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?
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.
I just wanted to say how much I appreciate this whole vibe!
Life changing
Wow this works pretty well!
How did I not know about this?
Amazing. Thank you.
That’s impressive thank you. Gesture typing with it now.
How do you gesture type with it? Slide doesn’t work for me and there’s no option to enable it.
You have to go to the settings and turn gestures on. Also this is not the fdroid version. This is the version from the link above.
BTW that still uses Google’s proprietary gesture typing library internally: https://github.com/wordmage/openboard/commit/46fdf2b550035ca69299ce312fa158e7ade36967
There’s still no good FOSS alternative to Google’s library though so it is what it is.
Aha, that’s why it’s not on F-Droid. That makes sense.
Still, it doesn’t connect to the internet so unless there’s something very sneaky Google does in the background, it should be good?
Floris Board afaik has its own implementation of gesture typing, but that’s been stuck in beta without word suggestions, so it’s not really usable.
It is on F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.dslul.openboard.inputmethod.latin/
Edit: The version on F-Droid does not have swipe.
That’s the version without gesture typing. The fork uses the same name so they can be hard to distinguish.
Doh, my edit was slower than comment federation 😀
Wow, this is an awesome keyboard! I love the pointer moving with the spacebar.
Thanks for sharing. I’ve finally replaced Gboard. Now I have to adjust to the new key sizes, but at least I know my data is private
You can resize it in settings, at least the height. I have mine set to 80%. Before OB I was using GB and I recall setting it so both looked the same.
I’ve been looking for something like this for so long, thank you!
Voilà ! My first great piece of advice found on Lemmy! So thankful for this, and for witnessing the sudden growth of a great community here on Lemmy <3
I’m glad the word is spreading, i also found out a few weeks ago through Lemmy. The only bug that drives me up the wall is when trying to delete backwards to fix a word. It eventually eats the space to the PREVIOUS word, joining them together and making an even bigger mess. It also looks like it never got an update after September :(
I guess you’re using Jerboa? Apparently that’s a bug between
WebViewWebkit and the AOSP keyboard (which OB is based on), or something… I don’t quite get what’s going on…It actually happens on any window or app I’ve used, maybe they’re all webview instances… Dunnow.
I can live with no gifs, but I can’t live without emoji support :/
It has regular emojis
Weird I’m not seeing any options for emojis anywhere on the keyboard using S23 Ultra
It’s under ‘preferences.’
Long press the enter/return button (round, with an left point arrow). It’ll show you the emoji and clipboard buttons. 💡
Alternatively, you can turn on the dedicated emoji button on OpenBoard’s preferences.
You can also long press the comma button. There you’ll find the preferences and emoji buttons.
If you long press the comma key on the left of the spacebar, you’ll see an emoji icon on the far right.
Maybe you have the key disabled, look in settings under preferences. There’s a bunch of stuff you might want to tweak.
Thanks! The only thing I don’t like is that I can’t have arrow keys. It’s immediately better than SwiftKey for sure, so I’ll adjust.
You can use swiping on the space bar to move left and right at least.
AnySoftKeyboard has arrow keys and more gestures, but it’s not as refined overall imo.
Floris Board has gestures to move around IIRC, but not at the same time as gesture typing, and is lacking word suggestions.
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Damn, Swiftkey sends the typed text even in Incognito mode… 😱
GBoard learning algorithm has been federated since 2017 🤷♂️ edit
https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collaborative.html
That’s actually pretty cool
It works like this: your device downloads the current model, improves it by learning from data on your phone, and then summarizes the changes as a small focused update. Only this update to the model is sent to the cloud, using encrypted communication, where it is immediately averaged with other user updates to improve the shared model. All the training data remains on your device, and no individual updates are stored in the cloud.
My main deal breaker with most open source keyboards is the usually pretty bad multi language support. I type in three languages all the time and don’t want to have to switch keyboards every time I switch the language. Currently using SwiftKey, just because it handles multi-language (fairly) well.
There is a fork of openboard with multiple language support, but it’s missing glide typing. When these two features are merged it’s the perfect keyboard. Until then the language switch icon works well enough.
As mentioned on this thread elsewhere, try the fork with glide typing enabled . it works rather well.
Same. Gboard is the only software keyboard capable of multi-language input that “just works”. I tried OpenBoard, AOSP, Floris, Anysoft and while they seem okay in general, none supports polyglots as well as Gboard
This is also my main deal breaker. Gboard does pretty well for me but I only type in two languages.
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.
If you have Google play services the keyboard could phone home through play services. Shutting off network access isn’t 100% effective, especially for Google apps.
Obviously depending on your threat model this is fine.
If you are using Graphene, Play Services are themselves sandboxed and running as a user app with no privileges. I think they really can’t be accessed on graphene, unless specifically choosing to.
I have a limited understanding. But I believe in graphene the Google Play services are available in the user account that is running the Google Play services. So if you have a Google keyboard running as your main user and you have Google Play services running in your main user account they can talk to each other. That’s how apps like signal could use Google Play services for message detection.
But if you have a work account and a personal account and Google Play is only in the work account. The personal account cant cross talk to it.
FOSS is not just about privacy! Freedom is that important reason you should care about. FlorisBoard is my suggestion for you.
Is it actually actively developed? The last version is from September of last year.
Yes, it is. But it doesn’t update fast.
Ty, yeah. I could’ve checked the repo myself 😂
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.
The latest release being almost a year ago doesn’t exactly inspire confidence though.
Why is everyone obsessed with constant updates? It’s not broken, there’s nothing to fix. It’s a keyboard, I prefer it to be fast, reliable and not phone home.
I don’t need some bloated mess that will take 10 seconds to start and require a gigabyte of RAM because the devs need to push an update every week with new useless crap without testing it.
Regular updates doesn’t mean, new features all the time. It mostly means security updates, which are important.
It doesn’t have internet accesss. There isn’t much to worry about.
Ed: I understand that non-internet apps can be used for attacks as well, but maybe there just hasn’t been anything to update.
There are active forks, it might take some time until a successor is found that includes all MRs.
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Weren’t you the one who randomly mentioned it a few weeks ago? After which it’s been my favorite thing to recommend.
Holy crap! It’s amazing! I’m using it right now, and it’s great!
Ok I’m f-droiding right now :)
edit :just realized it’s different than the one you linked.
further edit: It’s much better than floris. Happy days, thank you for the suggestion.
Why Gboard is better at gestures? That’s because it tracks you.
Badum tssss :D
If you’re on graphene OS then just uninstall GBoard and when youre installing it back uncheck the network permission checkbox. Easy as pie
No need to uninstall. Just go into Settings - Apps - Gboard - Permissions. You can deny or grant any perms (including Network) there.
If you’re on GrapheneOS, you get the option to block an app’s network access when you install it. So you can use whatever keyboard you want and it can’t call home.
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.
The major feature that’s missing is autocorrect, rely on it a lot
I checked every keyboard on F-Droid, Floris is the best keyboard you can find now.
Same and I agree, I’ll have to download it again later.
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!
Tried it for a few minutes, it just feels off. It could just be the haptics? Idk this makes sense it just really makes me aware I’m typing on a screen
Check the settings.
I do like FlorisBoard but japanese support is lacking it seems and as a learner, it made me have to go toward Gboard. Granted I am able to put GBoard behind a firewall and cut off it’s network connectivity.
I believe some custom ROMs use an AOSP version that is very simplified, but it’s not a 1:1 replacement. I’ll be following this to see if anybody has suggestions.
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.
Leaving this up because there are some good discussions here already and it’s a great question. I’d just flag rule 2 in the sidebar and that we ask questions and recommendation requests to be posted in !askandroid@lemdro.id instead. Thanks!
Off topic question, don’t you guys think splintering the Android community into multiple communities specifically for certain things when there are so few people on the Lemmy platform will lead to the instance becoming driy without content? Not sure if there’s been discussion about this yet.
Lemmy unfortunately doesn’t currently have functionality that could help people curate the type of content they want to see from within a single community (e.g., hiding posts, filtering by tags). Maintaining separate communities is more work for the moderators but gives people the choice to decide what kind of content to subscribe to when populating their “Subscribed” view.
Our hope is to foster a space that’s scratches the r/android itch with !android@lemdro.id, while also having a space set aside for questions, support, and seeking recommendations with !askandroid@lemdro.id. There’s also a tendency toward better quality responses for the latter when it’s in a community of people who have deliberately subscribed because they like to help folks out. That’s the thinking at least.
Do feel free to join us on the Matrix chat anytime! https://matrix.to/#/#lemdro.id:matrix.org
To those who have been recommending Florisboard in this thread: Thank you. I’ve longed for a good FOSS keyboard, but always found they lacked enough features that I was willing to compromise and stick with gboard. Florisboard, using the latest beta from IzzyOnDroid, absolutely hits the mark already. It’s missing a few features, like word autosuggest, but I can live without that for a while.
maybe using a firewall to block it’s internet access?
Any suggestions on how to bead in on it’s connections?
I’d expect it to use some QUIC type protocol reaching out to one of the generic Google shortcutted domains, but that’s 100% speculation and 0% testing.
Searching has brought up pcapdroid (it’s on fdroid) as a way to watch network traffic from apps via local vpn. I only just installed it myself though so you know as much as I do at this point.
I don’t know how much of a difference it makes in terms of Gboard phoning home, but you can disable a bunch of data sharing options in the Privacy section of Gboard’s settings:
F-Droid has a lot of security issues(if you care about security), use Neo Store if you want access to F-Droid apps with a more secure app.
EDIT: Even better to use Obtainium and add the links of the APP’s own Github/GitLab repo to it.
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 think OpenBoard is as close as it gets. There are no features like stickers but the layout is very similar.
There are no features like stickers (…)
I’m sold! I hate stickers. x)
What you really want is OpenBoard with gesture typing.
