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?
If you’re on calyxos, grapheneos, or lineageos you can disable network permisions for that app. If not, use netguard as a firewall and block it.
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.
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.
OpenBoard, Florisboard, AnySoftKeyboard
THERE ARE ALTERNATIVES, PEOPLE!
I installed all three.
OpenBoard has no swiping support at all.
AnySoftKeyboard is glitchy, moving the cursor around unexpectedly and inserting spurious characters.
FlorisBoard’s swiping is very inaccurate, to the point that it’s barely faster than typing characters one-by-one.
I hope this situation improves soon…
Well uhhh, kinda late, but the “original” openboard project hasn’t got an update in like, 12 months. There are forks, though.
Fork with glide typing - Haven’t received an update in 11 months https://github.com/erkserkserks/openboard
“New” fork: https://github.com/Helium314/openboard
Good to hear. Hopefully at least one of these forks lands in F-Droid soon.
There’s a fork of OpenBoard with swipe typing at https://github.com/erkserkserks/openboard
I’ve found this to be better than any of the alternatives.
I use the same, it’s just openboard + the propetary swipe lib
I dropped gboard and started using FlorisBoard. It’s a lot more crude and don’t have the same features, but I’m very happy with it and will not go back.
I preffer my privacy over features, and using the software and reporting feedback helps it betting better.
We really need to ditch Google.
I use SwiftKey with internet access turned off. Works well enough though obviously the gif and stickers won’t work.
FOSS is not just about privacy! Freedom is that important reason you should care about. FlorisBoard is my suggestion for you.
Used FlorisBoard for a good while, it’s the perfect replacement imo. I don’t remember exactly but there was a certain feature missing for me so I uninstalled it but it may have been implemented by now.
I checked every keyboard on F-Droid, Floris is the best keyboard you can find now.
Well outside of F-droid (for some reason) is OpenBoard with gesture typing
I only trust F-Droid and I don’t install any apps from outside of it!
Yesterday I installed Grapheneos so I’ve swapped to florisboard. Not bad but it’s very specific on where you swipe using gestures. I’m slowly getting used to it but gboard was a lot more forgiving.
Why Gboard is better at gestures? That’s because it tracks you.
I hate Gboard. So I use SwiftKey which is the best one.
I use OpenBoard from F-Droid.
I use a fork of OpenBoard with Swipe Typing libraries added to it.
Any idea why that isn’t in F-Droid?
I’m not sure, that’s a question for the Dev.
Some of the reason may be the hastle of rebranding, having two Openboards would be confusing so the fork would need to change names and icons and such. Some of it is also be this is for personal use, and we happen to find it, so they may not be interested in the expectation of maintaining it beyond their own useage. Some of it may be this is good enough, Openboard’s release cycle is pretty slow so the fork doesn’t need to be updated and released often, so an APK on Github downloaded twice a year is good enohgh for them.
What’s wrong with this?
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.
