Simple Keyboard is both on F-Droid and Play Store. https://github.com/rkkr/simple-keyboard
OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your privacy
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Re: OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your privacy
#12I use AnysoftKeyboard (on F-Droid) [1]. I's pretty good, but has issues with the French apostrophe, that's often used to combine words.
It also has multiple keyboard layouts, of which "terminal" compares favorably to hacker's keyboard. I like that it is configurable, and has a lot of text editing tools when swiping space up.
I admit I lost some typing speed when I switched from the alternatives, but I'm happier with it.
Re: OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your privacy
#13I would love it if we could get something like SwiftKey, but actively developed. Its predictions are magic, but lately it has been getting more and more buggy, suggesting words that don't exist, changing already-correct words to nonsense, and refusing to learn.
Try AnySoftKeyboard. Works great and is FOSS.
In my experience, the predictions were atrocious and not very smart, at least in French. It also couldn't detect words that had personal pronouns or determiners with an apostrophe, I had to type the apostrophe manually which is a no-go for me.
And it does not support having multiple languages at once which is incredibly inconvenient when you frequently have to switch between 4 languages when typing and when you often mix some of them.
But if you type without the autocorrect and the predictions, it can be great, I guess.
Re: OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your privacy
#14No gesture typing, unfortunately. I miss that feature from GBoard, whenever I try an open source one.
Yes, ASK has it, but it is not at all smart about figuring out what word I mean if I happen to not start my gesture on the exactly right starting letter.
Re: OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your privacy
#15Fun fact, one of my banking app prevents me from launching it if I do not use a "certified" keyboard app. I had bad luck with any keyboard from F-Droid.
Re: OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your privacy
#16Great project. It's funny that we are at a point where even keyboard apps are spying on your personal and private data. Crazy.
Yes, a keyboard app just should not allowed to have a network connection, but yeah, a thing to dream in 2021.
As an Android user, not developer, I wanted to ask how are permissions on Android these days.
Is "internet access" permission just granted for any app by default without asking the user?
There were initiatives (probably 3rd party) for more granular permissions, but I haven't noticed this becoming common. I vaguely remember that Android started asking for some individual permissions not upon installation, but only when they were first used by the app, e.g. camera access. Why is this not the case for internet access?
In a nutshell, how did permission granting in stock Android develop from say Android 3.x times?
I understand that some keyboards want to provide suggestions using a dictionary they download online. Also, I used to use SwiftKey once which wanted to read all my mail to produce better suggestions. Is there even a good way to balance the benefits (features) and risks (uploading a key log if the app is sold/abandoned and taken over by an attacker)?
Re: OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your privacy
#17Fun fact, one of my banking app prevents me from launching it if I do not use a "certified" keyboard app. I had bad luck with any keyboard from F-Droid.
Banking apps are such a disgrace. Full of weird ideas about what is ok and what is not and which data and whatnot they need or else they won't run and in the end it doesn't help at all.
Re: OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your privacy
#18No gesture typing, unfortunately. I miss that feature from GBoard, whenever I try an open source one. Yes, ASK has it, but it is not at all smart about figuring out what word I mean if I happen to not start my gesture on the exactly right starting letter.
No gesture typing in 2011, ahem, 2021 is not even worth considering to me.
I'm using a closed source keyboard because it just works better than all the open stuff (at least when I last tried various keyboard in ~2018), but have it firewalled off completely in AfWall+. That means no updates, though it learns new words like COVID-19 well enough from me, but also no data leaking (I'd happily contribute typing stats if it were some non-profit handling my data).
Re: OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your privacy
#19Does that mean that the "default" keyboard on Android does not respect my privacy?
As in, what does it do? Should I be worried about entering username, passwords etc from my Android device?
Re: OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your privacy
#20I'm using FlorisBoard which is amazing!. It's just recently developed and many features still WIP. But excited to see the future!