this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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My google/DuckDuckGo search for "iphone keyboard to defeat AI typing analysis" is a dead miss. Literally all of the search results are the opposite of what I want.

The problem: Sites and apps such as Facebook and even Reddit "analyze" my text input in real time, causing various problems. These apps interrupt my typing with unwanted "suggestions" and often, either cause me to be unable to finish my thought because of interference, or they "crash out" for various reasons including because their analysis overwhelms the app memory on the device. Additionally, some of these apps and web sites either defeat autocorrect tools that I DO want, or clash with their own AI correction on top of that of iOS resulting in incoherent nonsense, though more often, usually just the tab or app crashing out and reloading, losing everything that I've typed.

I can easily visualize the solution. It's really just "move the input buffer to the other side of the data stream." Instead of the text input being transmitted to the app or web site one keystroke at a time, I want the keyboard app to "hold" everything I type until I have finished typing and proofreading my text, and then give me a "send" button similar to like if I were typing a text in iMessage.

Anyway, I have a hard time imagining that such a simple keyboard app doesn't exist at all, but there's too much chaff to search through. Maybe it's just a search syntax problem, but every way I've tried phrasing the search usually just gets me the opposite of what I want. There are tons of keyboard apps offering to add AI to my input, none that are designed to help me bypass it. There are tons of "clipboard keyboards" but again, all of them seem to be a sea of unwanted features and none just a simple "type to clipboard" function - or if they do have that, it's obscured in the App Store descriptions behind the laundry list of unwanted fluff I don't care about.

I am pretty sure that this app would be relatively trivial to code, too. It's literally one of the basic functions a programmer learns early on, how to input text into a string variable and then transmit that string elsewhere. I could imagine that an even mildly competent iOS programmer could probably bang it out in an afternoon, given that it's not vastly beyond Hello World. And I think that's part of the problem, it's not complex enough, nobody wants to sell a simple app that probably fits inside the size of a small jpeg when compiled. This is practically three lines of code, apart from the graphical UI elements. Line one, create string variable "text_block". Line two, prompt user for text input to "text_block". Line three, output "text_block" to keyboard API output. Now, of course, being iOS, it gets a little more complex with the UIKit parts, making it look pretty, the needed API hooks, etc. But that's the crux of it.

I can anticipate an API problem. It is possible that when coding into a keyboard template within Xcode, there may be a hard choice between accessing the native system keyboard components, and doing what I'm describing. If I have to do it myself, I doubt that the tools available today will let it be as simple as I'd expect it to be.

I could have written it twenty years ago in Basic or AppleScript or even Java, but I don't know Swift or C to put it on an iPhone. I am not really sure that I have the bandwidth to figure it out. I'm willing to pay a reasonable rate for it... say, $500? But of course I'd much rather just buy it for $4.99 on the App Store.

Anyone know either the name of this app, or the name of a programmer who wants to make a quick nickel defeating Facebook?

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