I saw a post on reddit asking for open source android keyboards in recent years since a lot of the posts were older. One user recommended “Futo Keyboard”.
To be clear, I’m not affiliated with them but I’ve been trying them based on that reddit response and I just wanted to share here in case anyone else has been looking.
In short, this keyboard is about as close to awesome as you can get so far. Features I like:
- Feels like GBOARD
- Works fully offline
- Gesture typing (about 75% as accurate as GBoard)
- Built in offline speech to text (no third party engine needed to download
I’ve tried other options like heliboard and openboard and they are great too, but I think so far this has been the best I’ve tried and I wanted to recommend it on here in case anyone else is looking. Feel free to share any other setups or recommendations below!
EDIT: it was pointed out that it is source-available and not open source. Apologize for my initial assumption. The source and license can be viewed here: Futo Keyboard. It is fully open for non-commercial use. Anything commercial can have restrictions.
Ive been jumping to and from Futo keyboard and Heliboard.
Futo has swipe typing which is nice in a pinch, yet I prefer Heliboard almost entirely. However, I also really really like Futo’s voice typing which ether comes bundled with Futo keyboard or you can install it separately to use with other keyboards, yet when I do this. Google voice typing keeps turning itself back on repalcing Futo voice. So I’m a bit stuck between these two currently.
Heliboard can have swipe typing. It relies on a closed source library though, so…
https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard?tab=readme-ov-file#features