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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?
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!
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.
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.
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 use the same, it's just openboard + the propetary swipe lib
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.
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.
Any chance u can explain how Neo Store is more secure?
iirc fdroid utilizes very old api which is problematic as newer api gets newer security features droidify and neostore both are more modern
I read through that article, and though I don't have the time or knowledge to properly critique it, I found quite a lot of it unconvincing.
It's one thing to agree there are potential issues, but the article seemed to jump a bit too easily, via rhetoric more than logic, to "therefore it's unsuitable" and similarly to "the other ones are better".
(Disclaimer: I only know mildly what I'm talking about!! If whoever reads this is interested, I hope you can follow the details to their source and get involved in the proper discussion for improving f-droid and/or encouraging another respiratory client.)
A tempting idea would be to compare F-Droid to the desktop Linux model where users trust their distribution maintainers out-of-the-box (this can be sane if youβre already trusting the OS anyway), but the desktop platform is intrinsically chaotic and heterogeneous for better and for worse. It really shouldnβt be compared to the Android platform in any way.
This is, quite frankly, borderline misinformation. Malicious packages in Linux distributions are unheard of. Malicious apps in the allegedly-more-secure Google Play, on the other hand, are a dime a dozen.
The downplaying of the importance of reproducible builds further diminishes my opinion of this piece.
I'm going to go ahead and continue using F-Droid, thanks.
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.
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 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?
https://github.com/florisboard/florisboard/pull/2209
This is the pull request that implements that.
Holy monkeys!!! I'm absolutely giving this a shot right after work today, thank you so much!
OpenBoard, Florisboard, AnySoftKeyboard
THERE ARE ALTERNATIVES, PEOPLE!
this
https://github.com/florisboard/florisboard/pull/2209
As soon as this gets merged, I'm done with Gboard I hope.
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.
OpenBoard.
I dropped gboard and started using FlorisBoard. It's a lot more crude and don't have the same features, but I'm very happy with it and will not go back.
I preffer my privacy over features, and using the software and reporting feedback helps it betting better.
We really need to ditch Google.
What's wrong with this?
I've been using it for a couple weeks, and it's a lot slower than gboard. No swiping support, suggestions aren't as refined, and basically impossible to use one handed.
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.
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.
Iβve tried a bunch and tbh havenβt found anything sufficiently good for my standards
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:
maybe using a firewall to block it's internet access?