I saw a post on reddit asking for open source android keyboards in recent years since a lot of the posts were older. One user recommended “Futo Keyboard”.
To be clear, I’m not affiliated with them but I’ve been trying them based on that reddit response and I just wanted to share here in case anyone else has been looking.
In short, this keyboard is about as close to awesome as you can get so far. Features I like:
- Feels like GBOARD
- Works fully offline
- Gesture typing (about 75% as accurate as GBoard)
- Built in offline speech to text (no third party engine needed to download
I’ve tried other options like heliboard and openboard and they are great too, but I think so far this has been the best I’ve tried and I wanted to recommend it on here in case anyone else is looking. Feel free to share any other setups or recommendations below!
EDIT: it was pointed out that it is source-available and not open source. Apologize for my initial assumption. The source and license can be viewed here: Futo Keyboard. It is fully open for non-commercial use. Anything commercial can have restrictions.
Futo is open source. It’s not FOSS though.
They literally go out of their way to tell you they aren’t.
They are what’s called “Source-First” according to their own terminology
One of the things they say in that blog post that I think misses the point is that OSI-approved licenses don’t “fail to protect the developer”, they are literally built to pass the rights of the developer to the user, where they belong. Open source protects the user, full stop. The side effect of this is that corps can take advantage as they are also users - and this is why I personally fight so hard for the GPL license as it does prevent big corps from taking and not giving back.
FUTO is “Source-First” until they switch to a license that prioritizes the user over the developer. I believe the FUTO company’s public image is of service to their users, which is fantastic, we need more of that, but their license only reflects that partially.