What's your favorite Android keyboard?

I’ve only used GBoard (3 years) until I started setting up my mom’s new Sony Xperia. It had Swiftkey setup as the keyboard.

I hated Swiftkey! The numbers were so weird. They had the special characters first. 1 started in the middle of the screen. 7 wrapped around to the next line. What a mess! I constantly hit the wrong numbers because they were so far out of the expected position.

Swiftkey doesn’t recognize moving the cursor right/left by sliding your finger on the spacebar. I found myself missing that feature so much. I use it constantly to position my cursor for selecting text.

The letters were weird and too small. I had three times as many typos using Swiftkey.

Even the caps button was weird. GBoard has a black up arrow for Caps and white arrow for lowercase. Swiftkey uses a black arrow all the time and underlines it for Caps. Seems trivial? You’d be surprised how much that wrecks your typing.

I put up with Swiftkey for 2 days before installing GBoard from the Play Store.

I definitely learned a phone’s keyboard is a very personal preference and not to be trifled with.

What’s your favorite Android keyboard?

The other thing I had to turn off was adaptive brightness.

I was laying in bed reading the news. My screen gets dim. WTH? Is the display defective on this new phone? I discovered turning the phone slightly away or towards the bedside lamp made it restore brightness.

Every minute or two I had to do that dance turning my screen. That was tons of fun. :wink:

Thankfully under Settings, Display there’s an option to turn off Adaptive brightness.

Sony Xperia doesn’t run stock Android. Whipping it into something useable takes patience.

Android One is the current designation for Stock Android. I just bought a Nokia 7.1 that runs it.

I use Fleksy.

I use SwiftKey and have experienced none of the issues in the OP. If your issue is that the numberpad is on the right, you do realize that you can change the layout to put it on the left, don’t you?

I do agree with the OP that the spacebar needs to control the cursor. It’s too hard to position it precisely by tapping in the text field.

hm, on my ssmsung, the stock keyboard is a typicalish qwerty keyboard. 1-0 across the top, standard letter key arrangement below that with zxcvbnm as the bottom row with the caps key on the left (black outline arrow on light back ground, switch to blue for single Letter caps to WHITE ARROW OUTLINE ON BLUE FOR ALL CAPS) and backspace/delete on the right. Very bottom row is symbols/emotey key comma space bar, period and return/enter.

Double tap on the space bar inserts a period and I don’t have anymore than the usual difficulty typing on it than I’ve ever had with a “not actually a real keyboard” set up. Which is to say I can no longer type without correcting a typo every second or third word and I have also lost the skill of touch typing or being able to type something without even looking at the screen.

ETA. I really really miss the four directional arrow keys for controlling cursor placement in a body of text. As noted previously, mashing my finger onto the text field and hoping is a frustrating and nearly total futile effort.

Digital keyboards are always error prone and frustrating. I too was a skilled touch typist for most of my life. It served me well as a programmer.

Phone’s quickly ruined that life long skill. I notice it everytime I boot my PC. The real keyboard just doesn’t seem as comfortable & natural. It takes a couple days of heavy typing before I regain my touch typing accuracy & speed.

I suspect most people get used to whatever digital keyboard is stock on their phone. You’ll be annoyed and frustrated changing to a different keyboard. I could adapt to a new keyboard. It would take a few weeks.

I found it easier to switch my keyboard to GBoard. I prefer using the same keyboard on all my tablets and phones.

I’ve used SwiftKey for a number of years/phones now. Always download it to a new phone as part of setup.
The only thing I don’t like is they put some features behind a registration a few versions ago. No, I’m not giving my email just to have cooler colors.

I use Gboard. I started out with Swype.

I checked out Gboard on the G play store. And the permissions it requires are amazing.

Yeah, it’s much more than just a keyboard app but when I see an app needing permission to access contact list and such I move on.

Seconded. I’ve been happily using it for time, after trying various other keyboards.

On some phone keyboards, if you get anywhere close to where you want the cursor to be you can hold down the space bar and slide left and right for precise cursor placement. Just learned this recently.

Yeah, Gboard does that, which aceplace57 mentioned in his OP. SwiftKey doesn’t do that, a gripe which I have in common with aceplace57. I could use Gboard, it’s on my phone. But SwiftKey has a built in clipboard, which Gboard lacks, which makes copying and pasting much easier.

Fleksy also does that.

I’m a big fan of SwiftKey. Always install it on a new phone. No, it doesn’t have the sliding space bar feature, but you can turn on four arrow keys to move your cursor in two dimensions.

Another SwiftKey user here.

I did not know that, and I’ve been using SwiftKey for years. Ignorance fought, thank you.

I use swype, and get very annoyed when having to lift my finger for each letter when typing something into someone else’s phone, like my wife’s iPhone. Blæh!

Tell her she can download SwiftKey or Gboard for ios.

Well she’s perfectly happy tapping the letters in like a savage. :smiley: