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