I’m looking for a privacy-respecting open-source android keyboard, and so far I’ve found:
Does anyone have any experience with these (or other alternative keyboards)? Which one would you recommend?
Imagine asking this question 15 years ago
I use openboard but it gets me mad sometimes when I start deleting characters and it removes the space between the last word…sometimes it’s really annoying!
That weirdly only happens on jerboa for me
Is it while using Jeroba for Lemmy? I had that problem with that app so I switched to Sync for that reason.
No way I didn’t see that! I thought it was while using the English keyboard since it doesn’t happen in message apps and the only place I use English keyboard is in Lemmy (jerboa) … I’ll switch to other app
That’s a Jerboa bug with any keyboard AFAICT. Insane how this hasn’t been fixed yet.
That’s due to a bug with the AOSP keyboard that google has been ignoring for like 6 years.
Can confirm. That behavior stopped after switching to a non-asop based keyboard. Thanks!
Can I ask you which keyboard did you chosen?
AnySoftKeyboard
Here’s my lazy and unpopular solution
Ill go ahead and snail mail my boss lol.
OCR is good enough these days that that’s not enough
You’ve never seen my handwriting
I use FlorisBoard. It’s not perfect, but it has a fully featured clipboard and undo-redo functionality. Missing the swipe tho.
FlorisBoard has swipe
Only for english, which isn’t my main language.
Ah, my apologies, i didn’t know it was only limited to english
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But it’s quite bad, given their care for privacy there’s no way they can compete with google who has all the data.
I know a bit of machine learning and I’m pretty confident I could hack something together that’s better than what florisboard has right now, but I’d have no idea where to even start integrating it.
Agreed there isn’t any beating google, but everyone operates on different threat models. A bit of inconvenience for a bit of privacy may be worth it for some and not for others. From what little i used of it when i was trying it that yes it had much room for improvement but it was still useable. Once they get predictive text enabled i think the a swipe feature will really shine. But then again that’s just my humble opinion
Google’s swipe typing is pretty damn good, but it isn’t magic. It gets a lot better after using it for a while so I’m sure they use reinforcement learning in addition to the dictionary.
They’ve had it for quite a while and it’s good, so I doubt they are putting much work into improving it. And since we have phones with TPUs and multimodal LLMs now, I think it’s possible to beat google.
The LLM would only need 3-10 words of context and the swipe data as input to generate a single word, so it can be very small. I don’t know much about the power of cellphone TPUs, but I think training an LLM with about 10M parameters on the fly should be possible. If that’s the case, we could beat google while doing everything locally on the phone, so no privacy compromises.
Now that I think about it, it sounds doable. But then again I never did anything like this so I’m probably underestimating it by an order of magnitude or two.
Beating google while being local would be the dream, wouldn’t it? What you say tracks but i’m like you, i’ve not done anything remotely like it so it’s very possible we’re underestimate indeed.
I agree Florisboard is unusable as a daily driver
I’ve been using florisboard for a while now, across multiple phones. It’s exactly what I need in a keyboard with no fluff.
I use Gboard but with internet access disabled for it. I haven’t found a comparable open source keyboard yet.
Same. Tried openboard again two weeks ago, but had to switch back. The predictions were just too bad
I can’t do that on my side, perhaps because it’s a system app on my Pixel phone? Or do I need to be rooted for that?
It isn’t a system app for my phone, so maybe. You could still use something like InviziblePro or RethinkDNS to disable its internet access without root though.
Anyone know if it’s actually open source or if it has blobs?
Gboard isn’t open source, which is why I disable internet access for it.
I use thumb-key, made by dessalines. I downloaded it from fdroid
If you check out screenshots, you’ll see that its a very non traditional type of keyboard that requires time and effort to get the hang of.
Once you do, you will be able to type roughly as fast as you would with predictive swipe
That is really out there!
Probably not going to use it (since I’m already too used to normal keyboards), but props to the devs for developing something different.
Understandable. I had to take some time to learn it, and I sometimes do stop for a bit when I dont exactly know how to spell something lol
I just noticed, that keyboard was created by one of the Lemmy Devs.
Quite fitting to see it posted here
I’m using MessagEase, which looks incredibly similar.
ETA: oh, its a remake. I might need to install and move my layout over.
Any tips on how to actually learn this keyboard? Do I just force myself to use it as much as possible until the movements start to become muscle memory? How long might that take?
Yes, muscle memory
Roughly two weeks for me
Just adding Simple Keyboard here as well. It has no features besides typing. It’s literally just a keyboard. Been using it for a bit and like it, but it won’t be for everyone.
+1. Took some time for me to adapt, but since then it’s been a good experience. Been using since 2022.
my dumbass thought you were referring to a physical keyboard
Open source physical keyboards do exist though
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I use open board since forever and always hoped they get gesture… Why would I need to find it this way haha… Thanks
Because this fork uses a propetary library. That’s the only downer here. Florisboard and AnyKeyboard try to reinvent it OpenSource.
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Yes, that’s annoying. I stay away from Jerboa because of this error.
Thanks! Giving it a try, so far it’s my favorite.
I use an OpenBoard fork with gestures after giving up Gboard.
https://github.com/erkserkserks/openboard/releases/tag/v1.4.5-gesture-typing
holy shit this is perfect
Does it support ota updates by any chance?
Might want to look into Obtainium, automatic updates from any git repo.
Looks good
This was a one off that hasn’t been updated in almost a year. I doubt it’s getting any more updates.
Any keyboard with no internet permission should be “privacy-respecting”, as it can’t (as I understand it) send any data back to the developers. I’m personally a big fan of Unexpected Keyboard, though it’s definitely something to get used to.
All good but Florisboard has an internal clipboard with past entries. If you use its buttons (change in the settings, top row) and not the android ones, the system never gets your clipboard
I’m using openboard rn
@ashtrix shared a link for open board with gestures, this is what I use now
I just tried Unexpected keyboard, it’s easy to use and open source : https://github.com/Julow/Unexpected-Keyboard you can find it on F droid
I also use it and I can’t use gboard now
Looks great thanks for the suggestion. Im1. Trying to switch from swiftkey. I tried florisboard but they don’t have numpad.
edit i take my words back this keeb isnt meant for reg&lar use
Did you find any good replacement?
Nope all these keebs have flaws Florisboard was near perfect but lacked that numpad. I even feature requested on github but got ignored.
Using open board. The swipe is far from accurate and I miss the gestures. Anyway to stop data collection on Swiftkey?
Yeah disable internet access to it.
Every keyboard (the three you mentioned) is good according to the individual usecase and experience. For me, FlorisBoard (for most part) and Indic Keyboard (for regional language typing) work best.
