What if typing on phones was fast?

I keep coming back to this idea: what if we had better text input for mobile devices?

With a little practice, anyone can get to 100 wpm typing on a computer keyboard. Many can get much higher than that. And it’s not just raw text input speed: the precision of a mouse and ubiquity of keyboard shortcuts allow effortlessly editing already-written text.

By contrast, text input on phones is sluggish. Innovations like autocorrect, swiping, and predictive text input help, but even the fastest, mobile-native users struggle to get faster than 70 wpm.Two standard deviation of users aged 10–19 as of 2019 (the fastest age group) were under 68 wpm in a study by Palin, et al. (Table 4.)

 I top out around 50 wpm despite consistently beating 130 wpm on a desktop keyboard.

Toss in punctuation, remove autocorrect (it doesn’t know my variable names), and replace a mouse cursor with a finger, and now editing code on a phone is like breathing through a straw. It’s easily to the point where simply composing a function body on a phone takes 5–10 times longer than on a laptop.

We’ve built incredible general-purpose computing devices with processing power to run circles around the big desktops I learned to program on. But the way we interface with them locks them up as devices for consumption, not creation.

My commute is about 30 minutes of either riding on or waiting for transit… why do I not spend that time:

It’s not because I can’t use my phone for these—I have! People usually like to bash iOS, saying things like, “it’s just not possible to write the apps to do all this in the first place…” but for me, all the apps actually exist! I drafted this whole post in a markdown app on my phone. Blink Shell gives me a whole Linux environment to build code, even on iOS. Tailscale lets me build a website at home and access it anywhere. GitHub, Gmail, and Google Docs all have mobile apps.

Rather, the reason I don’t is because it’s so unsatisfying. The disconnect between my speed of thought and my speed of action is grating, making it impossible to get into anything resembling a flow state. Like a runner stuck on a crowded sidewalk, I’m constantly frustrated by the sputtering pace of progress.

In the same way that the mouse and keyboard revolutionized desktop computing, and the touch screen enabled mobile computing, I can’t stop thinking about this:

… what if it didn’t matter that transit was slower than driving, because you could just leave earlier and then work-from-phone?

… how many startups would be started on the back of a school bus if programming were as frictionless as mobile gaming?

… what are we leaving on the table by raising a generation to think of computing as consuming, not creating?

… what if the interface to the computer in my pocket was empowering like the interface to the one on my lap?