UKH

I find my year-old iPhone 12 has much worse predictive text software than my previous iPhone 7. It often comes up with multiple incoherent words after I put in a medium sized word, and possibly accidentally hit a wrong key (and the keyboard seems to be harder to be as accurate with, cf the previous one). 

In addition, I quite often put in a correctly spelled word, and it puts in a word that it sees as more appropriate. The software needs improving, as far as I am concerned. My Samsung phone is better on this score, so they had better improve to help compete.(One phone for work, one personal).

More iPhone anomalies, ask Siri, "What time is it in Palestine?"

Is Siri racist?

It works for Ramallah, The West Bank and another of other places.

Google, doesn't have the same issue.

My elderly iphone autocorrects “I’ve” to “Izvestia”, almost every time.

I get “Zhou” lots as well but, of course, now that I am trying to reproduce it, I can’t remember which letter sets it off.

I'm sure it's gotten much worse recently, had some right howlers with it. 

I was under the impression that it learns your style.  Try consistently spelling something wrongly.  I think it eventually accepts that is is just how you spell it and uses that version.  Mine certainly learns bad French and becomes less reliable if I consistently decline a verb wrongly

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I think that you are correct, and in fact I suspect that it also has its fingers in different text methods. So that if you are using regular iPhone text, it may use influence of text done via What's App, and vice versa.

Nevertheless, just swapping a correctly spelled word, used in the right context, is highly frustrating; and typing a single word that ends up as a string of short words without meaning is really strange (unless this is in another language that I have not previously come across).

You've got it set to English (US).

A lot of people seem to think that predictive text got worse on the update to IOS13, which was September 2019, so if your iPhone7 was running an old version of IOS that could be the reason.  The other reason could be that (I don't think) learned spellings and adjustments to the dictionary are synced over iCloud, so it's possible your new phone hasn't learned your dictionary and style from the old one.

I don't know. Every time I type 'Johnson' it comes out 'tw@t'

It has definitely got worse, and I keep catching it auto-correcting words that are not misspelt to random crap that makes zero sense.

In all fields, there is a misplaced drive to 'improve' things. You employ the brightest people; the product hits a high point of efficiency and useability; where do you go from there?
Downhill all the way.

So is there no essential programming protocol, that has the philosophy of, "the enemy of good is better", or is that too simplistic?

It's not simple enough for me. I haven't the faintest idea what you mean!

I first noticed the predictive text getting worse ( on my 4s) when the first iPhones with larger screens ( iPhone 6)  were launched. Perhaps its a deliberate ploy to encourage people to buy expensive phones with huge screens, the alternative is I've become a fat fingered tw@ in middle age.

I just turned predictive text off when I first obtained my mobile phone - never to go on again.

I'm sure that computer people don't actually speak normal English anyway, and the idea that they can spell correctly (in order to provide the database) is farcical - at least with every computer bod I've met.

In other words you can try too hard to make things better, and essentially balls it up. So I'm saying that recent changes to algorithms on phones may be trying to be too smart, and end up with a mess of words/language.

Phew! You agree with me!

Problem seems to be more with huge organisations like Apple, google, FB etc. Perhaps the blame lies with ruthlessly ambitious managers who want to make a mark.