I’ve treid a few, I don’t think any of them are as good as Swiftkey sadly. Swiftkey just works, even Gboard is nowhere near as good as it.
what’s something that makes SwiftKey better?
The predictive engine and ease of entering a prediction. Quite often I can just hit space a number of times to complete a message.
Openboard has been doing well for me.
FYI, there’s a fork of OpenBoard that enables swipe/glide typing! Literally was a game changer for me!
This is the one I’m using. It’s fantastic.
Does it do voice to text?
The only FOSS speech to text I found for English is Dicio, and it’s not amazing, but it works.
There is now an open source voice input you can install that works with open keyboard, Which as Louis rossman says in his video is actually a lot better than gboard’s
https://youtu.be/UCGaKvZpJYc?si=d3DMysA5Q_gMzQiU
Cc @refurbishedrefurbisher
@curveNope, not that I can see.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any alternative to gboard with good hand writing recognition for Japanese… So if you need that functionality I think gboard is your only choice
You are handwriting Japanese symbols? I use the querty keyboard that converts romaji to hiragana/kanji. However I’m afraid this isn’t available on other keyboards either…
Yes, but only for the words I don’t know the reading of. For everything else I use the T9 flick keyboard.
Any FOSS keyboards with swipe-to-text? Always seems like they’re missing that
Openboard fork with swipe typing feels the closest to Gboard imho.
Thank you so much, I was using FlorisBoard but was missing the swipe!
Uh… Florisboard does have that though. It’s in the glide typing section of settings
Ah thank you, I must not have updated it.
Im gonna give simple keyboard a week. If it works well, I might keep it.
Thumb-key is different but great
Anysoftkeyboard for me, it has good multilanguage support, lots of customization and even a swype option
What are the advantages of using this apps compared to the Android Keyboard (AOSP)?
For me, the key is FOSS. I was a keen fan of swiftkey, its word predictions worked great. Then it was bought by a company that I distrust, and when I was forced to choose another, I decided to try to ensure I’d never have to switch again.
A little while after I bailed on swiftkey, the news reports came that it was auto-filling random strangers’ credit card numbers; I felt vindicated.
I’m always looking for an android keyboard that is either only a number pad, or can be configured to show the number pad first by default. I have this one use case, playing farkle mostly, where I like to split screen excel and an image of the rules, and because excel is open split screen the keyboard always opens to letters. It drives me nuts that I cannot force a keyboard to open to a number pad.
FlorisBoard is feature rich.
Do you know if it is still under active development? It’s been one year since the last update
On their github they state that mayor releases take time. And there is activity on the github. So I think their working on it!
No releases in awhile, but there seems to be some work going on
For multilingual users, which keyboards you recommend? I type in 3 languages and need a a keyboard that can have all 3 languages enabled.
AnySoftKeyboard works great for me with two languaged😄
Thanks! Is it still being supported? I see on F-droid the last update was two years ago
Yeah, there is a beta channel you can sign up for. Still no much releases but it works very well for me 😄
Awesome, thanks. One last question if you don’t mind me asking. I was going to activate the keyboard on my Android phone and got a warning notification that if I did it, the keyboard wouldn’t be available to input before I unlocked me screen. But I need a keyboard to unlock my screen obviously. Could this be an issue?
If you are a Florisboard user, there is a version with dynamic Material You themes here. It’s really good while we wait for the new versions with this official built-in
