The new home of /r/Android on Lemmy and the Fediverse!
Android news, reviews, tips, and discussions about rooting, tutorials, and apps.
πUniversal Link: !android@lemdro.id
π‘Content Philosophy:
Content which benefits the community (news, rumours, and discussions) is generally allowed and is valued over content which benefits only the individual (technical questions, help buying/selling, rants, self-promotion, etc.) which will be removed if it's in violation of the rules.
Support, technical, or app related questions belong in: !askandroid@lemdro.id
For fresh communities, lemmy apps, and instance updates: !lemdroid@lemdro.id
π¬Matrix Chat
π°Our communities below
Stay on topic: All posts should be related to the Android OS or ecosystem.
No support questions, recommendation requests, rants, or bug reports: Posts must benefit the community rather than the individual. Please post to !askandroid@lemdro.id.
Describe images/videos, no memes: Please include a text description when sharing images or videos. Post memes to !androidmemes@lemdro.id.
No self-promotion spam: Active community members can post their apps if they answer any questions in the comments. Please do not post links to your own website, YouTube, blog content, or communities.
No reposts or rehosted content: Share only the original source of an article, unless it's not available in English or requires logging in (like Twitter). Avoid reposting the same topic from other sources.
No editorializing titles: You can add the author or website's name if helpful, but keep article titles unchanged.
No piracy or unverified APKs: Do not share links or direct people to pirated content or unverified APKs, which may contain malicious code.
No unauthorized polls, bots, or giveaways: Do not create polls, use bots, or organize giveaways without first contacting mods for approval.
No offensive or low-effort content: Don't post offensive or unhelpful content. Keep it civil and friendly!
No affiliate links: Posting affiliate links is not allowed.
Our Communities
Lemmy App List
Chat and More
The only app I can't live without. Except for gboard, all of my applications are Foss. There is no competition for gboard's swipe typing, not to mention its many capabilities like as searching for gifs, stickers, being able to paste copied images, translating, and so on. I'd like to know how I can use gboard while maintaining my privacy. According to what I've heard, it sends all typing data to Google's server. If you ask me, that's a massive no-no. Do you have any suggestions?
Give OpenBoard with gesture typing a shot. No gifs and stuff, but gesture typing works together with suggestions, unlike either base OB or Floris. Someone casually mentioned it a few weeks ago and damn how much my life changed.
Life changing
I'm so thrilled right now! I'm already typing this reply on OpenBoard and I'm loving it.
Gboard was also a big hurdle to my need to degoogle my phone. But not anymore!
Thank you so much. You've brighten my day. I'm both happy for knowing this and for finding about it on the fediverse.
I just wanted to say how much I appreciate this whole vibe!
BTW that still uses Google's proprietary gesture typing library internally: https://github.com/wordmage/openboard/commit/46fdf2b550035ca69299ce312fa158e7ade36967
There's still no good FOSS alternative to Google's library though so it is what it is.
Aha, that's why it's not on F-Droid. That makes sense.
Still, it doesn't connect to the internet so unless there's something very sneaky Google does in the background, it should be good?
Floris Board afaik has its own implementation of gesture typing, but that's been stuck in beta without word suggestions, so it's not really usable.
Wow this works pretty well!
How did I not know about this?
Amazing. Thank you.
Thanks for sharing. I've finally replaced Gboard. Now I have to adjust to the new key sizes, but at least I know my data is private
You can resize it in settings, at least the height. I have mine set to 80%. Before OB I was using GB and I recall setting it so both looked the same.
GBoard learning algorithm has been federated since 2017 π€·ββοΈ edit
https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collaborative.html
That's actually pretty cool
It works like this: your device downloads the current model, improves it by learning from data on your phone, and then summarizes the changes as a small focused update. Only this update to the model is sent to the cloud, using encrypted communication, where it is immediately averaged with other user updates to improve the shared model. All the training data remains on your device, and no individual updates are stored in the cloud.
My main deal breaker with most open source keyboards is the usually pretty bad multi language support. I type in three languages all the time and don't want to have to switch keyboards every time I switch the language. Currently using SwiftKey, just because it handles multi-language (fairly) well.
There is a fork of openboard with multiple language support, but it's missing glide typing. When these two features are merged it's the perfect keyboard. Until then the language switch icon works well enough.
Same. Gboard is the only software keyboard capable of multi-language input that "just works". I tried OpenBoard, AOSP, Floris, Anysoft and while they seem okay in general, none supports polyglots as well as Gboard
If you're on calyxos, grapheneos, or lineageos you can disable network permisions for that app. If not, use netguard as a firewall and block it.
If you have Google play services the keyboard could phone home through play services. Shutting off network access isn't 100% effective, especially for Google apps.
Obviously depending on your threat model this is fine.
There's a fork of OpenBoard with swipe typing at https://github.com/erkserkserks/openboard
I've found this to be better than any of the alternatives.
I believe some custom ROMs use an AOSP version that is very simplified, but itβs not a 1:1 replacement. Iβll be following this to see if anybody has suggestions.
F-Droid has a lot of security issues(if you care about security), use Neo Store if you want access to F-Droid apps with a more secure app.
EDIT: Even better to use Obtainium and add the links of the APP's own Github/GitLab repo to it.
FOSS is not just about privacy! Freedom is that important reason you should care about. FlorisBoard is my suggestion for you.
To those who have been recommending Florisboard in this thread: Thank you. I've longed for a good FOSS keyboard, but always found they lacked enough features that I was willing to compromise and stick with gboard. Florisboard, using the latest beta from IzzyOnDroid, absolutely hits the mark already. It's missing a few features, like word autosuggest, but I can live without that for a while.
What do you mean, no competition? SwiftKey was the first to have swipe typing, and still does it best, because it learns how you swipe and adjusts itself for that.
Swype was the first to have it. It did so amazingly well and was better than SwiftKey while it was still around.
I don't know how much of a difference it makes in terms of Gboard phoning home, but you can disable a bunch of data sharing options in the Privacy section of Gboard's settings:
https://github.com/florisboard/florisboard/pull/2209
As soon as this gets merged, I'm done with Gboard I hope.
Leaving this up because there are some good discussions here already and it's a great question. I'd just flag rule 2 in the sidebar and that we ask questions and recommendation requests to be posted in !askandroid@lemdro.id instead. Thanks!
Off topic question, don't you guys think splintering the Android community into multiple communities specifically for certain things when there are so few people on the Lemmy platform will lead to the instance becoming driy without content? Not sure if there's been discussion about this yet.
Lemmy unfortunately doesn't currently have functionality that could help people curate the type of content they want to see from within a single community (e.g., hiding posts, filtering by tags). Maintaining separate communities is more work for the moderators but gives people the choice to decide what kind of content to subscribe to when populating their "Subscribed" view.
Our hope is to foster a space that's scratches the r/android itch with !android@lemdro.id, while also having a space set aside for questions, support, and seeking recommendations with !askandroid@lemdro.id. There's also a tendency toward better quality responses for the latter when it's in a community of people who have deliberately subscribed because they like to help folks out. That's the thinking at least.
Do feel free to join us on the Matrix chat anytime! https://matrix.to/#/#lemdro.id:matrix.org
A lot oft ROMs allow you go completely disable Internet access for a certain app. Disabling the data collection toggles in GBoard and disabling internet access for GBoard, Play Services, Play Store and the Google App should prevent most logging.
I think OpenBoard is as close as it gets. There are no features like stickers but the layout is very similar.
There are no features like stickers (...)
I'm sold! I hate stickers. x)
I always see people recommend FlorisBoard, but I haven't been able to leave OpenBoard for it on the basis of never getting autocorrect to work on FlorisBoard. Is that implemented and I'm not setting it up right, or do you all manage to text with 100% accuracy?
On my old phone i used Florisboard, it was pretty good and it's FOSS as well.
These days I use the samsung keyboard as I recently switched to a samsung device. The keyboard customizations are really awesome, if you have KeysCafe module installed. Not sure how privacy friendly it is tho.
OpenBoard, Florisboard, AnySoftKeyboard
THERE ARE ALTERNATIVES, PEOPLE!
Since nobody has suggested it, I'm adding AnySoft Keyboard to the list of alternatives. It takes some time to train custom words but after that it's actually quite nice. Even the swipe typing works quite well. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.menny.android.anysoftkeyboard/
