Any Soft Keyboard is an open-source, on-screen keyboard with multiple languages support with emphasis on privacy.
This is one of the most customizable keyboards available.
To activate: Launch ‘AnySoftKeyboard Settings’ App, and follow the instructions.
Main features:
* Multi languages keyboard support via external packages.
* Completion dictionaries for multiple languages.
* Also completes your typed words from you contacts names (Android 2.0+)!
* And, learns your typing behavior to provide next-word prediction.
* Multi-Touch support (as in, pressing SHIFT along with other characters).
* Extension keyboard (swipe your finger all the way up out of the keyboard).
* Voice Input support (Android 2.2+).
* Compact/Phablet Mode.
* Gesture support:
** Experimental Gesture-Typing (enable in the Settings app).
** Swipe left or right to switch layouts.
** Swipe up to shift.
** Swipe down to close the keyboard.
* Theme support (comes with a few built-in skins, and more available in Play Store).
* Night Mode: Quiet, Dark keyboard at night time (enable in the Settings app).
* Power-Saving Mode: No vibrations, sound, suggestions and a dark theme (enable in the Settings app).
* Build-in user dictionary words editor.
* Build-in abbreviations dictionary: create shortcuts for words and sentences.
* Utility keyboard (swipe up from space-bar):
** Clipboard actions copy, paste, select-all, select selectively (long-press select and use arrow keys).
** Voice input
** Arrows
* And many more features!
Support at: https://github.com/AnySoftKeyboard
I like the app, however, there are inconsistencies and redundancies with key symbol availability. For example, on some apps the apostrophe is not available and on other apps the symbols that are available on the main keyboard, such as the colon, are giving twice. I’d like the keyboard keys to stay consistent across apps.
– Requires a healthy minute to go through the settings. – Key spacing is too tight and there isn’t an option for border adjustment, so I am frequently mistyping and missing keys. -understanding that Swype is in beta, it is extremely innacurate and needs more attention in the future. – I’ve deducted a star because the app hasn’t been updated in a year
It seems the original developer of this keyboard is no longer? I realize the keyboard is open source and all but it is a bit disappointing that it hasn’t seen an update since almost six months or more ago. The colored navigation bar hasn’t worked correctly ever since Android 11. Not a complete deal breaker but it definitely makes the keyboard feel more in sync with the device without the ugly black bar on the bottom.
I really like this keyboard a lot and I feel that this keyboard will quickly be my main keyboard to use. Its really customizable and simple to use. One thing I do wish was implemented better is the gestured option to delete.For example, I feel like whenever I swipe left to delete it is hit or miss. I usually end up selecting text instead of deleting a word. It needs to feel more sensitive. To be entirely honest I am not sure if there is an option for this since there are a lot of options available but not organized that well. Overall I would say it is still the best keyboard out there.
It’s OK. So far the best alternative I’ve found for privacy. Swype input still needs some tweaking, keyboard language randomly changes from what I had it set at. Autocorrect is somewhat limited and sometimes doesn’t know what I mean when I’m only one letter away from a word and when you go back to correct a word, you have to watch because ot only looks at the part you just fixed instead of the whole word and tries to correct that.
A lot of work must have gone into this app for it to be so polished. That being said I have two critiques: The option menus are a bit crazy and make it hard to find things, mostly just because their are so many options many of which are hidden in secondary menus. Secondly I think maybe it doesn’t like the physical hardware navigation buttons on my Kyocera. This is not a notable issue but it would be nice to take back the bottom slice of pixels that leave a gap at the bottom of the screen.
The spacebar was super tiny, which I didn’t like, and the long press options made no sense to me. Not bad, just not what I’m used to and I didn’t want to spend that much time relearning a keyboard layout. The theming options are (some form of) dark / white or an auto theme with your app that might be a truly obnoxious color. But otherwise I liked how you could customize the strength of the feedback, and the rest of the options looked interesting too
Highly customizable keyboard with split keyboard feature in landscape mode which I need. Has no swipe capabilities and the layout of the settings is like a complicated labyrinth but if you find them all you can design a great keyboard for yourself. Some bugs have been ignored for years but it is an open source project so who am I to complain? Good job all around.
Honestly I love this keyboard, it’s private, it has autocorrect, and its easy to navigate symbols/letters. A couple of quality of life things though: I’d love for the apostrophe/period and the question/comma buttons to be consolidated so there can be a bigger space bar, and also a theme to get rid of the arrow keys, I generally don’t need those so it’d be nice to have it an optional toggle so I can have a shorter keyboard. Other than that the switch to this keyboard has been smooth!
Overall im pleased with this keyboard. Its great to get away from Google tracking. But the one issue that I cant seem to get past is the tiny spacebar. I’ve looked everywhere in the settings and tweaks for a fix but see nothing and its annoying enough to consider a different keyboard. The period to the right of the spacebar is so close that when I really get typing, and then look back at all that I’ve written, instead of a space between words, its a period.like.this. Makes quick typing difficult
I love how this keyboard keeps everything offline and still allows for word prediction and customization, however it needs some fixes. First of all, you cant set it to have numbers at the top while still having than ability to switch to symbols, second, the key vibration.feature doesn’t work at all, and third, key vibration is still WAAY to heavy on the”light” setting.
It’s close to being as good as GBoard, but it misses the mark. You really have to dig through the settings after you first install it to get things just right, so I think many users will be driven away by that. The UI is starting to feel very outdated. Overall, it’s decent but I think the settings should be organized more like Swiftkey or GBoard and have a search button as well to make things easier.
Negative 1 for COVID ad on top of keyboard. Really not needed and is destracting. Cant find a way to get rid of it. Ultimately uninstalling because of that. Otherwise OK keyboard as far as privacy keyboards go, but still like openboard better. This has more customization (and I really like the animation), but spell check doesn’t seem to be as good. It also takes a little bit to get use to the layout (not too long though)
Could be perfect but is missing basic functionality: Need to be able to use one keyboard layout with multiple (2 to 3) language dictionaries merged together in predictive text. I shouldn’t have to hit a language key to swap dictionaries. This function, along with privacy, is my highest priority as a user. I’d be happy to pay for the app once this capability is implemented. Edit: apparently it finally supports multilingual text prediction…but not via the settings menu. Wth.
Beautiful, but I am so confused. This thing goes deep! The text editing navigation keyboard has a button you drag up to access numbers & punctuation but it ONLY inserts a ! when you touch ANY symbol. And what is the control key for?? Swipe LEFT or RIGHT to switch from letters to numbers and punctuation. There’s also an option “space switches keyboards”, but it doesn’t do anything but insert a space. So I don’t know what they mean by that.
I am so far loving it I love that it is open source so I can trust it more than ones that are not open source. There are a lot of customization options compared to other non open source keyboard. So I would highly recammend it to anyone looking for a new keyboard for a phone. The amount of things you can change are actually insane. But the issue I see is there is no search button that I am aware of to easily find a setting but it is a small issue that I wont remove a star.
Very good with a couple knitpicks. Word prediction/correction needs some work and are worse than gboard and swiftkey. For example, if I accidentally hit v or b instead of spacebar, it doesn’t have a correction of two words. Wish I could have the arrows (w/ home & end) on any layout without needing to swipe up. It’d be nice if I could add to the included 2byte ASCII kaomojis (custom input) since ones I regularly use aren’t listed.
people complaining about the keyboard layout really need to look into the options. they’re extensive and have something for everyone. it just takes some time. a few critiques though. first, swipe typing is no good. its still in beta tho. second, typo correction is leagues behind GBoard. but it gets better as you use it and it learns about your typing. Lastly, emoji search doesn’t use v intuitive terms. I gladly accept the shortcomings to keep my privacy and have all these configuration options.
So I do like this keyboard, but the swipe is still needing work on word prediction. On also having issues where the keyboard will just stop working and freeze my screen to the point I have turn screen off and back on. Please review this! I love the customization though and everything you can change. If they fix those things, its a gboard contender for sure. A possible add is selecting what to delete with delete key. Thank you!
Please if could keyboard that uses amoled friendly colors. Thank you for adding workmen keyboard still you are the only andriod app that has it. I like this app but… find that split screen is to far to the left & right when split. If could please… have away to the split to the users liking that would be helpful. Ex use pics how far to the left and right the user wants the split to be and have the opt for both landscape and portrait mode. Also it not easy to find options that you want.
Really decent overall. Two changes that should be made: First, a bottom layout where the comma key is removed and replaced with an emoji key. The order on the bottom would then be: the number key, the emoji key, space, period, and enter. In order to write a comma then have the long press on the period show a comma. Second, the ability to remove words from the built in dictionary (not the user created one).
Needs spellcheck. There are 2 items that need to change. 1. Add spellcheck options. I don’t want to use Google for spellcheck and this keyboard does not show a red line under misspelled words. Auto correct is pretty good with one notable exception. 2. There are too many symbols on the bottom row. You could condense the punctuation,which would make the space bar bigger. The small space bar makes it difficult to type words properly and when you miss a space, autocorrect is not built for this.
I really have tried to like this. I installed it becuase I read they don’t sell your data like the gboard. JFC this thing is slow, I have to back up and retype due to inaccuracies all the time (the period is too close to the spacebar, tell my muscle memory this). I want to like it, I really do but its awful. I type faster on a 15 year old Nokia with 12 buttons.
Thank you so much. I really like your keyboard App! And I appreciate privacy! Please add a clipboard features, a shortcuts for words feature, keyboards that show the long press characters on the keys. More themes please (the downloaded one seem to be entirely new apps). The 2 figure swipes doesn’t work for me. Please correct me if I’m missing these features. Keep up the great work.
Once play with for a bit, able to see how intuitive and extremely customizable it is. The reason i only gave 4 stars is the talk to text option requests gboard….that would negate the privacy that i chose this keyboard for. Sadly, i have not found a free or paid option. Im even farther from having learned to develop a legitimately private/offline speech to text anysoft addition. Other than this 1 very personal irk, i am satisfied user.
Though it initially took some time to get it set up as I liked, I found this keyboard to be excellent. As a long-time user of SwiftKey I rarely ever find keyboard apps I like other than it but this one is very nice. The swipe and autocorrect has worked well for me. And I love that it asked for no sensitive permissions. One thing I would like to see is a little easier more functional use of emojis. Thank you to the developer for sharing. Grace and peace
Works alright but sometimes when copy pasting large text it will freeze and not go away requiring restart of the phone. Latest update also added that annoying red dot on the autocomplete bar that cannot be removed or disabled was the final nail in the coffin. Until they fix the copy paste freezes and remove that annoying red dot from the autocomplete I can’t recommend anyone to use this…
Ironically, the swipe keyboard will NOT recognise the word “swipe”, and recognition can be a little ropey with other words. It also doesn’t do contractions (like “doesn’t”) but what’s really annoying is when correcting a wrong swiped word the backspace should delete the whole word instead of having to delete each letter or holding down the backspace. Everything else works fine though.
Been using without incident for years until today, while typing a search for david bowie, lyrics to space oddity began to type themselves across the front of the keyboard.I had all autocorrect features off, incognito mode on. Unbelievably creepy and not sure how it happened or what it was. Edit:Happens every time I type ‘David Bowie’, seems to be some kind of easter egg. Not particularly happy with it, would like to know whether text is scanned locally to enable it and how to turn it off.Cheers
Great! Very configurable and due to its open source nature we know that our keystrokes are not transferred to anybody. The utility keyboard that you can get by swiping up on space (by default) is awesome. You don’t need to fiddle around trying to get to the typo that you just made; you can just use the arrow buttons. The only option I am missing and were not able to find is to adjust the size of the keyboard by an arbitrary value.
Wide range of layouts, including exotic ones like Dvorak, and a staggering choice of customization options. But works out of the box. No dubious data permissions. Only criticism is that auto correct occasionally replaces legitimate common words, both in English and German, and prediction is not as good as on the Samsung keyboard. Occasionally it freezes the phone for a few seconds when loading. Other than that it’s perfect.
Overall a pretty nice keyboard, it takes a while to get used to the layout of symbols, but that’s to be expected. My biggest issue is that I cannot add 1 letter words to my dictionary easily (I type it, it usually suggests something else, I click on the correct version, but even when it says ‘touch again to save’, it doesn’t save it)
Needs some polish but very good overall. There are a handful of built-in themes that should appeal to many users. It took some tweaking but I found a good combination that I like and will keep trying it further. The settings really need some reorganization. Also, if you keep the number row on top all the time, you will get two rows when you switch to the symbol keys. That’s just wrong. Honestly, it isn’t quite as good as Gboard for functionality but it is far more private!
Not bad at all, I see potential. There are a couple issues. I will outline them in the hope that someone will listen. (Please note: people are looking for alternatives to swiftkey and gboard, get it right and it could be a winner.) 1. “hide language button” – I still see “English” button on the screen when typing. not everyone needs more than one language. 2. Switching between Letters/Numbers/Symbols, the button to change to the next layout moves/changes. its daft, why not have a button that stays and always lets you switch between letters/numbers/symbols? (bottom left corner is my suggestion) it is not intuative as it is. 3. Allow people to set a picture as the back ground. we all like personalisation. I like how your keyboard works, but it is a work in progress at the moment, not ready to be a replacement.
I really wanted to like this app, but 36 frustrating hrs later I’ve given up. Time & again I set it up, used it for a while, then things would start going wrong – keys would change, glide typing would stop working, suggestions would stop or be completely unrelated to the word being typed. Apostrophes would sometimes be inserted, sometimes not. B&R wouldn’t work with ‘custom’ path. It seems a lot of work has gone into this app’s appearance & features, but it lacks reliable functionality.
Very nice, especially for those not wanting to broadcast everything they type back to some company. You should take the time to customise it, and also, know that it takes a little time to adapt to you. Swipe/slide typing is an option, as well as voice typing ( which may still send data off your device) .
Good keyboard. Some comments: I wish it was possible to disable the speech-to-text feature (the microphone button). I don’t want to use the feature, and if you accidentally click the button, it will remove the text you just typed. Super annoying. Another bug is that the keyboard doesn’t always default to the same language. I want it to ALWAYS default to Danish and then I can manually switch to English when needed, but it seems pretty random which language is used at startup.
Really hard to get around. It would take a few time to adjust the app according to your liking. I wish there was a easy way to setup and move around the app. Else, great app, lots of features. Wish the emoji settings bar / switching to normal keyboard bar was below, not at right side. Lots of feature also means lots of clutter and to move your head in that clutter. Its nice that it has word save option While Typing 😀. But the blue button press color is annoying for me, hope there was option to
It would be a decent keyboard if only it stuck to what it is supposed to do. At some point, the app began to cover a part of the word suggestions with a crimson blot that directs my web browser to WHO’s COVID19 advice page. Clicking it takes me to a web page that hasn’t been updated for weeks now, and it does nothing to remove the blot, nor is there an option to turn it off. The developer’s condescension is palpable, and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I’m switching to another app.
FINALLY, A KEYBOARD AS GOOD AS TOUCHPAL. TouchPal won’t work on Android 12, but it was by far the best time saving Android keyboard. In particular, it had Swipe Up for Shift, easy editing / arrow keys / cut / paste. After trying many replacements, THIS IS THE ONE! I can do the same editing and quick capitals/alternate characters with AnySoftKeyboard. The only thing it is missing is a backspace key while editing.