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.
Hey, thumb-key is really cool! I’ve been using it for a bit and it has solved my issue of constantly fat-fingering wrong letters into what I’m trying to type on other keyboards. I just want to say thanks for developing it and keep up the good work!
Yes, please. I’m still using MessagEase. I want to like thumbkey, but it’s missing a few features that are already implemented in MessagEase. Long pressing for numerals is another feature I miss.
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.
So this is definitely not for everyone but Thumb-Key is privacy friendly and designed to be used with just one thumb. I have used Thumb-Key (and it’s predecessor Message Ease) for about 4 years now and they are way easier for me than qwerty, there are fewer buttons so typos are less frequent and you can access all letter/numbers/punctuation while holding your phone one handed.
Add comment