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?
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.
Imagine asking this question 15 years ago
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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.
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I just noticed, that keyboard was created by one of the Lemmy Devs.
Quite fitting to see it posted here
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?
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I’m using MessagEase, which looks incredibly similar.
ETA: oh, its a remake. I might need to install and move my layout over.
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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 OpenBoard. It’s good, but my only problem is the lack of images being copied to the clipboard unlike my default keyboard.
Related: how good privacy wise is the default AOSP keyboard found in no-Google-services ROMs like Lineage and /e/? Does it still phone home?
Try Thumb-Key. It’s a keyboard made by Lemmy’s main developer. It uses a rather exotic layout, but once you get used to it, it is so much better than qwerty.
Oh wow, that is different.
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Seems like you haven’t found yours yet.
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I was just being a dick because of all the typos you had in there.
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Which one are you using? Asking so that I can avoid it :)
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
Here’s my lazy and unpopular solution
OCR is good enough these days that that’s not enough
You’ve never seen my handwriting
Ill go ahead and snail mail my boss lol.
Privacy respecting, but not open source:
Typewise
(Also a lot less typos and faster writing once you get used to it.)
Problem is, without seeing the code, how do you really know?
There are not many open source projects I’ve checked extensively, and I’m a software developer. But yes, it’s at least possible and some might have done it.
It’s a long shot, but does anyone know if CJK languages (not romanizations) are supported in any of these?
The alpha version of FlorisBoard has preliminary support for shape based Chinese layouts so you can write 汉字／漢字 with say, Cangjie or Zhengma. It also has the JIS kana layout for Japanese. Although, it doesn’t support Kanji Substitution yet, but you could use the shape based Chinese layouts for that in the meanwhile. As for Korean, it’s supported but no Hanja support yet.
While there isn’t a release for it yet, you can take any release artifact from the GitHub Actions CI and it should have it.
Try https://github.com/osfans/trime. It has multiple input schemas (i.e. pinyin, zhuyin, cangjie, etc.) to choose from, and they are great for typing Chinese. Admittedly it only supports the C in CJK, but it is absolutely worth a try if you don’t need Japanese or Korean.
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.
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Ah, my apologies, i didn’t know it was only limited to english
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.
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.
I use an OpenBoard fork with gestures after giving up Gboard.
https://github.com/erkserkserks/openboard/releases/tag/v1.4.5-gesture-typing
Does it support ota updates by any chance?
This was a one off that hasn’t been updated in almost a year. I doubt it’s getting any more updates.
Might want to look into Obtainium, automatic updates from any git repo.
Looks good
holy shit this is perfect
