What keyboard are you using on android?

Questions
24

I’m getting it straight from GitHub using Obtainium which allows automatic updates.

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25

I may be wrong here, but isn’t IzzyOnDroid just taking APKs from the source repo and put them in their F-Droid repo? So, in theory, there isn’t any problem about the security issues of F-Droid, right?

26

Thanks! I see you can get Obtainium from either Github or F-Droid (which I already use). Does it matter where it’s from?

27

It doesn’t really matter, but since you’re already using F-Droid, you might as well use it.

1 Like
28

Yes that is correct

29

Heliboard s now in fdroid as well

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30

Thanks!

31

Hi, does someone know of an open source, actively maintained keyboard with glide typing ? Especially in no English languages. And autocorrect and suggestions.

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32

Heliboard is a very good FOSS keyboard, but for glide typing it needs to import and use an extenal library that is not open source.

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33

Not entirely FOSS (they call themselves FOSS, but others don’t, let’s not get into that debate) and I never personally used the gliding so not sure if it works well or not, but FUTO keyboard has that capacity.

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34

FUTO Keyboard.

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35

Thanks! It is definitely not as good as Gboard (especially the swipe and voice typing, but even those are usable still!). I did not thought it was that advanced. They still it is “unfinished”, “in development”, “alpha”, etc.
I could download a voice model to import on my keyboard :+1:

36

Has anybody tried out CleverKeys ?

According to their GitHub repo, this seems to be a fully FOSS Android Keyboard app, including swipe typing support. There also seems to be some swipe prediction via AI involved, where models run offline.

37

Its primarily a gesture keyboard. Not ideal for everyone and will likely put some people off even on principle even if AI here is offline on device. But it’s something if its on F-Droid. Thanks for sharing. Will check it out nonetheless.

38

I guess its both Swipe (Glide) typing with Gesture support and AI prediction? At least that’s how its advertised.

Would be a nice alternative to HeliBoard and its proprietary-only lib for swiping.

To be honest, they already got me with their beautiful header image at the mobile F-Droid page :wink: (not affiliated). Probably will give it a try as well

39

I’ve now tried all the popular FOSS keyboards on Android. I’ve come to the conclusion that gboard is just the undisputed king of Android keyboards and you won’t find anything better given that you use one handed swiping like me. The only thing with gboard is that you have to disable the default network permission (mine runs with no permissions at all) if you care about privacy as then it can’t IPC or make network requests.

1 Like
40

Heliboard without the gesture typing. If I have a lot to say, I use Futo voice typing.

I do give Futo keyboard a try every few months to see how it’s progressing. It’s about time I did so again.

Edit: Been using Futo keyboard for a day. Improved a lot since I last tried it.
Likely, I’m staying with it for the foreseeable future.

41

For now I am trying HeliBoard with swipe support and voice input via Whisper+, very happy so far. Is there something explicit you are missing from GBoard?

Yeah. It probably is also best to avoid having other Google apps/Play Services in same profile to prevent IPC between apps - or just disable network for all. I am blindly assuming here, all Google are chatty with each other.

42

All the popular keyboards offer the same functionality in my eyes. What sets GBoard apart for me is that it’s the king of auto-correcting what gets written as I swipe. There can be no privacy leaks as long as the network is turned off (I don’t use Google Play services either), so I can’t justify switching to another keyboard at this point.

43

I enjoy FUTO. I’ve tried the aforementioned FOSS keyboards but FUTO feels the best to me. Really great voice typing. Swipe/glide is a must for me. I like the clipboard management and configurability. I don’t need multi language so can’t comment on that. Autocorrect is meh…

I miss how good SwiftKey was but I simply don’t trust SwiftKey or Gboard. You can disable internet but that doesn’t stop potential IPC. Not worth the risk to me for such a huge potential breach of privacy.

1 Like