Mobile App Review – Swiftkey Keyboard

SwiftKey is a very popular alternative for Android – and now because Apple has introduced a third party keyboard too, one can use it for iPhones too. Swiftkey tries to learn up whatever you are typing – making the texts predictive, which means lower effort on your end. This is the learned language that it picks up quickly, and can be used across multiple devices too.

Swiftkey goes one step ahead and even learns how you use the language on social media.  Anything that you type on Gmail, LinkedIn, Twitter, or even Facebook, Swiftkey learns up the pattern immediately.

You may be wondering how is the privacy protected then? Of course Swiftkey comes with a detailed privacy policy – it promises to never sell off your data. The data is shared only within the company, and with some selected service providers (companies that assist the main company with various services). The data is also kept anonymous. Swiftkey makes this statement absolutely easy to understand, thus no ambiguity is kept.

You might be wondering if this is acceptable? It might be to you, based on your understandings of privacy and risk. It is safe to mention here that you do not have  use Swiftkey cloud to access the benefits of Swiftkey keyboard. The Swiftkey keyboard will still be able to understand the specific language habits that you have – using the phone data and your typing habits.

Best part of using Swiftkey keyboard is that it even uses the Swipe style of writing, so you don’t have to be worked up trying to type on each letter. You could just swipe your fingers across the keypad and spell out the desired word. This is called the Swiftkey Flow. With multiple languages to choose from and two themes to pick – this app is versatile and great for use.

How does it feel to use this app?

The Swiftkey app is the easiest and the most hassle free – and its predictive system is actually the most powerful one. And if you do choose to also use the Swiftkey Cloud, it will quickly start learning the phrases, that you commonly use. Say for a situation even if you do not use the cloud system, it will still be capable of quickly pulling information from your language and showing you the predictive texts.

If you are considering Flow, even that works brilliantly. This is a unique style of swiping through – instead of tedious keyboard pressing. It might take some time for users to get used to this, but once you have mastered this, you are going to save up majority of your time. Its just one hand typing, and it will be an enjoyable experience.

There are quite a lot of subtle differences between the standard keyboard and Swiftkey – meaning that Swiftkey has some added advantages. There is a lack of the Mic key in the corner button, which insists that the system is more centralized. Also, they have @ on their common keyboard which is readily accessible.

We love how it easily handles the switching between the upper and lower cases – whereas Apple confuses it wonderfully. Swiftkey has a clearer button which is clearly one of the advantages of using this predictive keyboard.

The Cons of Using This App:

If there are a dozen of pros, there will be some scanty cons about it too. There isn’t a huge amount of problems with this app – what will bother you will be tiny bugs. The first bug that we can think of, is that when the keyboard appears on the messages tab, the latest message is not scrolled upto automatically. And the keyboard occasionally pops into view instead of gliding into the screen. Neither of this are major errors.

iPad might have more troubles than the iPhones, and we have all come to the conclusion that a bigger screen will not need a predictive text setup. They are for other functions and not texting. We were also secretly hoping for a personal offline backup instead of a public Swiftkey Cloud.

You could easily download this app from the iPhone 4S versions, but we really do not recommend that you do that. iOS runs very poorly on that phone already, and this app is sure to crash.

So if you are into iOS 8 then this app Swiftkey should be a must have. It is definitely a huge leap ahead from the standard keyboards, and it’s a free to download app. There is absolutely no reason why someone should not try it.