TextExpander (Legacy) App Reviews

This is a five star app and a 5 star company if you need to respond to frequent questions. The complaints arrive from the fact that the company needs to walk a tightrope to make the product work. Apple is concerned with our security (yay). Texfexpander is trying to make us more efficient. (yay). I have had this app on all my computers and iphones for years. It has saved me countless hours. Just happened to ask customer service a question yesterday about my new Macbook and they responded within a few hours. The keyboard does need full access, but all of them do. This company has a long track record of mac developement. I use it with no concerns. And when it crashes and I need to revert to the standard keyboard it just reminds me how much work it saves me when it is running. The only option is to use the built in keyboard shortcuts, but before you do that make sure and check the apple discussion boards. Some people like me, have had apple shortcuts for years that have synching problems. I have never had a problem with correct textexpander syncing.

This app works fine on both my iPad and iPhone 6. Im just beginning to increase my list of snippets by getting ideas from their video tutorials.

Bought this on the premise that it would save time typing but every time I try and use it, my iPhone crashes and I end up wasting way more time. Not ready for prime time.

Buggy and many app crashes after installing on my iPhone 6+. Deleted.

This app does not work! When I tested the app, my keyboard would not show.

Previously awesome app has huge problems. Judging @textexpander’s tweets, they seem oblivious to this app’s issues, or even that this app exists..

It works. Buy it and get some valuable time back.

The good: it can sync your snippets from Mac to mobiles using a config file dropped to a cloud service. Makes remember your abbreviations easy. The bad: it replaces the OS primary keyboard, bringing with it unexpected behaviors. For example, it has its own autocorrect that is totally separate and different from the iOS one, and it is far worse. It will stubbornly "fix" the same word over and over again incorrectly, yet fail to make basic fixes. The ugly: it crashes. A lot. If you had hopes of using this as your primary keyboard, good luck. On my 6+, it would consistently fail to render correctly. I would get a sideways keyboard stuck in portrait mode or vice-versa, wrong resolution keyboard, keyboard draws correctly but sends no characters to screen, no keyboard at all (crashed), and on my iPad I couldnt dismiss the on-screen keyboard when my Bluetooth one was attached. My hope is that they spend some time squishing the (numerous) bugs here. If it were stable, I could say my $5 were well spent. For now, it is relegated as an extra keyboard. I can only hope it doesnt crash if I try to use it.

When you press a key, the "jump" that the key makes to indicate that it was pressed is so minuscule that I cant see the key under my finger. This leads to a lot of my abbreviations being mistyped. Thats not a problem on any other keyboard except this one but of course my snippets only expand with this keyboard. Other than that, this app gets the job done for me. I will say that this app feels a lot more rudimentary than the corresponding Mac app, which is feature-packed and a joy to use. In contrast, it feels like Smile threw this app together in a few weeks and is satisfied with having it be just a mediocre experience. It wouldve been nice if Smile had designed this keyboard with the intention that it could become a users primary keyboard. They clearly didnt set out with that goal in mind because this keyboard is frustratingly basic. I cant stand to use the keyboard for anything else except expanding snippets. Then again, I guess thats really all this keyboard was ever intended to be used for.

This is my first review. The application crashed so often when trying to type in the content for a new plain text snippet that I gave up. The keyboard freezes when typing the third letter of the snippet in multiple applications.

But the keyboard is questionable. Could be more useful; it doesnt always expand the shortcuts and its autocorrect is quite insistent. You know, sometimes I do want to type "coool". Really great tool though, very much improves my response time and productivity, for sure.

The old version worked great, and seemed very stable. On my 6+, the keyboard freezes and locks up the standard keyboard until I reboot phone. I have deleted and reinstalled; this still did not correct the problem. Will delete this previously great app until corrected.

Try it, but it will crash my regular keyboard input, save your money, dont buy it.

I love the desktop version of this app, but this version does not allow the expansion of fill-in snippets. Without that functionality, it is not worth owning this app. The description of this app does not make this clear. For them to say and work with all apps is deceptive. I wish I could get my money back.

This app never syncs across all devices. If youre expecting to sync up using DropBox, good luck. Ive had none. This is my biggest complaint. That said, the functionality and the ease of use is great. I wish the sync issue were fixed.

And the custom keyboard is icing on the cupcake.

The keyboard needs improvement and needs to be more intuitive and responsive. Its slow, laggy and does not increase typing speed as a result.

This hasnt worked on my iPad since they upgraded to version 3, and they havent responded to 25 emails requesting support. An indispensible app until then.

This was supposed to make life easier. It hasnt. I tried it for a very brief period. The keyboards letters and numbers are smaller than those on my iPhone 6. This causes me to miss letters. This app does not correct my mistakes, and it did not make it easier by correcting obvious mistakes. I wish I could get my money back.

Using iPad Air latest iOS there is simply NO expansion!