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Swiftkey Keyboard Android is now free
- ElliotH 12y agoThe new themes are quite nice, and it is a nice touch to give a free 'premium' theme pack to users who paid in the past.
- tmikaeld 12y agoThey added in-app-purchases instead, though doesn't affect the keyboard more then superficially (themes).
- sschueller 12y agoThank you for posting the link to the play store. The verge article I read earlier had no link which is very frustrating when reading something like his on a mobile device.
- motoboi 12y agoI bet they are aiming the iPhone market. Makes sense when you consider Swiftkey user base on android and how some iPhone users can become jealous of such a nice keyboard. As Apple opened the iPhone to this market, the strongest brand on Android may have a easier start.
- nobodyshere 12y agoI just wish I could remove their branded button from keyboard.
- ToastyMallows 12y agoI kind of like it because I hide the app from my app drawer and it's an easy way to get to the settings. To each their own though.
- nobodyshere 12y agoI'm not against it for everyone, I just want to have a choice there. This button usually stands out from the rest and is quite useless when you are actually typing.
- sschueller 12y agoI wish they had a semi-transparent theme.
- eropple 12y agoIt wouldn't do anything. The keyboard resizes the activity window. There's nothing behind it to show through it.
- marsvskittens 12y agoThere's an option to undock it from the bottom of the screen, in which case transparency could be useful.
- eropple 12y agoHuh, where? Maybe I have an old version? No update request though.
- marsvskittens 12y agoLong click on the "123" number button. You'll get a pop up menu with an undock option in it.
- cliveowen 12y agoIsn't the same thing already available on stock Android? I don't use it because I find it pretty inconvenient, but every time I swipe on the keys it appears.
- ivanche 12y agoWell, not exactely. When you try stock Android keyboard and then switch to Swiftkey, you realize that Swiftkey is intelligent. Stock keyboard becomes... hmm, ok, at best.
- wldcordeiro 12y agoThe only reason I continue to use the Google Keyboard over Swiftkey is the built-in emoji menu.
- thescrewdriver 12y agoThe stock android one is pretty poor compared to Swype.
- thomasahle 12y agoI have tried many different Android keyboards: Old and new stock ones, swype, ultimate, tons of non-qwerty ones; but I always end up coming back to Swift. It's just the only one that is Precise and Aggressive enough to support really fast typing. Good luck to them now, on iPhone!
- toxican 12y agoAs someone who jumped from Android to iPhone (it was curiosity, not a "I'm fed up with this! ARGH!" thing), I've been seriously missing the ability to use different keyboards. I cannot wait to be able to use them again.
- Nexxxeh 12y agoFor work I often have to use both. I loathe the iPhone keyboard. Is there a reason they don't change case of the letter display when you change the case of the letters? It seems ridiculous on a touchscreen display. (Done using the swipe of SwiftKey on a Moto E).
- jkscm 12y agoSame for me. Especially because I could never find a competing keyboard that handles multiple languages so well. Only minuum (http://minuum.com/ http://minuum.com/) could be an alternative for me since it is great to have more screen space.
- sinaa 12y agoThey seem to give you the 'premium' pack, even if you were only a trial user.
- stratford2072 12y agoDesperation as Fleksy slowly begins to destroy them
- Semaphor 12y agoCertainly not considering they only support one language at a time…
- safeaim 12y agoSo how will they make money now? By selling people's data?
- ToastyMallows 12y agoWell you can purchase in-app themes now, so I guess that's what they're banking on. Sorry but I have to throw a [citation needed] on your comment to stop the spread of FUD.
- safeaim 12y agoYeah, I might should have toned down my flippant tone, but I was genuinely curious as to how they are planning to make money. Obviously in-app themes is one choice, but I don't see that working out in the long run. Hopefully they will do great in the iOS store as it really is a good app!
- ssalenik 12y agoSelling an iPhone app for iOS8.
- _cipher_ 12y agoI can now give my data away for free instead of paying. Woo hoo. :)
- ch0wn 12y agoNo "cloud-enabled" app without snarky comments about data sharing. Sigh. I personally like the dictionary sync across devices. Especially because I use SwiftKey for German which always suffers from terrible dictionary coverage. But what stops you from disabling all online features?
- zz1 12y agoThe question is: once online feature is disabled, can you really be sure no information about you is shared beyond your back? Edit From what I gather they're not open source: I would be happier to see them go FOSS than free.
- Nyubis 12y agoIf you have App Ops you can prevent any app from phoning home, or just gathering sensitive data in the first place (although you can't stop a keyboard from storing your keystrokes).
- drdaeman 12y agoThat's a valid concern, though. Why should one invest their time in firewalling their phone or reverse engineering app, when cloud sync could be put into a separate package?
- ch0wn 12y agoThat's simply a question of demand and resources required. This is certainly not a trivial task that requires engineers building it. If more people would voice these concerns it probably something Swiftkey would consider.
- jpdus 12y agoI cant understand whySwiftkey still cant learn from WhatsApp. They had such a big advantage in the mobile keyboard market and are going to loose it because of missing new communication channels...
- drdaeman 12y agoAnother keyboard that requires network connectivity, profile/contact data, call state, access to photos/recordings (eh?) and even wants to send SMS[1]. Do users really don't care and blindly ignore all security warnings? Just wondering why keyboard makers don't provide "restricted" builds of their software, that intentionally lack some features, but still serve their purpose by providing an efficient method to type at a reasonable price. ___ [1] EDIT: Not sure, this could be localization error in a Play Store. Reportedly it says "read your text messages" in English, but for me what I see roughly translates to "send SMS and MMS".
- cwyers 12y agoThe SMS permission is so that it can read your SMS messages to use as training data for their word-completion prediction features. As to why SwiftKey doesn't strip out most of the features that makes it better than the official keyboard and sell it to a small market of people who don't want the features that are the app's actual selling point... well, that's why, those are the features that differentiate them, without them they're not really that special.
- drdaeman 12y ago> The SMS permission is so that it can read your SMS messages Either it's a bug in a Play Store, or we're talking about different permissions. For me, it says (in Russian, no idea how to switch language) "Отправка SMS и MMS (может взиматься плата)" which translates to "Sending SMS and MMS (fees may apply)". Unless Google broke something with their recent permission revamp, I assume it's SEND_SMS, not READ_SMS permission. And that's worrying - I fail to see why should I grant such permission to a keyboard. It's not SMS-sending app, I have a separate one for that.
- crazypyro 12y agoAppears to be a localization error? Here's what it looks like in English.[1] [1]http://i.imgur.com/li8jHu2.png http://i.imgur.com/li8jHu2.png
- csdrane 12y agoI found SwiftKey's performance to deteriorate markedly after a few months of use. After that I switched to Kii, which was fine. But now after jumping around I am back to stock, which I actually enjoy a lot more than I did the other two. Google's keyboard feels much more responsive to me and I don't feel like it handles swipe recognition pretty well. It's not as great at prediction but I found using that feature to slow me down anyway. Only feature I really miss is deleting an entire word by swiping space-backspace
- antirez 12y agoJust installed, times better than the stock one at predicting what I'm typing, larger keys, much better overall experience.
- inthewoods 12y agoI guess this is part of the continued move away from paid apps - but as a user, I found this confusing. Swiftkey states that their goal is to get as many people using the app as possible, so they're making it free - but nowhere do they define for their users how they are planning on making money. That leaves me thinking the one of the following: you'll be selling my data, you'll be doing in-app purchasing, you've found some other magical revenue source, or you'll be going out of business. I don't want to spread FUD here - my point is that as a paying customer this is not a good way to communicate. I have no idea what the strategy is - but if you want me to remain a customer, I personally would like to understand what is going on.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- Karunamon 12y agoyou'll be selling my data Not mentioned anywhere, not even in the EULA. FUD. you'll be doing in-app purchasing Err.. did you miss the announcement of the IAP theme store? Because that's exactly what they're doing. my point is that as a paying customer this is not a good way to communicate. I have no idea what the strategy is Sounds like give away the base app and sell value adds. A perfectly legitimate business model.
- inthewoods 12y ago"Not mentioned anywhere, not even in the EULA. FUD." Given that they have no last update date for their Privacy, Terms, et al on their website, I have no idea if these are current. "Sounds like give away the base app and sell value adds. A perfectly legitimate business model." As a user of the application, I don't know what they are doing - they did not communicate it. That's my point. "Err.. did you miss the announcement of the IAP theme store? Because that's exactly what they're doing." No, I saw that part of the announcement - that doesn't clear it up for me. It indicates that they'll be charging for add-on themes -- nothing else. It doesn't assure me that they'll NOT be selling my data (as an example).
- 12y ago
- dmix 12y agoThey are essentially a keylogger when the 'cloud' service is turned on. It uploads everything you type but tries to detect password fields and avoid them. They insist their security and cryptography is quality, but we've heard that a lot recently. Their lack of an obvious business model is a bit worrying.
- drdaeman 12y agoThey do send raw unprocessed texts? Thanks for warning. From my understanding, unless some really tricky and CPU-savvy math's in works, it probably would be more efficient to update language model on-device then push the change. Not only it would somehow avoid (not really, but at least obscure a bit) revealing the exact typed texts, but also lower the necessary server-side processing.
- dmix 12y agoThe text prediction still works fine locally without the cloud feature. The data gathering is probably to refine their algorithms. Which I'd expect would include raw text input. Which in a surveillance sense is a bit scary, someone seeing your unfinished thoughts or pre-self-censorship messages.
- swiftkey 12y agoHi, thanks for the feedback. SwiftKey Cloud is a secure, opt-in service that allows you to safely backup your language data and sync it across your devices. We take your data security seriously and you can read how we keep your data safe here: http://swiftkey.com/en/data-security/ http://swiftkey.com/en/data-security/