Has Gboard gotten worse for y'all? For past year or so it's gotten progressively worse for me. Has it been your experience too?

To clarify: you're talking about the Android onscreen keyboard? If so, in what way has it gotten worse? Less-accurate predictions of words?

Yea that one. And yeah the prediction of words is what had gotten worse for me.

I haven't been experiencing any differences. Been using it for 4+ years.

What’s a Gboard

HeliBoard.

The default keyboard on your phone.

How does heliboard's spell check compare to FUTO's? I'm currently using that and while it mostly works, It's horrible for anything that's not English.

I'm an English speaker so I have no idea about how it works for other languages.

I have disabled auto-correction some time ago because it would make things worse more often than not. Used not to be that bad, if I remember correctly. Now I send a lot of typos, but at least the recipient has chance to guess what I meant.

All keyboards have been getting worse (both on Apple and Android). It's impossible to type anything without typos anymore.

It's Google, so it's intended to get worse over time. They design their products against you. I suggest switching to a different one not under a big tech company.

I've already made the switch to FUTO, but the autocorrect is horrible if you even slightly deviate from English, and due to cultural reasons it's not easy to find an autocorrect for what we're used to here.

It's gotten to the point I can see those typos online everywhere, and I know for a fact those typos are due to autocorrect getting bad, cause it's similar to what I made while I used Gboard

There's two or three problems happening.

First, transferring a full-size keyboard to a phone is a GARBAGE concept.

Second, you know it's a garbage concept because almost all the innovation in this space is based around, " How can we make this GARBAGE concept work?" So you have lots of clever work around like autocorrect and swipe.

Third, because these solutions require a bit of programming oomph, they are liable to corporate whimsy.

My solution: ditch the full size keyboard for an input method designed for small screen. Suck it up for a month, learn a new system, and be set for life.

I use this guy: https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key , a 9-key system that has buttons big enough that you can actually confidently type when you mean to type without autocorrect, auto predict, or any kind of statistical-computational shennanigans. Learn it once and never worry about this shit again.

Edit: Please reply with "I'm too lazy to learn a new input method and don't appreciate you making me confront that fact" instead of downvoting.

Yup, way more typos. Used to be able to swipe with very little error, now having to correct several times along the way. I don't type on my phone often enough to be that annoyed yet, but maybe I should look into other keyboards too ...

Yes

You download language dictionaries, so it depends on the dictionary quality for the language

If you're a native English speaker or from Europe I can suggest FUTO keyboard. It's just not fit for my use case.

I don't use GBoard

Yup. Steady decline in accuracy when swiping, words/names I use everyday (and have added to a custom dictionary) aren't chosen from the swipe, and even on actual touchtype it corrects to words I never/rarely use.

I think my device defaulted the Samsung's keyboard.

Thanks to parent for posting this. I'm now in the market for a new keyboard because I just hadn't paid enough attention but gboard is complete garbage.

I've beenntrying O t FUTO for the last week and have not been very impressed with it over Heliboard. The autocorrect predixtion is either way too aggressive for some words, or just doesn't bother for other words. I mean I could say the same thing for Heliboard, but that tends towork just a little bit better for me. Btw I didn't manually correct any typos in this reply, that's all on FUTO.

i have all predictive text disabled everywhere i can find such a setting.
and i don't swipe.
mine works fine.

Not really, a lot of android phones ship with either a custom keyboard or the (horrible) AOSP one.
Pixels have been the only devices i've used that use Gboard per default.

not really. it's been fine for me. I keep trying to switch to Kubo, which I paid for, but I can't last more than a few hours on it.

Also fan of thumb key. so easy without looking

I'm using both German and English at the same time, with sliding-support for both languages at the same time. The only situation I found the spell check become confused is when switching between languages in the same sentence.

What layout are you using? Does it have accents?

I'm too lazy to learn a new input method but I do appreciate you making me confront that fact.

Yes. Just switched to the Samsung built-in keyboard for now.

It was very good on predicting the word and the next word, then it it started to act like it's guessing randomly.

Notice an increase on battery drain too.

all keyboards have gotten worse for me. I tried swype when it was new and it was getting better and better until it suddenly tanked. I'm not sure if it was before or after it sold. Then I tried swiftkey and gboard and idk what else but almost every closed and open source keyboard that was free and not obviously malicious.

Gboard was great for a while and I used it for looking up kanji by thumb writing them with typical stroke order and having it deduce usually the correct one while playing ace attorney vs layton back when they said it would never get an english version. It got an english version in the end. The swipe inputs for english and Spanish were excellent but English at least seems to have gotten worse to the point of needing 5+ attempts per word. Also disclaimer: Idon't actually speak spanish. Manual typing is just mentally draining due to recurring typos that get automatically added to suggestions but not a deletable dictionary entry as far as I can tell. I also don't trust google at all.

Almost everything else is equally untrustworthy and/or bad, with at best on par manual typing. The foss options with swipe input literally use closed source google modules and are all equally crappy as google.

I was using a ghetto usb knockoff blackberry keyboard for a while but while it is nearly perfect as far as typing goes, it's also an immensely inconvenient extra accessory that eventually snagged on something and broke.

Basically everything sucks and its still the fault of billionaires like everything else.

I once had the thought of a back of phone mounted backhand stenography input, but I feel like it would also suck.

HeliBoard or FUTO keyboard

When one of my devices started complaining it was low on space, I noticed the Gboard was consuming half a gigabyte of storage. I tried a different keyboard, which annoys me very much, and I might go back to Gboard.

Why would Gboard require so much space? For a keyboard? How does that make sense?

Trying it out now, so far so good!

It sucks

WTF is it key logging!?

It would have to be logging way more than the things I'd typed on a touchscreen to justify that kind of storage consumption, though. Even one million characters is a ton of typing. But 500 million? I will probably never type that much in my whole life.

I switched to heliboard 3 years ago with the added swipe library. Heli is working on their own swipe now.

I thought I was just getting old and incompetent

It keeps on autocorrecting words to some totally irrelevant wrong word, much more often than it used to. Previously it would just fix the occasional spelling mistake and ignore most capitalized words. Now it regularly changes proper names to other random words, replaces it's with its or your for you're (or the other way round) but it's almost always wrong even though I typed it correctly. I'll go back and try to fix it, only to find it's chosen some other random words to use instead of what I actually typed. It replaces correct words with incorrect words now way more often than it actually helps my spelling.

Yep. I've tried out several FOSS KB, using FUTO now, but it still tries to correct local peculiar words to something close.

I was so happy to try two keyboards I've never heard of, but sadly they don't have Japanese...

I think it's always been pretty bad, tbh, but it seems to have gotten especially bad in the past year or two. It's always screwing up "if" and "of". You'd think it would know which would make sense contextually.

I want to replace it, but I can't find any decent keyboards that types Japanese.

Which ones have you tried?

I've got an extensive personal vocab library to solve those issues, takes time.

Bummer, sorry

I switched to Heliboard

I need to manually add some entries but have been lax af, to be candid.

Futo Keyboard for me!