Privacy with Google's Gboard

noob@lemm.ee to Android@lemdro.id – 242 points –

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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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.

I'm so thrilled right now! I'm already typing this reply on OpenBoard and I'm loving it.

Gboard was also a big hurdle to my need to degoogle my phone. But not anymore!

Thank you so much. You've brighten my day. I'm both happy for knowing this and for finding about it on the fediverse.

I just wanted to say how much I appreciate this whole vibe!

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.

Aha, that's why it's not on F-Droid. That makes sense.

Still, it doesn't connect to the internet so unless there's something very sneaky Google does in the background, it should be good?

Floris Board afaik has its own implementation of gesture typing, but that's been stuck in beta without word suggestions, so it's not really usable.

That's impressive thank you. Gesture typing with it now.

How do you gesture type with it? Slide doesn't work for me and there's no option to enable it.

You have to go to the settings and turn gestures on. Also this is not the fdroid version. This is the version from the link above.

I can live with no gifs, but I can't live without emoji support :/

It has regular emojis

Weird I'm not seeing any options for emojis anywhere on the keyboard using S23 Ultra

Long press the enter/return button (round, with an left point arrow). It'll show you the emoji and clipboard buttons. 💡

Alternatively, you can turn on the dedicated emoji button on OpenBoard's preferences.

You can also long press the comma button. There you'll find the preferences and emoji buttons.

If you long press the comma key on the left of the spacebar, you'll see an emoji icon on the far right.

Maybe you have the key disabled, look in settings under preferences. There's a bunch of stuff you might want to tweak.

Thanks for sharing. I've finally replaced Gboard. Now I have to adjust to the new key sizes, but at least I know my data is private

You can resize it in settings, at least the height. I have mine set to 80%. Before OB I was using GB and I recall setting it so both looked the same.

Wow, this is an awesome keyboard! I love the pointer moving with the spacebar.

Voilà ! My first great piece of advice found on Lemmy! So thankful for this, and for witnessing the sudden growth of a great community here on Lemmy <3

I'm glad the word is spreading, i also found out a few weeks ago through Lemmy. The only bug that drives me up the wall is when trying to delete backwards to fix a word. It eventually eats the space to the PREVIOUS word, joining them together and making an even bigger mess. It also looks like it never got an update after September :(

I guess you're using Jerboa? Apparently that's a bug between WebView Webkit and the AOSP keyboard (which OB is based on), or something... I don't quite get what's going on...

It actually happens on any window or app I've used, maybe they're all webview instances... Dunnow.

I've been looking for something like this for so long, thank you!

Thanks! The only thing I don't like is that I can't have arrow keys. It's immediately better than SwiftKey for sure, so I'll adjust.

You can use swiping on the space bar to move left and right at least.

AnySoftKeyboard has arrow keys and more gestures, but it's not as refined overall imo.

Floris Board has gestures to move around IIRC, but not at the same time as gesture typing, and is lacking word suggestions.

Awesome! Using space to go left and right is good enough for me!

Thanks a ton for that. I got to really liking OpenBoard since I started using it.