This has been such a pet hate for years on systems with a mouse as well as iPhone iOS, that I assume it is nigh impossible to select text reliably and conveniently, for some unexplored reason or other. It's always the case that I can get a selection backwards up to the first letter but missing it, or including the first letter and some extra junk from the lines before, but not simply up to and including the first letter.

Right now replying to your comment on Windows, FireFox, with a mouse, I have just discovered a new text selection mode I've never noticed before[1] - double-click-and-drag selects whole words. Consistently up to the new word boundary on the right. That means it's possible to select an entire sentence up to (but without) the period. Or including the period and a trailing space. But not the obvious one to want - a sentence including the period and no trailing space.

[1] I know double-click commonly selects words, and triple-click selects sentences, but didn't know of double-click-drag.

Agreed — moving the cursor and selecting text has become almost unusable for me on iOS 13 [1]. It's a shame, because I always used to be impressed at how easy and natural it felt. I really hope they figure this out and reinstate the old approach.

[1] As I was saying only the other day: https://twitter.com/jawj/status/1221038674193932288

This could actually be a valid reason to jailbreak my iPhone (the last time I did so was 10 years ago). Does anyone know if there are any tweaks that would bring back the old pre-iOS13 behaviour?