The Best Text Expansion App for iPhone

We love text expansion because it can save you so much time typing. Apple quietly built it into iOS, and it's our favorite way to create typing shortcuts on our iDevices.

Settings: Shortcuts

Platform: iPhone
Price: Free
Built-in

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• Type in a shortcut (e.g. "brb") and it will expand to larger text (e.g. "be right back"
• Edit directly in the Settings app (General -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts)
• Works in every app

Before iOS 5, you had to jailbreak to get text expansion working throughout iOS. TextExpander, a third party app (and former top pick) tried to bring typing shortcuts to as many apps as possible but couldn't get system-wide integration due to Apple's many restrictions. While we'd prefer a more feature-rich, third party solution that integrates text expansion into iOS, Apple at least gave us something with the Shortcuts section of iOS 5. While it only offers simple typing shortcuts and no other features, it has to be our top pick because it works in every app. Text expansion is really only a great feature when you can use it, after all.

(By the way, if you want to learn how to use it read this.)

The primary downside is a lack of features. All you get is basic text expansion. In many cases, this is enough, but we like the ability to add variables like date and time, put snippets within snippets, organize, and many of the other thing you get with a desktop text expansion app. There's no reason this can't be done on iOS, and TextExpander does offer a variety of other features, but nothing else integrates system wide because Apple won't allow it.

TextExpander ($5, often on sale for less) was our top choice before Apple added typing shortcuts in iOS 5. While TextExpander can't integrate on the system level, it does provide variable support and syncs with the desktop version. A fair number of other third-party apps support it as well, so you're not restrained to the TextExpander app itself. All in all, it is the best solution?it just doesn't work everywhere and so it can't be our top pick anymore.

TapIt4Me, the mobile version of our top choice for text expansion on the Mac costs the same $5 as TextExpander but doesn't give you the iPad version as well. It has a few nice features like direct tweeting, but for the most part it just isn't as good as TextExpander. It also doesn't have the third party app support. Nonetheless, it is another option if you're looking for one.

For jailbreakers, Xpandr ($2) actually provides (mostly) system-wide support for text expansion snippets. This is how you want text expansion to work on the iPhone. We didn't make it our primary pick because it's a pretty simple app that doesn't come with too many features and, more importantly, not everyone is jailbroken, but if you are it's the way to go.

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Lifehacker's App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.

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Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/kMg12QujjHY/the-best-text-expansion-app-for-iphone

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