Every year or so I try one or more privacy focused keyboards. I always end up right back on SwiftKey after a couple of weeks because most of the keyboards I try have the same problem: the predictions suck.
Ok, I get that surveillance is good for predictions. Put another way, predictions are tough without collecting everything everyone types. Is there a best-of-both-worlds keyboard out there? I’d be patient enough to give it some time to learn how I type and get better.
Closest I got was Florisboard because of the customization options
The main things I’m looking for (in order) are
- predictions
- better support for emojis and gifs
- built in translations
Google Keyboard works really nicely and it’s hard to give up on some of that
Can you link me? Searching it in the Play Store turns up some weird results.
It’s on fdroid :)
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/dev.patrickgold.florisboard/
This sucks. What kind of suggestions are these?
The dev is implementing his own word suggestion engine. It will take time before it’s properly implemented.
ok yep that’s pretty terrible
If you need word suggestions use OpenBoard. If you dont, Florisboard is king.
I always turned off these “you cant type and I know it better anyways” suggestions. Also bilingual + colloquial is not great
I like AnySoftKeyboard but it also doesn’t have great predictions. They’re very customizable though, so maybe you can get something out of it?
I’ve been loving Thumb Key recently.
Not sure how it hasn’t been said yet, but I really like Helium314’s OpenBoard fork. Can’t recommend enough.
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I assume you must’ve tried openboard. What issues did you have with it? The predictions have been more than satisfactory in my experience.
I have OpenBoard too and the predictions suck for me. What do you do that makes it not suck for you?
Use it for a while.
I use Unexpected Keyboard
Used to use Openboard but honestly swipe typing is actually good. So I went with Gboard with internet access turned off.
OpenBoard supports swipe typing and uses a Google library to enable it, so it’s pretty much exactly the same as Gboard.
Every years or so I try out a bunch of alternate keyboards. Then I go back to using Gboard. {sigh}
I’ve been using swipe typing for years and I just can’t get by without it. None of the privacy oriented keyboards do it well enough to really be usable yet.
Almost exactly my situation, expect predictions over swiping and Swiftkey over gboard.
Gboard with every connection blocked through Rethink Firewall except for “media.tenor.com” and “tenor.googleapis.com” (because GIFs are cool).
I will never really know whether it really protects my privacy or if Google has other means to exfiltrate my data, but from Rethink logs it seems to be working. Unfortunately I have never found any keyboard as good as Gboard, so I would say this a risk I am personally willing to take for the convenience of a great keyboard. What would you say?
Gboard with every connection blocked through Rethink Firewall except for “media.tenor.com” and “tenor.googleapis.com” (because GIFs are cool).
How can I specifically do this?
I’m starting to like Thumb Key. It may have the hardest learning curve I’ve ever seen, but it’s highly configurable, the developer is super active, and it has a ton of nicely implemented features. I feel as if it’ll be like vim: hard to get up to speed on, but once the muscle memory takes hold, I’ll be extremely productive with it.
