v0.1.24-rc1

0.1.24-rc1

This is a release candidate. If you experience any new issues or regressions please inform us.

Layout system rewrite

The layout system has been rewritten. All existing built-in layouts have been ported and should behave and function identically, but if you experience any regressions please report them.

Thanks to this rewrite, it's now much easier to implement new keyboard layouts. They are defined in YAML and we are open to contributions on the new layouts repo.

You can also add custom layouts for testing, development or just personal use. The custom layouts menu is in developer settings, for more info you can check out the layout repo's README.

Layouts repo: https://github.com/futo-org/futo-keyboard-layouts

Minor theming update

Colors for all existing themes have been updated to improve color contrast and visual look. A few new themes were added, and the default theme for devices older than Android 12 has been changed from the FUTO VI theme to a new dark theme.

Keyboard size modes

There's a new Keyboard Modes action that allows you to enable split mode, one-handed mode, or floating mode. Resizing has been updated as well - you can now add side padding and set a different size for portrait and landscape. Foldables are now better supported as well.

Your old size settings should be roughly ported over but they might not be exactly right due to differences in height calculation, so you may need to re-adjust manually.

Automatic spaces

The keyboard now automatically inserts spaces in some situations (after period, after inserting suggestions). You can configure this in typing settings if you prefer the old behavior.

Swipe dataset

Thanks to everybody who contributed to swipe.futo.org! We've collected a significant amount of data from volunteers, and we'll be using it to improve the swipe capabilities of the keyboard, as well as releasing the data as a public dataset soon.

Nearly a million words were swiped in total, corresponding to 63,415 unique words. The average session swiped around a hundred words.

There are no improvements to swipe yet in this release, but it will be the focus for the next major release.

Other changes

• Added numpad mode accessible in symbols mode
• Updated languages menu to make adding languages and layouts easier, with search and layout previews
• Number row is now shorter and more visually distinct
• Added arrow key row option
• Symbols on long-press keys are more consistent in other layouts
• Key popup now better follows key width and is no longer too large on some devices
• Long-press keys are less wide in some circumstances
• Fixed a bug with enter key's long-press key order being messed up in some text fields
• Fixed a bug causing cursor to move to end of word when tapping a word
• Fixed a bug causing punctuation to be shown in suggestion bar in some circumstances
• Fixed a bug causing keyboard to be off-screen in landscape on some devices
• Added some additional layouts: Bulgarian phonetic, Icelandic, Colemak DH / ANSI DH (some were contributed by users like you!)
• Autocorrect now behaves slightly better with mistapping numbers when number row is enabled
• Bottom padded area responds to spacebar
• Bugfixes with cursor movement in RTL languages
• Fixed issues in Georgian keyboard layout
• Update reminder now triggers far less often and is dismissed by tapping X
• Fixed some other bugs and crashes

v0.1.23.2

To install through Obtainium, simply go to Add App and paste this repo URL in the source URL: https://github.com/futo-org/android-keyboard. Adding it may take a while depending on your internet speed as the APK needs to be downloaded.

If you missed the 0.1.32 release notes, check them out here as it included some major updates.

0.1.23.2

This fixes a few bugs that were still present in 0.1.23.1:

• Updated long-press keys for a bunch of languages. The order of important letters should not have changed, and letters not necessary for typing in that language should have moved to the "Misc. letters from common languages" category. This affects Afrikaans, Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Esperanto, Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Croatian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish. If you type in any of these languages and find errors in the change, i.e. you're missing necessary letters when the misc. letters option is disabled from long-press key layout, please let us know.
• Fixed many duplicate long-press keys appearing in languages like German
• Language keys are now default over numbers, this can be customized in long-press key settings in Keyboard & Typing
• Added uppercase Sharp S for German
• The long-press keys for the period has been changed to a layout most commonly used by Android keyboards
• Mistakenly removed diacritics in Arabic were added back
• Fixed a bug in languages menu with wide screens
• Actions for keys are now based on the key's physical location rather than the letter itself. For example, Undo on QWERTZ will be on the bottom left Y key instead of the Z in top row. Discussion on this is welcome
• Fixed a potential issue where clipboard history could get lost after reboot on Direct Boot devices
• Updated license to remove unintended use restriction
• Fixed a few crashes

Please report if you still experience any regressions. If there's nothing major remaining, then this will be the update to be fully rolled out on F-Droid, GitHub and Google Play.

v0.1.23.1

There was no GitHub release made for 0.1.23 due to it needing an immediate bugfix, so this release contains the release notes for it

To install through Obtainium, simply go to Add App and paste this repo URL in the source URL: https://github.com/futo-org/android-keyboard. Adding it may take a while depending on your internet speed as the APK needs to be downloaded.

0.1.23

New action bar

Design

The action bar has been re-designed and it now pops out above the keyboard. You can now have favorite actions always ready to use a single tap away, without it obscuring your suggestions bar. The keyboard will remember the state of your action bar: if you expand it, it'll remain expanded until you hide it again.

Customization

You can rearrange actions and change where they appear in the All Actions > Edit actions menu, or you can also edit in the app settings. Favorites appear in the expanded bar, and pinned appear in place of the voice input key. You can also assign a custom action key which appears next to the spacebar. By default it's set to Emoji, but you can change it to Language Switch Key or something else.

Example of editing action key:

Example of editing pinned actions:

Action Shortcuts

Related to this, similar to shortcuts on desktop keyboards, you can now long-press keys to access certain actions: Select All (Ctrl+A), Undo (Ctrl+Z), Cut (Ctrl+X), Copy (Ctrl+C), Paste (Ctrl+V), Redo (Ctrl+Y)

If you have any feedback or want to see some specific action added, please make a GitHub issue! https://github.com/futo-org/android-keyboard/issues

Settings reorganization

Settings should be more logically organized now. It was a common complaint that people couldn't find where to resize the keyboard, show key hints, etc. These options were originally at the bottom of the Themes menu, but now they have been moved to dedicated submenus.

Typing Preferences has been moved into a new menu called Keyboard & Typing.

Resize Keyboard is now located in Keyboard & Typing.

Show hints toggle is now located in Keyboard & Typing -> Long-Press Keys & Spacebar

Screenshot of new Keyboard & Typing menu:

New settings

The Languages menu has been updated with a new design.

Long-press key settings

You can now configure extra keys that pop up when they're long pressed - for example, you can disable symbols or make accented letters the default over numbers or symbols.

Spacebar and backspace behavior (in long-press key settings)

You can now configure the spacebar's long-press behavior. By default, long-pressing opens the language switcher, and swiping quickly moves the cursor.

There is now an option to allow swiping to change language (there's no pretty animation for it yet but the functionality is there), and long-pressing to move the cursor. You can now also disable the language switcher altogether and use the spacebar exclusively for cursor movement.

You can now configure the backspace swipe/long-press to delete whole words instead of individual characters.

Emoji Search

You can now search for emojis (currently English-only)

Google Play payments

Previously you'd get "Payment unsupported in this build" error due to a combination of Google Play's policies about linking to external payment systems, and the app being an offline-only app which is incompatible with the Google Play in-app payment SDK. This has been resolved now by making a paid app on Google Play which you can buy, which the app now links to. As a reminder, you can always pay at pay.futo.org

Pricing update

As was announced a couple weeks ago in Discord and Zulip, we're increasing the price by $2. The new price will be $7 through pay.futo.org and $12 through Google Play. This only affects newly paying customers; if you already paid then this doesn't affect you.

Other changes

Added more actions to long-pressing enter key
Clipboard manager now has a button to clear history
Emoji menu now has a button to clear recent emojis
Updated clipboard manager icon to be visually distinct from the paste action
Spacebar long-press threshold is now doubled to reduce accidental activation
Added link to Google Play payment app to the Play Store version of the app
Number row is now automatically displayed in password fields
Fixed blank row in symbols when number row is active
Added some missing superscripts for numbers
Fixed number row not using correct numbers for some languages like Persian
Added support for Direct Boot
Added a special error when a wordlist instead of a dictionary is being imported
Website will now automatically suggest a relevant dictionary download if one is located
Added option to hide suggestion bar completely
Internal optimization to some settings retrieval
Fixed suggestions/swipe not working in autocomplete text fields
Fixed auto-caps bug
Fixed TalkBack crash
Fixed misc bugs
Debug Info action menu now contains some info to help debug issues specific to input fields

(Community contribution by remreren) Added Turkish keyboard layout
(Community contribution by ravarage) Added Central Kurdish keyboard layout

0.1.23.1

This fixes a bug in 0.1.23 where the emoji key is gone by default. "More Actions" was changed to "All Actions", and the option to edit actions was also added to the app settings. A helper "Add Next" button was added to help initialize empty categories in the action editor to temporarily mitigate somewhat buggy drag-and-drop.

v0.1.22

Corresponds to https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime/-/tags/0.1.22

To install through Obtainium, simply go to Add App and paste this repo URL in the source URL: https://github.com/futo-org/android-keyboard. Adding it may take a while depending on your internet speed as the APK needs to be downloaded.

0.1.22

Changes:

• Added a clipboard menu. Currently text-only, so images and styled text are unsupported. After being enabled, up to 25 clipboard items will be remembered and they will automatically be removed after 3 days of inuse. You can pin items to prevent them from being removed. Sensitive items like passwords are currently excluded, if they're marked as sensitive by the other app.
• Updated the license from the FUTO Temporary License to the less restrictive FUTO Source First License 1.0 (the same one as Grayjay)
• Fixed a bug where backspacing in some apps would remove the space from the previous word
• Fixed a few reported crashes
• Action bar is forced LTR now on RTL locales

v0.1.21

Corresponds to https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime/-/tags/0.1.21

To install through Obtainium, simply go to Add App and paste this repo URL in the source URL: https://github.com/futo-org/android-keyboard. Adding it may take a while depending on your internet speed as the APK needs to be downloaded.

0.1.21

This is a minor update with a few changes:

• Languages menu was renamed to make it more clear you can manage models there
• Updated some resource management wording
• You can toggle bluetooth mic while using voice input
• Emoji menu now has navigation buttons
• Updated layout options for some languages
• Fixed an issue where the Payment menu still asks you to pay even after you paid

v0.1.20

Corresponds to https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime/-/tags/0.1.20

To install through Obtainium, simply go to Add App and paste this repo URL in the source URL: https://github.com/futo-org/android-keyboard. Adding it may take a while depending on your internet speed as the APK needs to be downloaded.

0.1.20 update

Languages & Layouts

FUTO Keyboard now registers a single input method. To switch languages, you will need to long-press the spacebar instead of using the Android input method picker.

There is a new screen to add a language that also lets you select a different layout. A lot of languages are still locked to a single layout, if there's any that you'd like to see added then let us know.

Note the autocorrect for English is optimized for QWERTY.

Future of standalone APK

Our goal is to offer strong privacy protections and to go beyond just promising to never sending anywhere the data you type or record. So we are removing the Internet permission from the app.

The app on Play Store has lacked the Internet permission for some time now, but the standalone APK still required it for automatic updates and online crash reporting.

With this update, the Internet permission is now removed for the standalone version as well, and it will no longer be able to automatically check for updates.

In order to continue receiving updates, we recommend using one of the three options for managing updates externally:

1. Download the app through our F-Droid repo
2. Use Obtainium (GitHub releases)
3. Download it from Play Store

You can still keep using the standalone APK and you can still manually check for updates using the option in the home screen of the app, but we recommend using one of the options above so that you don't have to bother with manually checking every time.

Crash reports can be sent via email to keyboard@futo.org. If you download from Play Store and use Google Play Services, then crashes are sent automatically through Google Play's Android Vitals.

Payments

You can now pay for the app if you want to support future development of the app. No functionality is locked or paywalled.

If you already paid for FUTO Voice Input, you don't have to pay for FUTO Keyboard again, you can just tap "I already paid" if you see the notice.

Payment link: https://pay.futo.org/api/PaymentPortal

Paying through Google is not supported yet

Other changes

• Improved TalkBack support
• Improved tablet support
• Stability improvements
• Extra themes
• Voice Input toggle for bluetooth mic and audio focus
• Disabled spellchecker service as it's half-broken and not being worked on currently
• Fixed Dynamic System not working properly in some cases
• Updated inline suggestions (for password managers)
• New website and play store branding