A hidden autocorrect suggestion bar has been uncovered in iOS, and with a bit of patience you can enable it yourself with any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 5+. The discovery was made by iOS developer Sonny Dickson, who provides the details on how to edit your iOS backups to turn the feature on without a jailbreak. This is pretty easy to follow, but it helps if you have even a tiny amount of experience editing markup or code:

WAIT! Are you using iOS 8? Then you already have this on your iPhone, it’s called QuickType, here’s how to hide and show the QuickType bar in iOS.

No? On iOS 5? That’s much older now, but you can try this if so:

Download the iBackupBot free trial (Windows & Mac OS X versions available) and install it

Launch iTunes and backup your iPhone, iPod, or iPad

Launch iBackupBot and from the left side “iTunes Backups” list, click the backup you just made with iTunes and let the backup info load

From the Path list on the right, find Library/Preferences/com.apple.keyboard.plist – you’ll get a warning about iBackupBot not being registered but click cancel and you can edit the file anyway

Add a new line between the ‘dict’ tags and paste in the following:

<key>KeyboardAutocorrectionLists</key>

<string>YES</string> Save the changes and close out the plist, then click on the little “Restore” icon highlighted below from within iBackupBot to copy the edited backup file to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch

Now anywhere you would typically see the iOS keyboard, start typing and you’ll see the completion recommendation bar fill in with suggested words or corrections. This is a typing feature that is widely used on Android phones, but for some reason or another Apple has decided against including in currently shipping versions of iOS.

If you’re going to attempt these tweaks on your own, it’d be wise to make a manual copy of iOS backup files, you can find those locally on your drive.

This is the second such finding this week, the first being a hidden panoramic camera option that can also be enabled through practically identical methods as those mentioned above.