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merryochatoday at 12:51 PM5 repliesview on HN

My biggest obstacle to de-Googling is the GBoard keyboard of all things. There's really no good open source alternative that even comes close.


Replies

eskoritoday at 1:23 PM

I was in the same boat until a year ago or so. FUTO^[1] finally provided a good text prediction/correction pair + that simply better feeling the Gboard has^[2].

[1]: https://keyboard.futo.org/

[2]: I never investigated this, so I always assumed that GBoard predicted what key I wanted to press when close to two letters. With FOSS keyboards, with a physically identical layout, I tended to make way more mistakes.

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lsowentoday at 1:21 PM

Have you tried the FUTO keyboard? I actually find I prefer it to gboard now.

https://keyboard.futo.org/

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everyday7732today at 4:10 PM

Heliboard is an option. No gesture typing out of the box but you can install an external library for that and it works good.

xethostoday at 3:43 PM

Evidently some disagree, but I'm on your side. Biggest reason I didn't immediately think of "But what would I use for a keyboard" is my Q25 has on built-in.

UnifiedPush, F-Droid, a GMaps webview (arguably cheating, but I'm not RMS), NewPipe or Invidious are all good-enough alternatives, but I remember struggling to find a keyboard that felt right when I was using a Pixel 2 for a fortnight.

I think I went with the oldest Fleksy or Minuum APK I could find (from a reputable source), as they were fine without GApps.

Though I'd also like to call out the fact that AOSP has talkback, the accessibility service built-in, but there's no AOSP TTS engine to use it with. This is especially noticable when trying to use any spoken directions in OSMAnd, as it requires a TTS engine to use that function.

The only reason it's not the dumbest thing about Google's stewardship of AOSP is that I'm not sight impaired - as it stands, the multi-trillion-dollar corporation ripping out the built-in SIP client in their phone OS takes that prize

codedokodetoday at 2:13 PM

I do not type a lot on the phone (I own a laptop), so no worries.