I remember as if it were today, the moment when touchscreens started to, slowly but surely, replace physical keyboards as the main input on smartphones. It was quite an event, as many people were sure that touchscreens simply cannot make for decent writing apparatuses. Only a few years later, it’s difficult to imagine having a phone with a keyboard, and writing using a touchscreen is second nature to anybody using a phone.

However, this doesn’t mean touchscreen typing doesn’t have its downsides, or places for improvement. Fortunately, some of the most helpful typing features are already implemented into stock keyboard options on both iOS and Android, and you might not even realize that. So, here are the most important smartphone typing features that you might have missed, and that tremendously improve the experience.

No more blindly tapping around

Swiping makes errors go away

For me, typing on a touchscreen brings about one huge annoyance. It is trying to correct a mistake that’s somewhere inside a word, especially between narrow letters such as an “i” or an “l”. Attempting to tap your finger in between the letters, so you can place a cursor there and delete a singular letter is a comedy of errors, and usually takes me and my wide fingers at least a few tries.

As it turns out, for all these years I could have avoided that annoyance. All the major manufacturers include a nifty little trick in their phone keyboards that makes this task so much easier. By swiping left and right on your keyboard’s spacebar, you can move the cursor left and right. This gives you the ability to be much more precise with the cursor placement, eliminating all that fiddling around.

Typing isn’t the only way to write

Just sliding around

For some people, thumb typing just doesn’t seem to work on a touchscreen. Using the hunt and peck style is a choice to be sure, but it’s neither very elegant, nor quick. Fortunately, there are other ways to write on your phone, and possibly also speed up your writing quite significantly. I’m, of course, talking about slide typing.

Well, as the name suggests, slide typing works by simply sliding your finger between the letters that you want to input, without lifting it. Once you finish a word, only then do you lift your finger up, and the word appears on your screen. It used to be a great feature back when touchscreens without multitouch were a thing, but even now it can significantly increase the typing speed of many people, especially if they are not used to touch typing. The feature is usually on by default, but if it’s not available, there should be a toggle in your keyboard settings.

Sometimes it’s OK to take shortcuts

And you can make your own

Everybody has their favorite turns of phrase. You just like the sound of them, or simply got used to saying or writing them — it’s perfectly natural. However, if they’re on the longer side, writing them out in full every time you’d normally use them can get really tiring. Fortunately, there is a workaround that lets you transform your favorite phrases into quick, always ready-to-go shortcuts.

The idea is very similar whether you’re using Android or iOS. Both systems allow you to set up your own, customized shortcuts. It works in a really simple manner. The first thing to do is set up your own shortcut in the phone’s dictionary. After that, what you need to do is to register the phrase that the shortcut will transform into once you type it out. Then, accept these changes and your shortcut will be ready to use.

This might sound a bit complicated, but in practice it’s extremely simple. For example, if you decide to set your shortcut as “omw”, and its extension as “On my way”, every time you type in “own”, your phone will change it automatically to “On my way” in the exact same way your automatic autocorrect functions. You don’t need to do anything more, and your typing can get so much more efficient thanks to a few simple shortcuts. However, keep in mind that your phone might need to learn the new shortcut, so a few first times you might need to pick the shortcut extension from the proposed phrases on top of your keyboard.

Your keyboard is not set in stone

Don’t like the typing experience? You can change it entirely

There’s one more thing to try if you feel you simply cannot get over the hurdles with your current phone keyboard — you can simply change it. Different keyboards offer different experiences and can end up prioritizing functionalities that might be more important for you, or their layout might just work for you better.

Whether you’re using iOS or Android, swapping to a different keyboard is extremely easy. You simply get to the AppStore or the Google Play Store, download another keyboard app, install and run it. It’ll ask you for permissions to become the default keyboard, and after granting them, you can start using it immediately. Once you’re done setting up, be sure to check out all the different settings and customizations, as you might discover options that were nowhere to be seen in the generic app.