Hidden on Your IPhone Is a Tactile Keyboard
Phone keyboards used to be real keyboards. When you typed, you had to press physical keys that provided tactile feedback as you typed. Touch screens have changed all that; now we are pounding on unshakable glass slabs. If you keep your iPhone on silent, you won’t even have the sound of fake keyboard clicks to let you know you’ve successfully pressed a letter. It’s just the way we live now.
But software developers have programmed the keyboards of our smartphones to be compromised. While we’ll probably never go back to physical smartphone keyboards (BlackBerry’s RIP), most modern phones can offer some tactile feedback when typing with haptic feedback.
Haptic feedback is vibration designed to mimic what you do on your phone. Unlike traditional vibration, which is often steady and loud, haptic feedback is subtle. You’ll notice this when scrolling through options on your iPhone, such as when setting a timer – as you scroll through different points in time, you’ll feel a series of subtle “tapping” sounds corresponding to each, like what you might feel as you spin. dial on the safe. This is a handy feature that makes your phone feel more three-dimensional.
On the iPhone, haptic feedback is made possible by the Taptic Engine. Apple first touted the iPhone 7 hardware, which made everything from 3D Touch (again, RIP) to scrolling more precise than standard vibration. However, for many years the company failed to bring this technology to the keyboard, although other developers filled this gap with third-party applications.
Apple Adds Haptic Feedback to Keyboards in iOS 16
With iOS 16 , Apple finally added haptic feedback as an option to the stock keyboard, now a fuzzy third-party solution is required. If you’re like me, having too many keyboards on your phone quickly gets annoying as you keep switching between them by accident. Third-party keyboards also raise privacy concerns: you need to enable “Full Control” of the keyboard on the app, which unnecessarily passes your input data.
If I can handle it, I prefer to use the built in keyboard. Adding haptic feedback to the standard iOS keyboard makes the decision to stick with it even easier.
How to use the tactile keyboard on your iPhone
For now, you need to download and install the iOS 16 beta on your iPhone if you want to try out haptic feedback for your keyboard. If you don’t want to run beta software on your main device (which is usually a smart move), you can wait until Apple releases new software this fall.
If your iPhone is running iOS 16, enabling haptic feedback will be easy (though hidden). First, open Settings, tap Sounds and Feels , then select Keyboard Response. In the Sound section, click Tactile. Now every time you type, you will feel a subtle vibration. While it doesn’t quite replicate the feel of a physical keyboard, it offers the same positive reinforcement feel. If you find that the tactile experience is not for you, return to this menu and disable the setting.