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Microsoft to Kill Off SwiftKey for iOS and Delist From App Store on October 5

FNi said:
Is there something going on with third party keyboards? Google barely updates GBoard for iOS anymore and its gotten very buggy. Are they just too much of a hassle to maintain?
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I suspect there isn’t money in it. You can’t charge a subscription for a keyboard, so what else is there to do. Well you can and I think Grammarly has one with a subscription, but that’s a niche market.

SwiftKey had themes you can buy, but I don’t suspect they sold very well. It’s probably extremely difficult or impossible to use it for a keylogger, so there goes any kind of data selling revenue. You can’t add actual ads in the keyboard, so no money there. There’s probably just more profitable apps to create for sale in the App Store.
 
bLackjackj said:
What a stupid comment. I don't use it for mult language support, I use it as a fully customized keyboard. It's far better than the stock iOS keyboard, which is why it exists and has so many users. 🙄🤦‍♂️
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Has so many users??? Microsoft knows down to the ones digit how many users it has… and it’s clearly not enough to justify support. It probably wasn’t enough to justify support in 2016 even, like how their Skype acquisition was very late to the party. It’s only reason to still exist at all is for the phone-to-Windows copy/paste.
 
502DDD13-D82B-4F01-AD6E-55457134EB8F.png


Perfect on my 7 Plus. And it's the only app I use dark mode feature so the keys have good contrast to the rest of the page (while other keyboards tend to blend in).

Switching to another keyboard and immediately seeing you have to switch keys just to get number row is depressing.
 
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I never trusted Microsoft or Google swift keys or swipes apps for my iPad running iOS 12, using other third-party software, and now it's built in the newer iOS so it's a moot issue.
 
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jimmy_uk said:
Well damn.

I use SwiftKey because of:
key size and position,
Number row above keyboard,
Colour options,
Swipe gestures and cursor movement with drag from anywhere on keyboard,
I have stored many predictions.

Switching to another keyboard and immediately seeing you have to switch keys just to get number row is depressing.
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gboard has a long press option for the number keys. Not as good as a dedicated row but usable.
 
FNi said:
Is there something going on with third party keyboards? Google barely updates GBoard for iOS anymore and its gotten very buggy. Are they just too much of a hassle to maintain?
Click to expand...
I’d bet most iOS users use the default keyboard so devs don’t feel the need to support them much.
 
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jimmy_uk said:
View attachment 2083607

Perfect on my 7 Plus. And it's the only app I use dark mode feature so the keys have good contrast to the rest of the page (while other keyboards tend to blend in).

Switching to another keyboard and immediately seeing you have to switch keys just to get number row is depressing.
Click to expand...

Time for a new phone? Every Max sized phone has the numbers present on the stock keyboard. Presumably others, but since you’re typing in English there’s no reason to ever change keyboards.
 
Shirasaki said:
Now it's time to download the IPA and iTunes 12.6.5.3 and start saving IPA files so you could use swiftkey longer than Microsoft would want you to do. I have one saved locally so I can still use it if I want to.

To anyone else, download the app IPA file now so you could use the app for a few more years. Also, local IPA is the only way to counter dev/Apple pulling apps. I fear Apple will also remove the app in your purchase history so you can no longer redownload it directly. (Vidget was pulled and I can only use it by installing it using iMazing)
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Thanks for this. Could you elaborate a bit more please? I will get a new iPhone on the next few weeks so I may loose Swiftkey. Is the IPA file and Mac app? And what next? Much appreciate it.
 
saudor said:
the IPA will stop working if they change the signing signature like they did in 14.5 but there’s still a way to download it with the updated signature even if it’s removed from your purchased history as long as you have the expired IPA and imazing.
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That‘s good to know. I should keep that in mind.

okeribok said:
Sounds good, but how does that work? Don't you need ios 13 or even 12 for that to work? And macos 10.14 or something? Would like to know more as I tried pretty hard, but got nowhere.
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You need a PC running Windows 10 or older (I bet Windows 11 will not work, but never tried) and iTunes 12.6.5.3, which is the last version that still has built-in App Store, and download complete IPA, instead of whatever ****** shrunk version Apple pushes out. Or, purchase (free version wont work) iMazing, and use it to download IPA.

What I use is a PC running Windows 10 and iTunes 12.6.5.3 to regularly download IPA and store locally, then use iMazing on my PC or Mac to install the app onto iPhone. I am not sure how iPhone 14/14 Pro handles iTunes 12.6.5.3 but iPad Pro M1 can still be recognised by that version of iTunes, so it should be good to go. iMazing supports latest devices just fine. iOS version doesn’t seem to matter Afaik.
 
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BvizioN said:
Thanks for this. Could you elaborate a bit more please? I will get a new iPhone on the next few weeks so I may loose Swiftkey. Is the IPA file and Mac app? And what next? Much appreciate it.
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Check this below. This setup works for me. Keep in mind macOS no longer support iTunes of any sort on Apple Silicon. iMazing is the only tool available on those Macs.
Shirasaki said:
That‘s good to know. I should keep that in mind.


You need a PC running Windows 10 or older (I bet Windows 11 will not work, but never tried) and iTunes 12.6.5.3, which is the last version that still has built-in App Store, and download complete IPA, instead of whatever ****** shrunk version Apple pushes out. Or, purchase (free version wont work) iMazing, and use it to download IPA.

What I use is a PC running Windows 10 and iTunes 12.6.5.3 to regularly download IPA and store locally, then use iMazing on my PC or Mac to install the app onto iPhone. I am not sure how iPhone 14/14 Pro handles iTunes 12.6.5.3 but iPad Pro M1 can still be recognised by that version of iTunes, so it should be good to go. iMazing supports latest devices just fine. iOS version doesn’t seem to matter Afaik.
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Gboard is next, it hasn’t had significant updates since it was released.

Apple seems to have done third party keyboards just to check a list of Android features to copy. No third party keyboard has any success and Apple puts too many limits on them. They are all noticeably worse to type on than the stock keyboard, even though the stock keyboard’s autocorrect and letter prediction are basically actively fighting against me at all times.

Of all the things Apple needed to copy from Android, always on display was not one.

The keyboard sucks worse than ever in iOS 16. And it seems third party keyboards are a dead category. And it seems Apple does not care at all about their own keyboard anymore.
 
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Zeke92 said:
I never used SwiftKey but Apple seriously needs to improve its predictive typing and slide to type. And it’s multi language keyboard functionality. It really hasn’t gotten better in years
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It won’t, it used to use thwt T9 system that worked great, but due to Apples advancements and ‘security’, you now have a predictive text system that learns the words you use, but also words other users use and it as I understand uses them together, so you get more misspellings, however due to some security reason it won’t work properly or use the cloud properly for predictive text. I can’t rember but it’s some rubbish like that, basically predictive text in iOS is pretty poor these days and won’t improve anytime soon due to Apples policies.
 
BuffaloTF said:
Time for a new phone? Every Max sized phone has the numbers present on the stock keyboard. Presumably others, but since you’re typing in English there’s no reason to ever change keyboards.
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Cannot use any OLED iPhone sadly due to PWM otherwise I'd be there.
 
That's a shame. Swiftkey was always the first app I installed on a new iPhone as I can't stand the iOS keyboard. I mainly swipe instead of typing and back in the day that option wasn't even built in iOS. So unnecessary to kill such good apps, perhaps some other developer buys it and revives it. Big corporate often are like an angry toddler, if my toy isn't useful to me I destroy it before somebody else enjoys it. Well done Microsoft.
 
Shirasaki said:
Check this below. This setup works for me. Keep in mind macOS no longer support iTunes of any sort on Apple Silicon. iMazing is the only tool available on those Macs.
Click to expand...
That's very helpful, thank you. Never heard of iMazing before, have to download it since I only use Mac.
 
That was predictable, unfortunately. I used Swiftkey for years and loved it as much as everyone, both on Android and iOS. It was already obvious because there have been no more updates for the app in the App Store for over a year now. The keyboard itself still works, of course, but I experienced more bugs that never existed before for me (keyboard was sometimes not activated or was stuck briefly) and current emojis were no longer supported as well. Very sad, but that's just how it is now. I have been using the standard iOS keyboard for a few weeks now and it has actually become usable, not only because of Haptic Feedback. I find that learning and predicting words has also noticeably improved with iOS 16. It's quite good now. Only my beloved number row above the letters is now gone. Oh well. For security reasons alone, one should probably uninstall this app now. An app without support and patches is no longer recommendable in the long run. Farewell, Swiftkey! You've been great.
 
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russell_314 said:
Shocking that Microsoft would remove an app that benefits a competitor. This is just Microsoft being Microsoft, doing the things they’ve always done. I used SwiftKey long before Microsoft bought it, and I knew that was going to be bad.
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How does it benefit Microsoft tho?
 
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russell_314 said:
Shocking that Microsoft would remove an app that benefits a competitor. This is just Microsoft being Microsoft, doing the things they’ve always done. I used SwiftKey long before Microsoft bought it, and I knew that was going to be bad.
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It's always a conspiracy, isn't it? Never mind that the reasons given (Apple making low level access needed for a keyboard more and more restrictive) are demonstrably true; that much of the app's once USP functionality is now baked into iOS; that Microsoft have continued to provide/support for the iOS app for many years since acquiring SwiftKey, and that they're continuing to support the Android version (Google being arguably much more of a competitor than Apple). And let's not even talk about how many other non-revenue linked apps MS are maintaining in the App Store.
 
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contacos said:
I will never understand why they have not rolled this out to Siri as well. The phone should be smart enough that if I am communicating with person X via text in English, that I would like to have their responses also read out in English and if I am typing with contact B always in German, it should read out those texts in German. Right now Siri is useless and everything that isn’t German (in my case) just becomes gibberish nonsense
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I use English Spanish and Polish on a daily basis. Anything text-to-speech, speech-to-text and any sort of predictive typing are all completely useless to me.
 
contacos said:
I will never understand why they have not rolled this out to Siri as well. The phone should be smart enough that if I am communicating with person X via text in English, that I would like to have their responses also read out in English and if I am typing with contact B always in German, it should read out those texts in German. Right now Siri is useless and everything that isn’t German (in my case) just becomes gibberish nonsense
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Oh my god yes

Also when speaking to Siri, good luck having it understand the name of a track when it’s set to anything but English
 
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