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?

  • Sume
    1•2 years ago

    I use OpenBoard. It’s good, but my only problem is the lack of images being copied to the clipboard unlike my default keyboard.

  • @CAPSLOCKFTW@feddit.de
    1•2 years ago

    I use FlorisBoard. It’s not perfect, but it has a fully featured clipboard and undo-redo functionality. Missing the swipe tho.

      • @nottheengineer@feddit.de
        1•2 years ago

        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.

        • @zerodawn@leaf.dance
          1•2 years ago

          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

          • @nottheengineer@feddit.de
            1•2 years ago

            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.

            • @zerodawn@leaf.dance
              1•2 years ago

              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.

  • fernandu00
    1•2 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!

    • Rin
      1•2 years ago

      Is it while using Jeroba for Lemmy? I had that problem with that app so I switched to Sync for that reason.

      • fernandu00
        1•2 years ago

        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

  • @someone@feddit.ch
    1•2 years ago

    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.

  • @DengueDucky@lemmy.ml
    1•2 years ago

    I use Gboard but with internet access disabled for it. I haven’t found a comparable open source keyboard yet.

    • @wax@lemmy.wtf
      1•2 years ago

      Same. Tried openboard again two weeks ago, but had to switch back. The predictions were just too bad

    • @1984@beehaw.org
      1•2 years ago

      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?

      • @DengueDucky@lemmy.ml
        1•2 years ago

        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.

  • @Onezero@lemm.ee
    1•2 years ago

    Any of them have good support for foldables? (I.e. Full keyboard on cover screen, thumb keyboard on main screen)

    • strawberry
      1•2 years ago

      @ashtrix shared a link for open board with gestures, this is what I use now

    • Metalero
      1•2 years ago

      Unexpected Keyboard, or any other keyboard and use a firewall (Netguard, Invizible Pro) to block internet access.