Discussion : Stock or 3rd Party Phone Keyboards?

[BandOfBrothers]

Hi everyone.

For years now I've only really used stock keyboards without much thought.

Even when Apple opened up the option for 3rd Party Keyboards in iOS 8 (I think that's the version of iOS that opened up 3rd Party Keyboards options)

Recently I watched one of my children using 'SwiftKey'and was impressed at how much faster it was to use to type via swiping through letters which then created the word. It seems to be more accurate too.

I've decided to now use SwiftKey for now but decided not to link this to my Google or Facebook accounts for my own preference even though this is said to improve the effectiveness.

I'm very possibly late to the party with this one

That said I'd be interested to know which keyboard you've opted for and why? As I'm open to trying out different ones if available on my iPhone 6 Plus.

For example >

SwiftKey
Swype
Flesky

Or perhaps another one you know about

[jeffkinn]

I've used lots of different keyboards on both Android and iOS devices. These include Swiftkey but also Swype and Minuum.

I've now opted to use Swiftkey on my iPhone and I find it faster and better than the stock keyboard. 

[BandOfBrothers]

Hi @jeffkinn

Thanks. 

May I ask have you linked SwiftKey to Google as per one of the options. I was a little put off with possible security?

[jeffkinn]

I certainly have in the past and with Facebook. Not sure what security concerns you'd have. I tend not to stress about security in these situations. 

[BandOfBrothers]

Just in the boundaries of SwiftKey and the cloud and what's collated and privacy. 

Some sites do say that SwiftKey works and learns just fine if not linked, just that then it's all stored on the device on not on SwiftKey Cloud. 

[jeffkinn]

When I was an Android user I had to go through factory resets and having Swiftkey store information in the cloud and be able to bring it back afterwards was extremely useful.

I haven't needed to reset my two recent iPhones but I'm still happy for the Swiftkey cloud to hold data about me. I'm a big consumer of cloud services. I have 50gb on iCloud, 100gb on Google Drive, 1tb on OneDrive with my Office 365 subscription and I have a cloud backup service with LiveDrive. Thus my data is stored in several places simultaneously and it would be virtually impossible for me to lose anything. I also have Time Machine backing up to local USB devices.

Hence using Swiftkey in this way doesn't give me any cause for concern whatsoever.