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
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)
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 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/HeliBoard
How 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.
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 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.
