Developer: SwiftKey Team
Platform: Android
Price: Free
For a long time now, one of the many things Android has had over it’s Apple counterpart, is the ability for users to swap out the on-board OEM keyboard for another of their choice. In fact, this is such a commonly done thing these days, and such a subconscious selling point for Android, that Apple have confirmed they will be introducing this feature in the next version of their own Operating System.
There has been a whole wealth of keyboard apps available, from third-party developers, on the Play Store; and I have pretty much tried them all. Swype was okay, but a little featureless beyond it’s not-so-unique-to-just-it party trick. Google’s Stock Keyboard was pretty good as vanilla typers go. Kii was a jack of all trades, but master of none. They all have little things that appeal to certain types of people, and all of them have their merit, but none shine as brightly or are as all encompassing as SwiftKey.
Let’s start off with the fact that it used to be a premium app, in that not only did it cost, but it was tagged at the slightly higher end of the scale – a little under a fiver if memory serves? Whilst I think it was money well spent, having tried all of the free alternatives, and being thoroughly underserved by all of them. However, I can appreciate that some people begrudge paying more than 60 or 70 pence for an app of such subtle impact on their daily phone usage. Well, due to it’s sheer popularity and astronomical success (10,000,000+ global downloads), the SwiftKey development team rather graciously moved the whole app over to a “freemium” product. Yes, that’s right, the best keyboard in the mobile device universe is now free!
It’s two main selling points for me can be broadly defined as it’s customisability, and it’s intelligence. Let’s look at the former first; sometimes, a keyboard is great as it is. However, there are times when you are busy, multitasking or in a rush, and you can’t quite get across the whole board, or keep misskeying whilst typing. With SwiftKey, this is a thing of the past as you can rescale and resize the keyboard to suit your needs at any given moment. Add to this, the ability to change the layout (colour, key positioning etc) and even undock the keyboard from the bottom of the screen, and have a floating “widget” of sorts, and you’ve got one seriously amazing keyboard. Looking at the latter, then, and I wouldn’t be far wrong in saying SwiftKey is the smartest keyboard app on the market. With permissions for all of your social media and messaging apps, SwiftKey runs in the background (with minimal power consumption, I might add!) and analyses every message you ever send, and begins to learn the style and intricacies of your written linguistics. This sounds scary and a little “Big Brother”, but trust me that information is only stored locally. You will never have seen predictive text like it…
I know keyboards don’t feature in many people’s daily thoughts – I have come to the realisation that I am a bit odd in this regard – but when you consider that over 75% of your daily mobile device usage figures a keyboard in there somewhere, why should you settle for just the middle-of-the-road, basic OEM stuff? There is no better app for all of your typing needs, and every mobile device on the planet should be running this beauty.
Pros:
- Best third-party keyboard in the Android ecosystem
- Customisation of layout is second-to-none
- Docking feature is fantastic!
- Perfect for all screen and hand size
- It’s now free!
Cons:
- ……
- It’s too perfect?
MOANING SUITS 
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