmer at Google. Those only happen at other companies that Google highlights. /s
Actually have encountered one or two issues where Google does something contrary to design and then decides itâ(TM)s not their problem. The one that got me was the soft keyboard behaviour on Android for key codes in Chrome. Sounds like the ghost of Internet Explorer.
Is this even relevant? (Score:2)
I can't remember the last time that I actually typed in an entire word on my phone that wasn't a proper name. Instead, I always use a mixture of: swiping, predictive words above the keyboard, or voice dictation, all of which insert properly spelled words anyway. I'm not sure that a broken spell checker would ever make a difference to me.
I don't think google cares... (Score:2)
Not sure if this should even be "news", per se. Google's total lack of care for qualify and usability of their software is sorta ubiquitously understood at this point.
I mean, this is the company which produces a phone operating system which unlocks the display for a device (in your pocket, for example) when answering via Bluetooth, a significant usability flaw which has been reported, acknowledged, and complained about for 6+ YEARS. Based on experience, there's no reason to suspect that ANYONE at Google car
Two different things (Score:2)
There are two different issues here. One is spell checking in an input field, which is where you will find a red underline on misspelled words. This has nothing to do with the input method, be it a soft-keyboard or anything else. It is dependent on the application being used. The other issue is auto-correction/auto-completion, which is indeed handled by the keyboard, and which Gboard still does.
I have definitely noticed the lack of spell checking in input fields, and hope they get the issue resolved soo
They keep making it worse. (Score:2)
Accessing some punctuation recently got worse.
Also, typing numbers switches to the calculator layout, rather than the location you know the numbers to be normally (hold down q for 1 or W for 2 etc)
When you hit the number entry selection down the bottom left, you'd expect them not to move.
Also as I've said a long time, let us delete words, easier. I want a fairly small vocabulary, which ensures a higher prediction rate, the way to delete words sucks especially if the word you want to delete is the one it jus
Thanks for the recommendations (Score:2)
Have you noticed Gboard's broken spell checker on your device? If so, you may want to look into another third-party keyboard, such as SwiftKey
Thanks for helping out friendly submission. I clicked on the SwiftKey alternative and was greeted with this review right at the top:
"I normally love this app but over the past few months the predictions displayed have been very useless, and return words like thia and exmalpa, which aren't even wotlfs! What ahppelbed?"
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