Privacy with Google's Gboard
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?
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FOSS is not just about privacy! Freedom is that important reason you should care about. FlorisBoard is my suggestion for you.
Yesterday I installed Grapheneos so I've swapped to florisboard. Not bad but it's very specific on where you swipe using gestures. I'm slowly getting used to it but gboard was a lot more forgiving.
Try OpenBoard with gesture typing
The latest release being almost a year ago doesn't exactly inspire confidence though.
Why is everyone obsessed with constant updates? It's not broken, there's nothing to fix. It's a keyboard, I prefer it to be fast, reliable and not phone home.
I don't need some bloated mess that will take 10 seconds to start and require a gigabyte of RAM because the devs need to push an update every week with new useless crap without testing it.
Regular updates doesn't mean, new features all the time. It mostly means security updates, which are important.
It doesn't have internet accesss. There isn't much to worry about.
Ed: I understand that non-internet apps can be used for attacks as well, but maybe there just hasn't been anything to update.
There are active forks, it might take some time until a successor is found that includes all MRs.
Ok I'm f-droiding right now :)
edit :just realized it's different than the one you linked.
further edit: It's much better than floris. Happy days, thank you for the suggestion.
If you're on graphene OS then just uninstall GBoard and when youre installing it back uncheck the network permission checkbox. Easy as pie
No need to uninstall. Just go into Settings - Apps - Gboard - Permissions. You can deny or grant any perms (including Network) there.
If you're on GrapheneOS, you get the option to block an app's network access when you install it. So you can use whatever keyboard you want and it can't call home.
Why Gboard is better at gestures? That's because it tracks you.
Badum tssss :D
I do like FlorisBoard but japanese support is lacking it seems and as a learner, it made me have to go toward Gboard. Granted I am able to put GBoard behind a firewall and cut off it's network connectivity.
Is it actually actively developed? The last version is from September of last year.
Yes, it is. But it doesn't update fast.
Ty, yeah. I could've checked the repo myself 😂
Used FlorisBoard for a good while, it's the perfect replacement imo. I don't remember exactly but there was a certain feature missing for me so I uninstalled it but it may have been implemented by now.
The major feature that's missing is autocorrect, rely on it a lot
I checked every keyboard on F-Droid, Floris is the best keyboard you can find now.
Well outside of F-droid (for some reason) is OpenBoard with gesture typing
I only trust F-Droid and I don't install any apps from outside of it!
Same and I agree, I'll have to download it again later.
Tried it for a few minutes, it just feels off. It could just be the haptics? Idk this makes sense it just really makes me aware I'm typing on a screen
Check the settings.