skuzz, 7 months ago

While not disagreeing with you, Android does have an Internet permission in the manifest. For an application to use network access, it must define both:

<span style="color:#323232;">uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span>

Sauce: developer.android.com/develop/…/connecting

So if a keyboard is open source, one could quickly validate if the keyboard app actually is requesting to have Internet access or not, and one could choose a keyboard based on it not using these permissions.

(Edit: Formatting.)