Perhaps related, but when communicating over the radio (including via digital printing modes like RTTY) you have to declare that you’re done transmitting and yield the frequency to the other party. This is because your signal may fade, appearing to the other person like you stopped transmitting. This is the purpose of the ubiquitous “over” seen in movies and TV, though in ham circles you use the more casual “go ahead” or “back to you”.
I imagine a period sends the same message, but because you don’t have to manage turn-taking with texts the way you do on the radio the period can be seen as redundant because they already know you’re done speaking. So sending a period may seem like you’re emphasizing the finality of your message.
In radio, you signal the end of a contact (QSO) with “out”, but again, in ham circles you just say “73”.
Is any of this relevant? I have no idea I’ve been up since 1 AM this morning.
I’ve never heard of OP’s convention. But if I had to guess, it’s this:
It’s slow to input text on an onscreen keyboard compared to a physical one.
Mobile vendors try to reduce the number of keystrokes via predictive text and other tweaks in their onscreen keyboard software.
One common optimization (which I do not like and have off) is to try to reduce the effort to terminate a a sentence.
On iOS’s keyboard, tapping space twice inserts a period, then space. This is an easy action to perform.
I would assume that many iOS users are thus trained to only terminate sentences this way, and not to explicitly use periods. A trailing period requires extra effort and an unusual keystroke.
As a result, iOS users tend not to put in the extra effort, and so their sentences tend not to have a trailing period if not followed by a subsequent sentence.
For these users, the norm then becomes to omit a period on the final sentence, and so explicitly adding it looks like the user has gone out of their way to specially add punctuation. The trailing period then acquires semantic value, meaning.
I expect that the whole thing stemmed from some random engineer at Apple just banging away trying to get average typing speed up, not spending a lot of time thinking about any linguistic or social impact.
It could also be that Microsoft or Google do that by default — but I don’t use their default onscreen keyboards, and the descriptions I can find online of their default behavior sounds like they don’t.
To enable the double space period feature on the Samsung keyboard, go to Settings > General Management > Language and input > On-screen keyboard > Samsung Keyboard > Smart typing, and ensure that the “Auto spacing” option is turned on. If the feature is not working, you may need to reset the keyboard settings to default or clear the keyboard’s cache.
EDIT: This (presumably) human, about older versions of the Galaxy:
Perhaps related, but when communicating over the radio (including via digital printing modes like RTTY) you have to declare that you’re done transmitting and yield the frequency to the other party. This is because your signal may fade, appearing to the other person like you stopped transmitting. This is the purpose of the ubiquitous “over” seen in movies and TV, though in ham circles you use the more casual “go ahead” or “back to you”.
I imagine a period sends the same message, but because you don’t have to manage turn-taking with texts the way you do on the radio the period can be seen as redundant because they already know you’re done speaking. So sending a period may seem like you’re emphasizing the finality of your message.
In radio, you signal the end of a contact (QSO) with “out”, but again, in ham circles you just say “73”.
Is any of this relevant? I have no idea I’ve been up since 1 AM this morning.
I’ve never heard of OP’s convention. But if I had to guess, it’s this:
It’s slow to input text on an onscreen keyboard compared to a physical one.
Mobile vendors try to reduce the number of keystrokes via predictive text and other tweaks in their onscreen keyboard software.
One common optimization (which I do not like and have off) is to try to reduce the effort to terminate a a sentence.
On iOS’s keyboard, tapping space twice inserts a period, then space. This is an easy action to perform.
I would assume that many iOS users are thus trained to only terminate sentences this way, and not to explicitly use periods. A trailing period requires extra effort and an unusual keystroke.
As a result, iOS users tend not to put in the extra effort, and so their sentences tend not to have a trailing period if not followed by a subsequent sentence.
For these users, the norm then becomes to omit a period on the final sentence, and so explicitly adding it looks like the user has gone out of their way to specially add punctuation. The trailing period then acquires semantic value, meaning.
I expect that the whole thing stemmed from some random engineer at Apple just banging away trying to get average typing speed up, not spending a lot of time thinking about any linguistic or social impact.
It could also be that Microsoft or Google do that by default — but I don’t use their default onscreen keyboards, and the descriptions I can find online of their default behavior sounds like they don’t.
My Galaxy S25 does the double space inserts a period thing, even with as much predictive text as I can disabled.
Duck Duck Go’s AI suggestion is:
EDIT: This (presumably) human, about older versions of the Galaxy:
https://www.techbone.net/samsung/user-manual/auto-punctuate