Hoping the Foss community can help me explain why it seems keyboards like AnySoftKeyboard haven’t been updated for years. Google play - Nov 2021 F-Droid - Jan 2022
The GitHub still seems quite active with changes being made 3 days ago. Is there a reason these aren’t pushed to the standard distribution channels? I also looked at FlorisBoard and it seemed to show a similar pattern.
Are there any other FOSS keyboards people can recommend for Android?
I can recommend OpenBoard. Its open source and available on F-Droid or Google/Aurora. It doesn’t request Network permissions. As far as updates: it hasn’t been updated in 17 months. Its not updated extremely frequently, but it’s definitely not abandoned. It works great and I don’t see anything it needs added or fixed in my experience.
This looks much like much more what I was looking for. Like a Foss replacement for the android keyboard, will keep playing with it to see how it goes. Thanks
HeliBoard
It’s available through the IzzyOnDroid F-Droid Repo.
That’s where I found it, and according to that, it was released in alpha nine days ago as of my writing this. I’m currently in the process of degoogling, and HeliBoard is easily the closest thing I’ve found to a direct replacement for Gboard. I’m not gonna lie to you and say it’s quite as good as Gboard or better, yet, because I think that would be somewhat overselling it as of this exact moment; I also think it’s about to be at least as good as Gboard if not better, probably soon, and I say that as a Gboard user until roughly a week ago (at which point I installed GrapheneOS). It’s already way better than anything else I’ve ever tried in terms of FOSS Android keyboards, if you want my opinion, and I was also getting tired of those that were at least somewhat usable being consecutive years out of date.
I’d try HeliBoard, if I were you.
Thought I’d tack on this relevant thread from the F-Droid Lemmy page