The only app I can’t live without. Except for gboard, all of my applications are Foss. There is no competition for gboard’s swipe typing, not to mention its many capabilities like as searching for gifs, stickers, being able to paste copied images, translating, and so on. I’d like to know how I can use gboard while maintaining my privacy. According to what I’ve heard, it sends all typing data to Google’s server. If you ask me, that’s a massive no-no. Do you have any suggestions?
Leaving this up because there are some good discussions here already and it’s a great question. I’d just flag rule 2 in the sidebar and that we ask questions and recommendation requests to be posted in !askandroid@lemdro.id instead. Thanks!
Off topic question, don’t you guys think splintering the Android community into multiple communities specifically for certain things when there are so few people on the Lemmy platform will lead to the instance becoming driy without content? Not sure if there’s been discussion about this yet.
Lemmy unfortunately doesn’t currently have functionality that could help people curate the type of content they want to see from within a single community (e.g., hiding posts, filtering by tags). Maintaining separate communities is more work for the moderators but gives people the choice to decide what kind of content to subscribe to when populating their “Subscribed” view.
Our hope is to foster a space that’s scratches the r/android itch with !android@lemdro.id, while also having a space set aside for questions, support, and seeking recommendations with !askandroid@lemdro.id. There’s also a tendency toward better quality responses for the latter when it’s in a community of people who have deliberately subscribed because they like to help folks out. That’s the thinking at least.
Do feel free to join us on the Matrix chat anytime! https://matrix.to/#/#lemdro.id:matrix.org
I use SwiftKey with internet access turned off. Works well enough though obviously the gif and stickers won’t work.
I hate Gboard. So I use SwiftKey which is the best one.
OpenBoard, Florisboard, AnySoftKeyboard
THERE ARE ALTERNATIVES, PEOPLE!
I installed all three.
OpenBoard has no swiping support at all.
AnySoftKeyboard is glitchy, moving the cursor around unexpectedly and inserting spurious characters.
FlorisBoard’s swiping is very inaccurate, to the point that it’s barely faster than typing characters one-by-one.
I hope this situation improves soon…
Well uhhh, kinda late, but the “original” openboard project hasn’t got an update in like, 12 months. There are forks, though.
Fork with glide typing - Haven’t received an update in 11 months https://github.com/erkserkserks/openboard
“New” fork: https://github.com/Helium314/openboard
I dropped gboard and started using FlorisBoard. It’s a lot more crude and don’t have the same features, but I’m very happy with it and will not go back.
I preffer my privacy over features, and using the software and reporting feedback helps it betting better.
We really need to ditch Google.
