Change order using the "Switch Keyboard" (Globe) key on iOS screen keyboard

Question

If you refer to the Apple KB here, or to what other users seem to experience on the web (maybe because they have only 2 keyboards set up...), you would expect that the Switch Keyboard key 🌐 would do a circular shift of one increment in your list of set up keyboards in Settings each time you tap it.

For me it does not. Instead, the switching order seems rather random (I have 7 keyboards enabled). I can't get to understand the behavior or to find a pattern.

Has anybody the same issue? I am asking because daily I use only 2 or 3 of them, and it is "annoying" to open the full list by holding the button when typing.

Answer 1

It’s not actually random unless you’re experiencing a bug I haven’t seen. If you switch keyboards in fast succession, it cycles through the list in the same order as it’s presented when you hold. However, if you wait a second after switching the keyboard, the next time you press the globe button it goes BACK to the last keyboard you used (i.e. the last keyboard you kept open for a second or more). So if you don’t switch fast, you’ll end up switching between just two keyboards. I assume this is designed for bilingual people like me, but I agree that it’s confusing sometimes. One confusing consequence of this is that if I have keyboards A, B and C installed (ordered the same way in the list), I’m currently on B and before that I used A, then here’s what happens if I start quickly switching keyboards: it first goes to A because that’s what I last used, but then it SKIPS B and jumps to C, and from there starts cycling through the list. The full trajectory in this example ends up being B A C A B C A B C...

I would like an option to make the globe button cycle through only a subset of keyboards and make all other keyboards accessible only by holding.