Apple Has A Hidden And Much Smaller iOS Keyboard That It Didn’t Want You To Know About

Paul Balo, October 21, 2016

A well-known software developer by the name Steve Troughton-Smith shared what some suspected but were not able to work around on Twitter recently. He says Apple has a hidden one-handed keyboard in the iPhone and iPad.

Video or it didn't happen: (very hard to engage in the Simulator with a mouse cursor) pic.twitter.com/vw2wpCgiLJ
— Steve T-S (@stroughtonsmith) October 19, 2016

At the moment in iOS, you would have to use the big virtual keyboard which appears at the bottom of the screen but this developer has just showed us something different. The surprising part of this revelation is that this feature has been with us since the launch of iOS 8 which launched in 2014.

Troughton-Smith after swiping right to left on the current keyboard revealed the existence of a smaller one-handed keyboard which moved to the left side of the screen. This could come in handy for those who may want to type faster because a smaller one handed keyboard one side of the screen could change user experience dramatically. Users currently have to use third party apps to do this and why won’t Apple just open the feature to its users? It beats me too.

Well for those who want to access the feature, it might look like a herculean task as the developer was able to access it using a developer console which is used to testing applications on the Apple platform.

For non-developers, this would mean jail breaking the entire iOS which is not always advisable but it only means that since this smaller keyboard is a restricted feature, you would have to remove all the restrictions to use it. This also could mean discovery of other application features which Apple is not allowing people use for now.

The big warning here is that jailbreaking could render the entire software useless and will ultimately defeat the purpose for jailbreaking in the first place.

A little more context for anybody wanting to make a jailbreak tweak to turn this on (assuming one doesn't already exist - I dunno) pic.twitter.com/We5WymSXOa
— Steve T-S (@stroughtonsmith) October 19, 2016