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Comment by elashri | Hacker News Reader

> and then when they finally release an update it's because of a fucking Bing button

To be honest and as a heavy user of SwiftKey on iOS, they updated the app and released a fix before all the AI hype in the last couple of months. They might have this in mind as part of their vision from that point, but it is not to say that

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Wait, you were still using it? I used it for years and years but then they announced they killed it[1] last Fall and I switched to something I like a lot less.

Is SwiftKey back? Can I start using it again? Will they just yank it again in three months when people get bored of the AI gimmick?

I'm confused.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/microsoft-will-end-s...

Can we please, as an industry, stop selling good things to big companies just so they can smother them with a pillow?

It never really left. It got removed from the app store briefly but they reversed that decesion pretty quickly afterwards. I've also never had any issues with it on iOS so I'm curious why OP thinks it's a broken mess.

Only broken mess I'm experiencing seems to do with iOS integration of 3rd party keyboards. I think the apps are supposed to remember which keyboard you want to use with them, but the SwiftKey regularly persists even in apps in which I didn't switch to it. I wish I didn't have to use it, but until Apple rolls out swipe and autocorrect support to my native language, I'll have to suffer.

For me SwiftKey is far superior to either native Apple keyboard or Gboard. Native keyboard has insane issues with autocorrect with multiple languages, to the point where it's not usable for me. My native (Polish) language also has fairly bad dictionaries. It's really bad overall.

Gboard is much better in that, but it has a lot of minor bugs that annoy me constantly and they refuse to fix them. Gboard will randomly show up with weird scaling issues until you hide and reopen keyboard, sometimes it will just randomly crash and restart while typing, often has layouting issues when switching orientation. Google clearly just doesn't care enough to support it.

SwiftKey fixed most of those annoyances for me. I dropped it when they said they won't support it anymore but I'm actually happy they reversed that decision and I just installed it again.

OK, well, I guess I'll try it. I'm not looking forward to 6 months from now when they do an internal product review and decide to kill it, again.

They just added ChatGPT? That's the last thing they would do in 6 months is kill a new potential interface for it.

Exactly. And kudos to them for not removing the Swiftkey either during that time, even if they were not updating it anymore. It was a nice, functional piece of software albeit with some bugs.

Worth noting that they did announce they were discontinuing it and removed it from the app store in October, then brought it back quickly after.

Just to put the Bing button on? Not smart. But I'm glad they updated.

(I'm using edge with bing button and SwiftKey with Bing button.)

Smart - they are currently trialling GPT/AI features so the keyboard will help you rewrite text.

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