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Popular 'Gboard' Keyboard App Has Had a Broken Spell Checker For Months

Posted by BeauHD on from the grammar-nazi dept.

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.

54 comments

  1. Oh dear! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How will the phone addicts ever be understandable again?! Spellchecker dependence is a big problem, in my eyes. Compare/contrast 'kanji amnesia' (a result of automated input methods) in Japan.

    1. Re: Oh dear! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Kanji amnesia? Who cares? They hardly use kanji in Japan. They're taught katakana and hiragana and kanji is an elective. Sure it's on everything just like in the US there is Spanish on everything.

  2. Abandonware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    An abandoned Google software? No way!

    1. Re:Abandonware by denisbergeron · · Score: 1

      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...

      --
      Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
    2. Re:Abandonware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't worry they have time to demonetize youtube creators.

    3. Re:Abandonware by Excelcia · · 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?

    4. Re:Abandonware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      nooo. google would never do that to us.

            I think everyone is using swiftkey these days anyways.

    5. Re:Abandonware by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    6. Re:Abandonware by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      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.

    7. Re:Abandonware by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      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...

    8. Re:Abandonware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Can someone explain why you'd use any keyboard app that uses the internet permission?

      Does it somehow not make sense to people that your passwords will literally be sent up to "the cloud", and even if the original company had good intentions, this only becomes a honeypot for those that are more malicious?

  3. This is why by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is exactly why I donâ(TM)t buy or use Google things. They just donâ(TM)t give a shit about anything except their direct ad revenue.

    1. Re: This is why by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Slashdot apparently can't handle Unicode quotations since forever as well...

    2. Re: This is why by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    3. Re: This is why by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I remember when the original slashdot owners cared about the site and they listened to the users and cared about stuff....

      Lolololololololololol!!

      âoeââ(TM)â(TM)â(TM)â(TM)â(TM)â(TM)â(TM)

    4. Re: This is why by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Serous question though, what platform are those characters coming from?
      I’ve heard people say Apple iOS but I post using Safari on iOS fine and quotes don’t appear like that.

        (Prior to hitting Preview the above post has typographic smart apostrophes in it.)

    5. Re: This is why by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Any platform that uses unicode. It happens to me on Samsung stock keyboard if I use the autocomplete or autocorrect but not if I just type it out.

    6. Re: This is why by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I was fine until I upgraded (downgraded?) to iOS 11 on iPad. Then Unicode crap started showing up here.

      âoeUnicode crapâ

    7. Re: This is why by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Pedridge farms doesn't remember that.

  4. Terrorist detection by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's just using those CPU cycles to tell via AI if your a terrorist and call in the robot murderers

  5. It was useless in doing evil by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Once Google found out that this tool wasn't useful in doing evil, they abandoned it.

  6. This story is absolutely false by JoeyRox · · Score: 3, Funny

    Iams tiping ths messssage on gbored rit now and itz worken grate.

  7. Google is too busy by maxbuzz · · Score: 5, Informative

    Google is too busy doing evil to care about spelling.

    1. Re:Google is too busy by Darinbob · · Score: 0

      So what? Users should see their own spelling mistakes, they don't need an app to do this for them.

    2. Re:Google is too busy by cellocgw · · Score: 2, 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.

      --
      https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
    3. Re:Google is too busy by rtb61 · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
  8. Unlock at trusted place also stopped working by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The smart lock function to unlock at a trusted place also stopped working a while ago, and apparently Google doesn't really care. Tried several proposed things, like deleting cache and readding, nothing helped.

    1. Re:Unlock at trusted place also stopped working by sexconker · · Score: 1, Troll

      Yup. Android is fucking shit through and through.

  9. Must be Trump's Keyboard of choice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    #covfefe

  10. Keyboard App by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Keyboard App NotATrojanKeyboard would like permissions to:

    -Root permissions
    -View files/folders
    -View/Manage contacts
    -View/Manage calls
    -View/Manage WiFi
    -Control network state
    -Enable/Disable Power Management

  11. You should have supported other ecosystems by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Imagine if you had a healthy ecosystem of Windows Phone, Tizen, WebOS, Blackberry, Firefox OS and Bada instead of just Bugdroid, we could have voted with our wallets and switched to different devices when there was bugs. But no you kept with the green robot and now you see the consequences of duopoly.

    1. Re:You should have supported other ecosystems by lucm · · Score: 3, 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.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
  12. Ah, Google by Artem+S.+Tashkinov · · 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.

    1. Re:Ah, Google by darkain · · Score: 4, 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.

    2. Re:Ah, Google by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      TBH, I wouldn't want to deal with the flood of (mostly low-quality) user feedback for something as popular as anything Google has released. So I do understand why they'd shut themselves off.

    3. Re:Ah, Google by Tony+Isaac · · Score: 1

      Oh, but they DO have support for their customers. No, not you and I, but their advertising customers. We're just the product, remember?

  13. Never knew it had that by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

    1. Re:Never knew it had that by darkain · · Score: 2

      "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 online communications.

    2. Re:Never knew it had that by cyberchondriac · · Score: 1

      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" should have the other suggested when one of them is typed, after all the s and d keys are literally adjacent. But no, that just about never happens, and it gets the wrong one constantly, again, ignoring the overall context and tense of the sentence.

      --

      Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
  14. "fundamental"? by wept · · Score: 1

    How is this evidence of a "fundamental" flaw?

    1. Re:"fundamental"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because the fundamental functionality of the app doesn't work.

  15. User error by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    Jumpstart the tartan drive.
  16. Hoo kneeds spel chek neway? by raymorris · · Score: 1

    U shud not kneed sell chek neway. Y can't U spel righte withut it? I kan.

    1. Re: Hoo kneeds spel chek neway? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      *ehneway

  17. Is this even relevant? by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 1

    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.

  18. 3rd party keyboards too by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The underlying issue affects 3rd party keyboards too. Sometimes I get spell checking with Hacker's Keyboard, and sometimes I don't.

  19. I don't think google cares... by sigmabody · · Score: 1

    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 cares AT ALL about usability of their software, and/or fixing bugs, and/or customer experiences.

    But to be fair to Google, this has been the case since day one, and this is not new or news. If you want something you can tinker with, Google has [plenty of] products for you; if you want something which works, try elsewhere (eg: Apple, Microsoft, etc.).

  20. This is an ONION headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    LOLOLO

  21. Two different things by hackel · · Score: 1

    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 soon. It's very annoying.

  22. They keep making it worse. by AbRASiON · · Score: 1

    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 just matched

  23. Typical google by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    they care when they want, then ignore you / crap all over you when it doesnt work for them. this is nothing new.

  24. Thanks for the recommendations by thegarbz · · Score: 1

    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?"

    Have you ever encountered a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 exploding in your hand? Check out the alternatives: https://www.boomtownfireworks.... https://dynamitefireworks.com/

  25. Gboard by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ....can suck my Wboard (weinerboard).

  26. Except swear words, they work fine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I usually check this by filling in another bloodly fricken pointless feedback bug report that disappears down their gaping hole. The feedback report even with engineering analysis and clear descriptions gets ignored anyway. After 3 go wild with them, literally nothing to lose. The "bug reports" are now just catharsis for the users. It is a completely munted system.