HeliBoard

★★★★☆

A versatile on-screen keyboard for Android with local-only autosuggest and autocorrect dictionary for multiple languages, and optional gestures.

HeliBoard is extremely configurable, including autocorrect sources (you can give it access to your contact list or installed apps, but you don’t have to), and doesn’t “phone home” (as we used to say), so it’s a better choice than GBoard for privacy.

And it supports a whole boatload of writing systems! Not just Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Greek, but Hindi, Arabic and a bunch more alphabets. Even Korean (a syllabary, so it’s easily composed), though it doesn’t handle Chinese or Japanese, not even the kana. Emoji and accented characters are easy to get to.

Auto complete/correct mitigates the problem of my clumsy thumbs hitting letters instead of the space bar. Even after a month and a half, I’m still doing it at about the same rate as on GBoard. But the autocorrect rate (both overall and good/bad) seems to be comparable too, so it’s still an improvement over Fossify Keyboard. As with GBoard, backspace will undo a bad autocorrection.

There are cursor keys on the “functional” row that slides out to replace suggestions, which really helps with editing, and it’ll use the system speech recognition for voice “typing.”

My typing is a bit worse with the number row always visible, but having to show/hide it is so inconvenient that I turned it back on. I tried adjusting the keyboard height (I did mention it’s super-configurable), but it didn’t make much difference.

Of course, it’s a different experience on a tablet-sized screen, where it’s almost (but not quite) possible to touch type.

Gestures

It’s possible to install a compatible gesture library for swiping. That library isn’t open source, and it’s basically a binary blob extracted from GBoard, both factors in why I wanted to give the app a fair shake without gestures first. It’s a bit of a pain to download a file from GitHub onto your phone, but once you’ve loaded it, swiping works just like you’re used to.

Bottom line: Even without enabling gestures, it works about as well as Android’s default keyboard (unless you need to write Chinese or Japanese), but respects your privacy. With gestures, it’s a drop-in replacement. And still isn’t sending your word choices to Google for whatever they’re doing with it now.

Heliboard isn’t available on the Play Store yet, though there’s some work being done on prerequesites now. But it is available on third-party app store likes F-Droid or Izzy.