Private Phone Keyboards

Right now I'm using the stock Gboard for my phone keyboard but I want to switch to a keyboard that doesn't track me. I went looking at the options and I see a ton of options. Is heliboard the best option? Are there better options for privacy? I was hoping we could have a thread where people talk about their experience and the overall usability of the multitude of keyboard options available right now. Are any of these options actually privacy preserving? https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard

HeliBoard learns words you type which is an issue if someone has physical access to your phone or if some other app tries to take that stored data. AnySoftKeyboard has an incognito mode pausing that feature. FlorisBoard and Thumb-Key both have the glide typing features like previous two as well but im not sure their other features if they learn words you type or not. Youd want Hacker's Keyboard if you write code using your phone because the layout but you probably dont or you wouldnt be asking this.

>>24385 Look for a keyboard on F-Droid. Back when I was using smartphones I would use AnySoftKeyboard: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.menny.android.anysoftkeyboard/

Ditto on check F-Droid. I always used "Hacker's Keyboard" (no idea why it has that name) because it was the easiest for me to type with.

>>24388 It's just called that because it is meant for coding.

hacker's keyboard, aosp keyboard hacker's keyboard gives you an extensible desktop keyboard for phones. it's foss and very stable aosp keyboard is dead simple and just works, graphene and linage use it

Im starting to wonder why there are so many different keyboards. Why cant the devs just merge these and work together to make a single perfect keyboard?

There's a similar thread over at >>>/tech/75606 , but to contribute to the post : Recently Futo released their own keyboard. I hopped onto it from Gboard. (long overdue) I tried Heliboard and the likes but they never striked the same feel as gboard and felt clunky to use. Futo keyboard feels like an offline gboard keyboard with no compromise. I'm pretty impressed. Gesture swipe isn't quite there yet, but I figure it is because I have to let the keyboard learn my swiping pattern or use a more accurate model for later. Oh yeah. Can change model apparently. I haven't tried it yet. Here's the fdroid repo for anyone interested : https://app.futo.org/fdroid/repo

>>24392 The swipe typing is in alpha development their site says. I do wonder how their voice typing feature works if it doesnt use the internet or store data on the phone either as they say.

>>24393 On their gitlab page https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/voiceinput >FUTO Voice Input is currently based on the OpenAI Whisper model here https://keyboard.futo.org/voice-input-models >The models are OpenAI Whisper (tiny, base, small) finetuned with the ACFT method. [Link to a github page explaining the ACFT method] It sounds like you can switch from one voice model to another so I doubt anything is shared to some third party and the magic happens on the spot on your phone. some models seem to be heavier on processing than others for accuracy. All their projects are open source and I'd like to personally try to give it a look once i'm not too burdened by work.

>>24391 > Im starting to wonder why there are so many different keyboards. Why cant the devs just merge these and work together to make a single perfect keyboard? Because if there were ten keyboards, and some of the devs got together to make the single perfect keyboard, then there would be eleven keyboards.

>>24391 Profiling for profit maybe. Most popular software keyboards are tied to biggest (ad-)tech corpos.

>>24399 Maybe if their websites have ads or they embed ads in the keyboard but not all do. It just seems common in open source projects for there to be no big plan or used as a means of work to use on a portfolio.

>>24400 >seems common in open source projects for there to be no big plan Most popular keyboards are not open source: Gboard, M$ SwiftKey, Yandex, Grammarly, etc.

>>24402 Yes but i was talking about why so many open source projects all doing basically the same things instead of working together.

>>24397 You forgot the XKCD strip in your post :) >>24403 It comes down to different views of how a keyboard should work look and feel. but honestly even that reason feels like a cop-out for me. Like. Alright. Just offer the optional features to make it more "you". If you got every dev on board, surely that would be possible.

>>24404 Yeah like they all look mostly the same and have same features. Only different one ive seen is Thumb-key which is going for a more unique input which would be odd to include with others when it isnt a standard established so that makes sense. Actually now I am thinking of it is a physical keyboard more secure on a phone? Since couldnt say if you use Android cant it know where you touch the screen so it can guess your key presses?

>>24405 >Actually now I am thinking of it is a physical keyboard more secure on a phone? Since couldnt say if you use Android cant it know where you touch the screen so it can guess your key presses? Well, you could do the same prediction attacks with a keyboard and mouse. Touch screens and physical inputs aren't so different. I actually use my phone through keyboard and mouse via scrcpy most of the time but I interact with it just like how I would use a phone on hand. I don't think there's any use to perform an attack like this, however.

>>24393 In their discord they said that the swipe on the Futo keyboard is in super active development they just hired some dude to work exclusively on the swipe soykaf. I assume it will be much better after they roll out some of the improvements.

I use this, very lightweight and has a feature that allows you to type numbers and special chars by swiping in diagonal a key, really useful makes it better than any other touch keyboard i've tried. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/juloo.keyboard2/

>>24412 >Unexpected keyboard I keep it on hand in as a secondary keyboard in case I need the characters! :)

>>24409 Does the FUTO swipe learn as you go or not? I have been using it but I can't tell if it is learning or not to be honest.

>>24416 I have a hunch it is only predicting with the dictionary/LM autocorrect. I do hope they get swipe learning out there and working. Right now I do use swipe text, but often fall back on regular typing more than I would like.

>>24417 Swipe learning can have the down side of learning wrong which ive had happen before.

>>24416 I'm pretty sure it doesn't right now, they were talking about having a much more sophisticated learning thing for it in the next month or so.

I personally just use Gboard but isolated from other applications and without network permissions. That way I can have Gboard without all of the privacy concerns.

>>24385 I use Florisboard. Looks really nice and never gets in my way.

Openboard just works, swipe input is for pussies

>>24391 Why would they *all* work together with other devs? Wait, don't tell me you're a nodev, because then you couldn't possibly understand...

>>24385 Use SwiftKey and block all internet access with adguard or afwall+

>>24393 The voice typing out of the box default is really nice for no connectivity, if you import the ai resource file English-74 itll comprehend almost anything you throw at it. Cannot speak for the multilanguage variant. Also, itll be a cpu task so phones older than 2017 might struggle with the AI voice to text. I tested it on an LGV20 and it ran very slow. It runs a little faster on a The Cat s22 Flip so sending messages with that is a little nicer with it, albiet slow.

My biggest problem with all of these keyboard suggested is that they have limited support for languages that don't use the Latin alphabet and the dictionaries suck. >>26338 How exactly do you ensure this?

I use FUTO Keyboard https://keyboard.futo.org