How to type faster on your phone

What makes some people faster on a phone?

The volunteers copied sentences on their own phones in a web-based test and told the researchers how they held the phone and which typing aids they used. The mean was 36.17 WPM, with 2.34% of characters left wrong, which the authors put at about 15 WPM slower than the same group's earlier study of physical keyboards.

How people held the phone:

The release that accompanied the paper reported that over 74% of people type with two thumbs, and called thumb use the best predictor of speed. If you're one of the rest, two thumbs is the single biggest change on this page.

Which typing aids people used:

Autocorrect on its own came out on top, and adding prediction to it gave up most of the gain. The paper found a small negative correlation between how much people used prediction and their speed (r = minus 0.183). One of the authors, Sunjun Kim, explained it in the release: the time spent thinking about word suggestions often outweighs the time it would take to type the letters.

What the study can't tell you

These are averages for groups of people who chose their own settings, not an experiment that switched autocorrect on and off for the same person. People who leave autocorrect on and ignore predictions may differ in other ways, such as how much they type. The volunteers were self-selected and mostly young, female and from the US, as the authors point out, and native English speakers typed fastest at 37.8 WPM.

So read the tables as strong hints. The mechanism behind them is plain enough to test on yourself: a prediction costs a glance, a decision and a tap, and autocorrect costs nothing until it gets a word wrong.

Two more findings worth knowing. Age matters: the 10 to 19 group averaged 39.6 WPM, against 28.9 for people in their 40s. And the release reported no benefit from formal ten-finger keyboard training, so a typing course for your laptop won't carry over to your thumbs.

iPhone settings for faster typing

All of these are in Settings, then General, then Keyboard.

Keep Auto-Correction on. It's on by default. From iOS 17, corrected words are underlined, and tapping one brings up a menu of options, so a bad correction is quick to undo.

Try Predictive Text off for a week. Apple lets you turn it off in the same menu, or by touching and holding the emoji or globe key and opening Keyboard Settings. If your speed holds or rises, leave it off. iOS 18 also has a separate switch for inline predictions.

Set up Text Replacement. Tap Text Replacement, then Add, then type a phrase and a shortcut. Apple's own example turns "GM" into "Good morning". Your email address, home address and a few stock replies are good candidates, and each one saves dozens of taps.

Slide to type is an option too. Apple calls it QuickPath: you slide from letter to letter without lifting your finger. It isn't available in every language.

Android settings for faster typing (Gboard)

Gboard, Google's keyboard and the default on some Android phones, keeps its options under the features menu at the top of the keyboard, then More, then Settings, then Text correction.

Leave auto-correction on. Gboard corrects misspelled words as you type, and Backspace straight after a correction undoes it.

Teach it your words. When a name or term you use often gets a red underline, tap it and choose Add to dictionary, and it stops being "corrected".

Remove suggestions you never want. Touch and hold a suggested word and drag it to the trash.

Glide typing is Gboard's swipe mode. On most phones it's under Settings, System, Languages and input, Virtual keyboard, Gboard, Glide typing. Not every language supports it, and on some Android versions the menus differ by manufacturer.

Should you use swipe typing?

Try it, but measure. In Palin's data, people who used only swipe averaged 32.2 WPM, below those using no aids at all, and the combination of swipe, prediction and autocorrect was the slowest group in the study at 28.8.

Swipe can suit one-handed typing, on a bus or with a coffee in the other hand. For two-handed speed, tapping with both thumbs and autocorrect on is the stronger bet on this evidence.

How to measure your phone typing speed

Take a 1-minute typing test on your phone three times with your current settings and keep the middle score. Change one thing, such as prediction off, use it for a few days, then test again. One change at a time is the only way to know which one helped.

On this site, a result typed on a touch screen records whether you used autocorrect, an autocorrect replacement counts as one keypress, and phone results stay off the public leaderboards. The scoring methodology explains the details. Don't hold a phone score up against a keyboard chart: why your WPM differs between sites explains why scores move with the test as well as the typist.

For what a good phone speed is, by age and against keyboards, see average typing speed by age, job and device and what is a good typing speed.

Frequently asked questions

What is the average typing speed on a phone?

About 36 WPM. Palin and colleagues measured 36.17 WPM across 37,370 volunteers, with 2.34% of characters left uncorrected.

Is it faster to type with one thumb or two?

Two. Two-thumb typists averaged 38.0 WPM, against about 30 for one thumb and 29.2 for a single finger.

Does autocorrect make you type faster?

In the study, yes. People using autocorrect alone averaged 43.4 WPM, the fastest group, and autocorrect use correlated positively with speed.

Should I turn off predictive text?

It's worth testing. Prediction-only users averaged 32.8 WPM, below people using no aids, because choosing a suggestion often takes longer than typing the word.

What is the fastest anyone types on a phone?

The study's fastest typists went over 80 WPM, and the release put the top touchscreen speed at 85 WPM.