Products · Pattern or everyday thing
mobile text editing
Raised as a usability problem by 17 people on Hacker News over 7 years (2019–2025), in 3 threads.
People raised many different problems with mobile text editing, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 17 complaints
- Mobile text formatting and cut/copy/paste are extremely frustrating to use2025-07-16
- Typing and editing text on a smartphone is frustrating, so people abandon emails and posts and restart on a laptop2023-09-25
- No way to undo accidental deletions; backspace removes far more text than intended2023-09-24
- Undo arrows are scattered everywhere and still not elegant to use2023-09-24
- Teardrop selection handle is hard to control, so editing text is difficult2023-09-24
- Text editing on mobile devices is a terrible experience2023-09-24
- Scrolling, panning and text selection are annoying when editing text on phones2023-09-24
- Cannot drag the cursor to the end of text on a phone2023-09-24
- Paste option is hidden; must place cursor precisely and tap teardrop2023-09-24
- Context popup menu position makes text editing choices slower and less precise2023-09-24
- Touch-only interfaces make composing and editing text on phones and tablets hard2023-09-24
- Precise cursor positioning, selection, and cut/copy/paste/undo on phones are hard to do accurately2023-09-24
- Tapping to bring up the teardrop sometimes moves the cursor position2023-09-24
- Pasting is hard to hit because the tap target is effectively zero-width2023-09-24
- Autocorrect changes words wrongly, and edge cursors make it hard to select the first letters2023-09-24
- Typing and editing text on phones is much slower and more frustrating than on a physical keyboard2023-09-24
- Editing text files on mobile is frustrating compared to other input methods2019-12-02