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.
Ok done a bit the reverse as many here: came from Heliboard and tested out FUTO (thanks to this post and some others telling it was great). And indeed, it works pretty well, better than Heliboard, especially in English (~40% of my use on Android - I’m French native speaker so most messaging is in French and I use English for some search, lemmy,…). So that’s say in French, futo is not as good as in English (suggestions are often less accurate than in English) but it’s still better than Heliboard. The swipe works better too (and doesn’t require an external (proprietary) library). The only drawbacks I see until now is the limitation to 3 suggestions in the suggestions bar, with Heliboard there was a 3 dot menu giving more suggestions and the lack of spellchecker.
I used AnySoft Keyboard until someone recommended Futo here on Lemmy. It’s been my daily driver for a couple of months now and I have to agree: It’s the best Open Source keyboard around, even if it’s technically still in alpha. It’s ridiculously good, even with languages other than English. It will nail German 20-character compound words first try and I haven’t seen any other keyboard do it this well.
I have to point out that Futo is not open source, it’s source available, but yes it’s pretty good and I’ve been using it for a couple months.
Ah noted. Thanks for clarifying that. I found the source: Futo Keyboard and read the license. Sure enough it is open but restricted by commercial use. As long as it’s not for commercial use, there is no restrictions on using the source.
