The only app I can’t live without. Except for gboard, all of my applications are Foss. There is no competition for gboard’s swipe typing, not to mention its many capabilities like as searching for gifs, stickers, being able to paste copied images, translating, and so on. I’d like to know how I can use gboard while maintaining my privacy. According to what I’ve heard, it sends all typing data to Google’s server. If you ask me, that’s a massive no-no. Do you have any suggestions?
What’s wrong with this?
For me, I use the clipboard a lot and having to hit that clipboard icon at the top right of the keyboard every time I want to paste something really adds up imo. I wish the last copied string would be in the suggested words bar like other keyboards.
I’ve been using it for a couple weeks, and it’s a lot slower than gboard. No swiping support, suggestions aren’t as refined, and basically impossible to use one handed.
It does have swiping though. It’s ripped straight put of gboard.
The version I’m using (from f-droid repo) does not have swiping. You might have a fork? Someone mentioned that elsewhere in the comments, I was not aware it existed.
yes, its a fork
Give OpenBoard with gesture typing a shot. No gifs and stuff, but gesture typing works together with suggestions, unlike either base OB or Floris. Someone casually mentioned it a few weeks ago and damn how much my life changed.
Wow, this is an awesome keyboard! I love the pointer moving with the spacebar.
Thanks! The only thing I don’t like is that I can’t have arrow keys. It’s immediately better than SwiftKey for sure, so I’ll adjust.
You can use swiping on the space bar to move left and right at least.
AnySoftKeyboard has arrow keys and more gestures, but it’s not as refined overall imo.
Floris Board has gestures to move around IIRC, but not at the same time as gesture typing, and is lacking word suggestions.
Awesome! Using space to go left and right is good enough for me!
Thanks a ton for that. I got to really liking OpenBoard since I started using it.
BTW that still uses Google’s proprietary gesture typing library internally: https://github.com/wordmage/openboard/commit/46fdf2b550035ca69299ce312fa158e7ade36967
There’s still no good FOSS alternative to Google’s library though so it is what it is.
Aha, that’s why it’s not on F-Droid. That makes sense.
Still, it doesn’t connect to the internet so unless there’s something very sneaky Google does in the background, it should be good?
Floris Board afaik has its own implementation of gesture typing, but that’s been stuck in beta without word suggestions, so it’s not really usable.
It is on F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.dslul.openboard.inputmethod.latin/
Edit: The version on F-Droid does not have swipe.
That’s the version without gesture typing. The fork uses the same name so they can be hard to distinguish.
Doh, my edit was slower than comment federation 😀
Life changing
I’ve been looking for something like this for so long, thank you!
Wow this works pretty well!
I’m glad the word is spreading, i also found out a few weeks ago through Lemmy. The only bug that drives me up the wall is when trying to delete backwards to fix a word. It eventually eats the space to the PREVIOUS word, joining them together and making an even bigger mess. It also looks like it never got an update after September :(
I guess you’re using Jerboa? Apparently that’s a bug between
WebViewWebkit and the AOSP keyboard (which OB is based on), or something… I don’t quite get what’s going on…It actually happens on any window or app I’ve used, maybe they’re all webview instances… Dunnow.
That’s impressive thank you. Gesture typing with it now.
How do you gesture type with it? Slide doesn’t work for me and there’s no option to enable it.
You have to go to the settings and turn gestures on. Also this is not the fdroid version. This is the version from the link above.
I’m so thrilled right now! I’m already typing this reply on OpenBoard and I’m loving it.
Gboard was also a big hurdle to my need to degoogle my phone. But not anymore!
Thank you so much. You’ve brighten my day. I’m both happy for knowing this and for finding about it on the fediverse.
I just wanted to say how much I appreciate this whole vibe!
Thanks for sharing. I’ve finally replaced Gboard. Now I have to adjust to the new key sizes, but at least I know my data is private
You can resize it in settings, at least the height. I have mine set to 80%. Before OB I was using GB and I recall setting it so both looked the same.
Voilà ! My first great piece of advice found on Lemmy! So thankful for this, and for witnessing the sudden growth of a great community here on Lemmy <3
How did I not know about this?
Amazing. Thank you.
I can live with no gifs, but I can’t live without emoji support :/
It has regular emojis
Weird I’m not seeing any options for emojis anywhere on the keyboard using S23 Ultra
If you long press the comma key on the left of the spacebar, you’ll see an emoji icon on the far right.
It’s under ‘preferences.’
Long press the enter/return button (round, with an left point arrow). It’ll show you the emoji and clipboard buttons. 💡
Alternatively, you can turn on the dedicated emoji button on OpenBoard’s preferences.
You can also long press the comma button. There you’ll find the preferences and emoji buttons.
Maybe you have the key disabled, look in settings under preferences. There’s a bunch of stuff you might want to tweak.
This is not a direct solution to your question. The only available option currently is Florisboard. I tried it but it didn’t work well for me. Ever since I’ve justbeen using openboard. Clean, fast, pretty accurate but no glide typing. There is an open issue for it and some POC work had been done but not merged into main.
Florisboard is what im currently using and its still missing spelling corrections and suggestions which makes it really hard to reccomend. Besides that i really like it. Make sure you go into the haptic settings and turn off “vibrate motor directly”, the system haptics for most devices is much better than the mushy ones enabled by default.
What do you mean, no competition? SwiftKey was the first to have swipe typing, and still does it best, because it learns how you swipe and adjusts itself for that.
Swype was the first to have it. It did so amazingly well and was better than SwiftKey while it was still around.
I loved Swype. Nuance made it a pile of shit though. One annoying thing after they bought it was that ‘K.’ would always autocorrect to K. d. Lang. You could not tell it to stop doing that.
I use SwiftKey now. Microsoft is getting more of my data.
I never ran into that issue, but it might be because I write okay!
Oh shit you’re right! I forgot all about Swype. I used that too, back in the day.
Gonna try this out. Hmm. Seem OK. No floating, no one handed mode, no pinyin input though. Good start.
My main deal breaker with most open source keyboards is the usually pretty bad multi language support. I type in three languages all the time and don’t want to have to switch keyboards every time I switch the language. Currently using SwiftKey, just because it handles multi-language (fairly) well.
There is a fork of openboard with multiple language support, but it’s missing glide typing. When these two features are merged it’s the perfect keyboard. Until then the language switch icon works well enough.
As mentioned on this thread elsewhere, try the fork with glide typing enabled . it works rather well.
You mean it can auto recognize the language you’re using?
This is also my main deal breaker. Gboard does pretty well for me but I only type in two languages.
Same. Gboard is the only software keyboard capable of multi-language input that “just works”. I tried OpenBoard, AOSP, Floris, Anysoft and while they seem okay in general, none supports polyglots as well as Gboard
To those who have been recommending Florisboard in this thread: Thank you. I’ve longed for a good FOSS keyboard, but always found they lacked enough features that I was willing to compromise and stick with gboard. Florisboard, using the latest beta from IzzyOnDroid, absolutely hits the mark already. It’s missing a few features, like word autosuggest, but I can live without that for a while.
I think OpenBoard is as close as it gets. There are no features like stickers but the layout is very similar.
There are no features like stickers (…)
I’m sold! I hate stickers. x)
What you really want is OpenBoard with gesture typing.
I believe some custom ROMs use an AOSP version that is very simplified, but it’s not a 1:1 replacement. I’ll be following this to see if anybody has suggestions.
I always see people recommend FlorisBoard, but I haven’t been able to leave OpenBoard for it on the basis of never getting autocorrect to work on FlorisBoard. Is that implemented and I’m not setting it up right, or do you all manage to text with 100% accuracy?
https://github.com/florisboard/florisboard/pull/2209
This is the pull request that implements that.
Holy monkeys!!! I’m absolutely giving this a shot right after work today, thank you so much!
Its not implemented yet but its coming based off of this discussion and yeah I misspell sometimes but not as much as one would think.
This is such a relief to read, I was getting the feeling that it’d been abandoned, and not having autocorrect yet, it was hard to pull the trigger. Thank you so much for sharing this
https://github.com/florisboard/florisboard/pull/2209
As soon as this gets merged, I’m done with Gboard I hope.
I use SwiftKey with internet access turned off. Works well enough though obviously the gif and stickers won’t work.
On my old phone i used Florisboard, it was pretty good and it’s FOSS as well.
These days I use the samsung keyboard as I recently switched to a samsung device. The keyboard customizations are really awesome, if you have KeysCafe module installed. Not sure how privacy friendly it is tho.
Not at all. And if you don’t grant it contacts permission, it will keep asking. Every. Damn. Time.
Since nobody has suggested it, I’m adding AnySoft Keyboard to the list of alternatives. It takes some time to train custom words but after that it’s actually quite nice. Even the swipe typing works quite well. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.menny.android.anysoftkeyboard/
Just installed it. Swipe typing seems to sort of work, although it’s even less accurate than Gboard. Still, I think I’ll keep it, at least for a while.
I do wish for a physical keyboard, though… Wouldn’t need gesture recognition then.
GBoard learning algorithm has been federated since 2017 🤷♂️ edit
https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collaborative.html
That’s actually pretty cool
It works like this: your device downloads the current model, improves it by learning from data on your phone, and then summarizes the changes as a small focused update. Only this update to the model is sent to the cloud, using encrypted communication, where it is immediately averaged with other user updates to improve the shared model. All the training data remains on your device, and no individual updates are stored in the cloud.
