Are there any good privacy friendly keyboards for android?
I’ve looked at a few on fdroid and they all seem like they aren’t being maintained anymore.
Edit: I’ve spent the past day trying most all of the suggested keyboards here and I think I’ve landed on either Unexpected Keyboard or AnySoftKeyboard. Thanks for all the suggestions. Thumbkey is quite the thing to get used to.
I’m using open board with swipe entry (so it functions like gboard). My only complaint is I’ve noticed I have to be extremely accurate in my swiping or it won’t type out the intended word).
In this message alone: my first attempts at the word “type” came out as toe. “Out” came out as TT & “along” came out as “alone”
So it’s definitely not perfect. I might stick with it. I might just go back to gboard and not grant it network permission. It’s only been about a week so a little too early to tell…
Idk but you could always just install gboard & not give network permissions. You’ll lose a little functionality like the ability to add gifs from the keyboard which obviously need internet to search/load.
Lotta good recommendations here. If you get GrapheneOS, you could get any keyboard (including GBoard) and turn off its network access at the app level (as well as sensors and other permissions), which would make virtually any keyboard privacy-friendly.
I use AdGuard and do the same with its built in Firewall feature for GBoard. The thing is, since I don't use custom ROMs I can't be sure that GBoard won't just use Google Services for spying/tracking.
I won’t pretend to know how tightly integrated the keyboard is within the Android OS, but given the interoperability between app and keyboard it seems likely that vulnerabilities could be leveraged to gain malicious access to the clipboard and other sensitive data.
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