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?
Many years ago when I was using it heavily, it was extremely good. If I had to estimate, 80 or 90 percent of the time I got the exact word I desired when swiping. Very low rate of having to make corrections.
I don’t know when exactly it changed. I think I may have upgraded to a newer phone and despite migrating the data successfully it just didn’t “recognize me” anymore. Tried a couple keyboards before settling on Gboard, which was the most consistent (read: least frustrating) at that time, but still noticeably less accurate than Swiftkey.
I generally have automatic updates disabled, so it’s entirely possible that a newer version on the old phone would’ve been bad too, but I don’t think I thought of that at the time.