Bug? iOS 'Text Replacement' works unexpectedly in some cases

So the other day I was trying to cut short my typing effort by saving ‘the coolest girl ever‘ as the replacement text for my name (Aparajita, if you still don’t know) in the Keyboard settings of my iPhone 6s Plus, for I wanted that phrase to auto-replace my name on typing (the self-obsessed me).

Surprisingly, whenever I typed Aparajita, the Text Replacement feature tweaked the replacement text by capitalizing ‘t’ of the word ‘the’ – so what I got was ‘The coolest girl ever‘. That’s weird, I thought. So I cross-checked the text replacement entry to see if I had mistakenly saved ‘The coolest girl ever‘ instead of ‘the coolest girl ever‘. But that wasn’t the case.

You can see all this in the following video clip:

Then I changed ‘Aparajita’ to ‘aparajita’ to see if the feature behaved the same way in this case as well. But it did not – now the replaced text was ‘the coolest girl ever‘.

Well, that left me wondering whether or not there can be use-cases wherein this weird, unasked capitalization behavior of iOS ‘Text Replacement’ feature would seriously affect user experience? And while brainstorming, I stumbled upon the case of special symbol characters like alpha, beta, gamma and so on. If you aren’t aware these symbols are written differently in lower and upper case (as can be seen in the screenshot below).

This led me to test how the Text Replacement feature acts in scenarios where such symbols are used. Unsurprisingly, it continued to behave erratic. When I saved ‘β’ for Beta or ‘α’ for Alpha, the feature instead of showing what I saved, replaced Alpha with ‘A’ and Beta with ‘B’ as that’s how both the symbols are written in upper-case.

See for yourself:

Of course, when I wrote alpha and beta, the replaced text was as expected – α and β respectively.

The feature is a waste for me if instead of replacing Beta with β it replaces the word with B, which in turn changes the entire meaning of what I actually wanted to convey. Not to mention this behavior also makes life difficult for user as it’s not easy to just erase B and replace it with β, which isn’t directly available on the keyboard.

It’s worth mentioning that this behaviour is reproducible on the latest iOS 11.3.1 as well 11.3. We also tested the same on a device running iOS 10.3.3, and the results were same.

I am not sure weather it’s a bug or an expected behaviour. If it’s the latter then it’s reasonable to say the functionality is misfiring. And if it’s an issue, then I think Apple should fix it asap.

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