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.

Comments

Abandonware

[Anonymous Coward]

An abandoned Google software? No way!

This story is absolutely false

[JoeyRox]

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

Google is too busy

[maxbuzz]

Google is too busy doing evil to care about spelling.

Ah, Google

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

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

[darkain]

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:You should have supported other ecosystems

[lucm]

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.