I’m looking for a privacy-respecting open-source android keyboard, and so far I’ve found:

Does anyone have any experience with these (or other alternative keyboards)? Which one would you recommend?

  • fernandu00
    23·
    10 months ago

    I use openboard but it gets me mad sometimes when I start deleting characters and it removes the space between the last word…sometimes it’s really annoying!

    • Rin@lemm.ee
      5·
      10 months ago

      Is it while using Jeroba for Lemmy? I had that problem with that app so I switched to Sync for that reason.

      • fernandu00
        3·
        10 months ago

        No way I didn’t see that! I thought it was while using the English keyboard since it doesn’t happen in message apps and the only place I use English keyboard is in Lemmy (jerboa) … I’ll switch to other app

    • Lemmchen@feddit.deEnglish
      3·
      10 months ago

      That’s a Jerboa bug with any keyboard AFAICT. Insane how this hasn’t been fixed yet.

    • pimento64@sopuli.xyz
      31·
      10 months ago

      That’s due to a bug with the AOSP keyboard that google has been ignoring for like 6 years.

  • CAPSLOCKFTW@feddit.de
    191·
    10 months ago

    I use FlorisBoard. It’s not perfect, but it has a fully featured clipboard and undo-redo functionality. Missing the swipe tho.

      • nottheengineer@feddit.de
        1·
        10 months ago

        But it’s quite bad, given their care for privacy there’s no way they can compete with google who has all the data.

        I know a bit of machine learning and I’m pretty confident I could hack something together that’s better than what florisboard has right now, but I’d have no idea where to even start integrating it.

        • zerodawn@leaf.dance
          4·
          10 months ago

          Agreed there isn’t any beating google, but everyone operates on different threat models. A bit of inconvenience for a bit of privacy may be worth it for some and not for others. From what little i used of it when i was trying it that yes it had much room for improvement but it was still useable. Once they get predictive text enabled i think the a swipe feature will really shine. But then again that’s just my humble opinion

          • nottheengineer@feddit.de
            2·
            10 months ago

            Google’s swipe typing is pretty damn good, but it isn’t magic. It gets a lot better after using it for a while so I’m sure they use reinforcement learning in addition to the dictionary.

            They’ve had it for quite a while and it’s good, so I doubt they are putting much work into improving it. And since we have phones with TPUs and multimodal LLMs now, I think it’s possible to beat google.

            The LLM would only need 3-10 words of context and the swipe data as input to generate a single word, so it can be very small. I don’t know much about the power of cellphone TPUs, but I think training an LLM with about 10M parameters on the fly should be possible. If that’s the case, we could beat google while doing everything locally on the phone, so no privacy compromises.

            Now that I think about it, it sounds doable. But then again I never did anything like this so I’m probably underestimating it by an order of magnitude or two.

            • zerodawn@leaf.dance
              3·
              10 months ago

              Beating google while being local would be the dream, wouldn’t it? What you say tracks but i’m like you, i’ve not done anything remotely like it so it’s very possible we’re underestimate indeed.

  • DengueDucky
    15·
    10 months ago

    I use Gboard but with internet access disabled for it. I haven’t found a comparable open source keyboard yet.

    • wax@lemmy.wtf
      4·
      10 months ago

      Same. Tried openboard again two weeks ago, but had to switch back. The predictions were just too bad

    • 1984@beehaw.org
      2·
      10 months ago

      I can’t do that on my side, perhaps because it’s a system app on my Pixel phone? Or do I need to be rooted for that?

      • DengueDucky
        2·
        10 months ago

        It isn’t a system app for my phone, so maybe. You could still use something like InviziblePro or RethinkDNS to disable its internet access without root though.

      • DengueDucky
        5·
        10 months ago

        Gboard isn’t open source, which is why I disable internet access for it.

  • ChickenAndRice@sh.itjust.works
    12·
    10 months ago

    I use thumb-key, made by dessalines. I downloaded it from fdroid

    If you check out screenshots, you’ll see that its a very non traditional type of keyboard that requires time and effort to get the hang of.

    Once you do, you will be able to type roughly as fast as you would with predictive swipe

  • mat@linux.communityEnglish
    101·
    10 months ago

    Any keyboard with no internet permission should be “privacy-respecting”, as it can’t (as I understand it) send any data back to the developers. I’m personally a big fan of Unexpected Keyboard, though it’s definitely something to get used to.

  • Pantherina@feddit.de
    7·
    10 months ago

    All good but Florisboard has an internal clipboard with past entries. If you use its buttons (change in the settings, top row) and not the android ones, the system never gets your clipboard

    • Apeeksiht@lemdro.idEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Looks great thanks for the suggestion. Im1. Trying to switch from swiftkey. I tried florisboard but they don’t have numpad.

      edit i take my words back this keeb isnt meant for reg&lar use