How to type faster on your phone

Two thumbs, autocorrect, swiping, text shortcuts and dictation: the changes that make the biggest difference on a touchscreen.

Test your phone speed

On a phone, the average person types about 36 words per minute. On a computer keyboard it's about 52. Those two numbers come from two very large studies by the same research group, and the gap sounds like a law of nature: small glass keys, two thumbs, no bumps to feel. But inside the phone study the spread was enormous. Three quarters of people typed below 44 WPM, and the fastest went past 80. The difference between them had less to do with quick thumbs than with a handful of habits, most of which take a few days to pick up.

What 37,000 phone typists showed

In 2019, researchers from Aalto University, the University of Cambridge and others asked visitors to a typing test website to copy sentences on their own phones. After cleaning the data they had 37,370 people. The average was 36.2 WPM, and people left about twice as many errors uncorrected as they do on a computer keyboard (2.3% against 1.2%). They also pressed Backspace less often, which the researchers put down to fixing mistakes being more awkward on a phone.

Three findings matter for anyone who wants to be faster:

• Two thumbs won clearly. People who typed with both thumbs averaged 38 WPM; those who used a single thumb managed about 30, and one index finger about 27. Over 82% of participants already used two thumbs.
• People whose keyboards autocorrected their words were the fastest group of all, at about 43 WPM. People who relied on tapping word predictions from the bar above the keys, without autocorrect, were among the slowest, about 10 WPM behind the autocorrect group.
• A typing course on a computer keyboard made no difference you could see. Typing on glass is its own skill.

One caution: these are comparisons between groups of people, not experiments. Confident, fast typists may simply be more likely to leave autocorrect on. Still, the pattern fits what the keyboards were designed to do, and the habits below are worth trying for a week each.

Use two thumbs, and hold the phone for it

If you type with one thumb or one finger, switching to two is the biggest single change you can make. An earlier lab study by Shiri Azenkot and Shumin Zhai found an even bigger gap than the big survey did: about 50 WPM with two thumbs, against about 36 with one thumb and 34 with an index finger.

Hold the phone in both hands with the bottom resting on your fingers, so both thumbs can reach the middle of the keyboard without stretching. Then give each thumb its own half, just as touch typists give each finger its own keys: the left thumb takes everything from Q, A and Z to T, G and V, and the right thumb takes Y, H and N across to P and L. The keys in the middle, such as B, go to whichever thumb is free. When you stop sending one thumb across the whole screen, the two start working in parallel, one moving to its next key while the other presses.

For the times you only have one hand, use the one-handed layout instead of stretching. On an iPhone, touch and hold the emoji or globe key and choose the left- or right-handed keyboard; tap the edge of the keyboard to centre it again. Gboard on Android has a one-handed mode too, in its settings or in the menu above the keys.

Let autocorrect do its job

Autocorrect works best when you type whole words quickly and let it clean up near misses. It works worst when you watch every letter and fix each slip as it happens, because then you're doing its job for it, more slowly. So aim at the keys, keep going to the end of the word, and only step in when it guesses wrong.

The prediction bar is a different matter. Tapping a suggested word means taking your eyes off the keys, reading two or three options and moving a thumb up to the bar. For long words that can save time. For short ones it nearly always costs time, and the slow prediction-heavy group in the 2019 study suggests that's how it often turns out. Use the bar for long words you're sure it has right, and ignore it the rest of the time.

If autocorrect keeps “fixing” a name, a place or a work word that was correct, teach it. On an iPhone, add the word in Settings › General › Keyboard › Text Replacement with the shortcut left blank, and it will stop being changed. In Gboard, add it to the personal dictionary.

Try swiping, and know when it wins

Swipe typing means drawing a line through the letters of a word without lifting your thumb, and letting the keyboard work out what you meant. On an iPhone it's called Slide to Type and it's on by default (the switch is in Settings › General › Keyboard). In Gboard it's called glide typing, in the keyboard's settings. You can mix swiping and tapping in the same sentence.

Whether it's faster depends on where you are. In a 2015 study by Shyam Reyal, Shumin Zhai and Per Ola Kristensson, people sitting in a lab, fully focused, were fastest tapping with two thumbs. But when twelve people used their own Android phones in everyday life for four weeks, swiping came out ahead: by the end, about 39 WPM against 31 for tapping, although swiping left more errors. By the end of the study, three of the twelve had made swiping their main way of typing. It's a small study, so treat it as a hint rather than a rule. The practical version: tap with two thumbs when you're sitting down with both hands free, and swipe when you're walking, holding a coffee or typing one-handed.

Make text replacement type for you

The fastest message is the one you don't have to type. Set up shortcuts for the things you type every week: your email address, your home address, “running late, be there in ten”, a sign-off.

On an iPhone, go to Settings › General › Keyboard › Text Replacement and tap the plus button; Apple's own example turns “omw” into “On my way!”. In Gboard, go to its settings, then Dictionary › Personal dictionary, choose your language, tap the plus button and add the phrase with a shortcut. Pick shortcuts that aren't real words, or they'll fire when you don't want them to. Ten good shortcuts can save more time in a week than any amount of thumb practice.

Fix mistakes without hunting for them

The slowest thing on a phone is often not typing but moving the cursor: tapping at a word, missing, tapping again, and trying to drag a tiny handle. Both main keyboards have a better way.

On an iPhone, touch and hold the space bar until the keyboard turns light grey. It's now a trackpad: slide your finger to move the cursor exactly where you want it. To undo, swipe left with three fingers. In Gboard, swipe left or right along the space bar to move the cursor one character at a time, and many versions also let you slide left from the Delete key to remove several words at once (the switch for it, if your version has one, is in the glide typing settings).

Other keyboards, such as Samsung's, have similar options under different names. It's worth five minutes in your keyboard's settings to find them.

Set up the keyboard for your hands

Feedback helps on glass, because there's nothing to feel. A 2008 study at the University of Glasgow found that adding tactile feedback to a touchscreen keyboard significantly improved typing, with fewer errors and higher speeds. On an iPhone, turn on keyboard haptics in Settings › Sounds & Haptics › Keyboard Feedback; Apple notes that this can use a little more battery. Gboard has its own sound and vibration options in its settings. Key clicks, on the other hand, mostly annoy the people around you; vibration gives you the same confirmation silently.

Size matters too. If you often hit the key next to the one you wanted, a larger keyboard helps: Gboard has a setting for the keyboard's height, and turning the phone sideways gives you wider keys on any phone, at the cost of a less comfortable grip. If you have long nails, the angle you hit the keys at matters more than the size; see how to type with long nails.

Talk when it's quicker

For anything longer than a quick reply, dictation beats every thumb. In a 2017 lab study by researchers at Stanford University and the University of Washington, people entered short messages on an iPhone 2.9 times faster by speaking than by typing: 153 WPM against 52. Speech also made fewer errors during entry, though it left slightly more mistakes in the finished text (1.3% against 0.8%), so read before you send.

On an iPhone, tap the microphone on the keyboard and speak. You can say punctuation by name, and in supported languages it adds commas, full stops and question marks for you (the Auto-Punctuation switch is in Settings › General › Keyboard). In Gboard, tap the microphone on the keyboard; voice typing can be switched on in its settings. A good workflow is to dictate the message, then use the space bar trackpad to fix the one word it got wrong.

Look after your thumbs

Thumbs aren't built for hours of tapping. If you type a lot on your phone, swap between tapping and dictation, switch hands now and then, and hold the phone higher rather than bending your neck down to it. Two thumbs share the work, which is another point in their favour. The posture guide covers the same ideas for desks and laptops.

This is general advice for comfortable typing, not medical advice. If your thumbs, wrists or hands hurt and the pain doesn't go away, see a doctor or physiotherapist.

Measure your phone speed

The typing tests on this site work on phones, so you can see whether a change helps. Take a 30-second test on your phone now, try one habit from this page for a week, and test again. Use the same test length each time, and compare phone scores only with phone scores: a phone test and a computer test measure different skills, and your phone score will usually be lower. If you're curious how your phone speed compares with keyboard speeds, average typing speed has the numbers.

Where to start

This week, switch to two thumbs and stop looking at the prediction bar for short words. Add three text replacements: your email address, your address and the reply you send most often. Next week, try swiping whenever you're typing one-handed, and learn the space bar trick for moving the cursor. For the habits that make computer typing faster too, see typing tips and tricks.

Sources

• Palin, Feit, Kim, Kristensson and Oulasvirta, “How do People Type on Mobile Devices? Observations from a Study with 37,000 Volunteers”, MobileHCI 2019.
• Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson and Oulasvirta, “Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes”, CHI 2018.
• Azenkot and Zhai, “Touch behavior with different postures on soft smartphone keyboards”, MobileHCI 2012.
• Reyal, Zhai and Kristensson, “Performance and User Experience of Touchscreen and Gesture Keyboards in a Lab Setting and in the Wild”, CHI 2015.
• Ruan, Wobbrock, Liou, Ng and Landay, “Comparing Speech and Keyboard Text Entry for Short Messages in Two Languages on Touchscreen Phones”, Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies 1(4), 2017.
• Hoggan, Brewster and Johnston, “Investigating the effectiveness of tactile feedback for mobile touchscreens”, CHI 2008.
• Apple Support, “Type with the onscreen keyboard on iPhone”, “Set up shorthand for frequently used text on iPhone”, “Change iPhone keyboard sounds or haptics” and “Dictate text on iPhone”; Google, Gboard Help.