Howdy. I wanted a central place for information surrounding smartphone keyboards since there have been some changes recently to a few of them. I hope to keep this post afloat over the long term so we can share experiences, information, news, etc to find the perfect smartphone keyboard for ourselves and help others do the same.
Smartphone keyboards are unique apps. How a person interacts with the device they probably use more consistently than any other is a big consideration. Add to that the potential for direct data theft through the keyboard itself potentially being a fancy keylogger and it makes sense to pay more attention to the app that many of us dont give a second thought to.
To that end, i think we should crowdsource 1st hand usage experience coupled with news and information to make a list of keyboards. Everyone has different priorities, use cases, and needs. The list should reflect that diversity.
“Why now borZ0, whats the big deal?”
Well, i used Swype (which is the greatest of all keyboards in ever forever) until the most recent version of OneUI came out and borked it. (…to be fair, from what i understand, no development has been done with Swype since it sold years back and this was bound to happen) Since my precious keyboard was ripped from my hands I’ve been trying very hard to like samsung’s native keyboard… trying so hard… but am open to something that better fits my use case. I’m more privacy and security focused now and would prefer a keyboard that wasn’t feasting on my user data. If this thread gets enough data, maybe we can put together a spreadseet listing multiple data points…?
I’m writing this from a coffee shop and will add more of my own experiences and collected data over the next couple days but wanted to get the ball rolling. Please post your own experiences, links to articles, wikipedia, inevitable Lemmy posts that have aleady talked about this (even links to the site which shall not be named are useful) and we can start getting a list/ table together.
Tldr: Smartphone keyboards are important and often lame. Thoughts?
Beginning list:
- HeliBoard
- Gboard
- Samsung
- Swype
- Simple not sure it this is the recently sold version or one of the forks…
- Microsoft SwiftKey
- OpenBoard
- FlorisBoard
- AnySoftKeyboard
- Thumb Key
It is so disappointing how terrible all the keyboards are theses days. I moved to Gboard because Swiftkey’s predictions just kept getting worse and worse (and wouldn’t fix by resetting the learning), but GBoard refuses to capitalize “I” for me, and its predictions are only marginally better than Swiftkey’s. Other keyboards are missing required features such as swipe typing.
What happened to the early days of Swiftkey and Swype where you could be wildly off and it would still guess your word correctly almost every time?
My experience is the same, swiftkey was so good in the beginning. Microsoft really knows how to screw good things.
https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard
FOSS replacement for GBoard, with multilanguage typing. Swype can be achieved by sideloading a lib directly from the app itself (read app description).
I didn’t find it significantly worse than GBoard.
You unbelievable hero. Instead of sleeping, Ive been configuring HeliBoard. Its all I’ve ever wanted (all most) and was completely off my radar. Thank you very much!
Glad to have helped :-)
I use Thumb Key. https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key
It’s a privacy-conscious keyboard for your thumbs written by one of the creators of lemmy. It uses a 3x3 grid similar to the old t9. The idea is that you can touch-type much easier with only 9 buttons so you don’t need to autocorrect.
Former swype user here as well. I need it back. I use Gboard for swyping now but it’s not same and def keeping my info
I use Gboard with the one handed option always enabled, so I can keep my keyboard exactly where I want it on the screen.
Some health issues make excessive keystrokes painful, and my phone is big enough already. I have it adjusted to about the keyboard size of a Galaxy S2 on screen keyboard, and to the right.
I keep Hacker’s Keyboard if I ever wind up playing something old school, though I usually wind up playing Pathos if I get an itch for NetHack on the go.
If anyone has a good option for keyboards you can force to keep on top for Accessability/gaming purposes, though, let me know.
AnySoftKeyboard, of course
i write in 3 languages. Keyboard should be flexible, customizable (i prefer QWERTY for French, for example) and it shouldn’t have any trackers.
I use OpenBoard. It’s great!
Unfortunately, it’s an abandoned project that hasn’t gotten updates for 2 years.
There’s an active fork
but no release yet, you can only install by building it yourself: https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoardHow do you mean “you can only install b building it yourself”? I just downloaded it from Github, installed it like any other keyboard and started using it. Works like a charm.
You’re right, scratch that.
I’ve just never downloaded apks directly from Github and probably shouldn’t recommend it for the reasons OP gave wrt keyboard apps.
I got confused by that issue about naming conflicts with the original OpenBoard. If you have installed that one, you need make your own debug build to run them in parallel.
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I started using Thumb-Key after MessagEase began charging a subscription. It had an “english symbols messageease” layout that was basically the same one I’d used for years.
Open source, no autocorrect, yet - but they’re working on it.
I’m not using it as a daily driver yet because of the autocorrect. But I like the accuracy - for some reason I mis-type less with it than Swiftkey or Heliboard.
Smartkeyboard was my go-to for years (still have it), but it was abandoned.
Also Heliboard, as mentioned by others. Damn good, though I mistype on it more for some reason
BlackBerry Keyboard.
I’ve used it since 2014 on BlackBerry and 2016 on android.
I miss that one.
It can be brought back. I am still using it on Android 13
Still works.
Here’s the blackberry suite. If I recall correctly, you need to install the manager to get the keyboard to work initially. Then you can uninstall it.
You are amazing, thank you.
Glad to help! I knew I saved all those apks for years for a reason 😁
I use an app called APK Export to save the apks of apps I want to retain.
My daily driver is a zFold 4. The device itself has as much to do with a keyboard being useful as anything else. I put up with Swype not handling a foldable well because of it’s other features. I can say that Samsung’s native keyboard (obviously) handles being used between two different screens well, but if Swype began magically working again, i’d drop the native keyboard immediately.
- Phone - Samsung zFold 4
- Primary-use Keyboard - Samsung Keyboard
- Preferred Input Style - Swipe, Gesture
- Preferred number of hands involved in typing - One (mostly have to use two with Samsung keyboard)
There are not really that many privacy keyboards that have foldables in mind. OpenBoard is probably one of the best you’ll get. Source: i have a z fold 3 and 5.
I’ve been through quite a few keyboards both open source and closed and they pretty much all suck. In the end I found Gboard to be the only viable option.
I did go into settings and disable all the data sharing, uploading/downloading options so in theory it should send nothing to the cloud.
It’s swipe typing is also best of the rest at the moment. I swipe type 99% of the time
There was this keyboard called Mon Key or KeyMon and it was a dual swype keyboard so one could use swipe gestures with both thumbs simultaneously. I loved it but support ceased and the app died.
Keymonk. It actually still mostly works if you find an old apk, I’m using it now. The suggestion bar is broken and it’s a little buggy, but god most of the time it still flies, security risks be damned.
Keyboard 69 was another option, but it’s also abandoned and I found it much more bloated and buggy.
What I wouldn’t give for a good open source two finger swiping keyboard…
Gboard in general. Tasker switches to unexpected for me when using juice ssh.
