You never realize how much you rely on it until someone hands you their iPhone. It's so intuitive now I always try to do it out of habit on a friend's iPhone before realizing they don't have it.

SwiftKey is on iOS, but I can't say I'd recommend it.

> It's orders of magnitude faster

This always make me laugh when said figuratively.

Just imagine: If it takes you 10 seconds to type a sentence normally, with swype you can do it in 100ms! :)

ok, the real answer is "seems slightly" but hey, the other way sounds better. :)

Also, all growth that is not linear is exponential. Forever.

For me it is cool but (like voice typing) I felt that if I had to correct it once, then I could have typed it twice. For a while I used Swype but with the gestures disabled. Eventually I switched to the stock keyboard, then Gboard (with gestures disabled).

I'm not good at spelling.

Regular typing on phone keyboards with predictive suggestions is really helpful for me getting the spelling correct, because it gives good early feedback and can often susgest based off a full misspelling (though, I always get the impression that suggestions are not designed for my style of misspelling, for example I keep misspelling 'susgestion' in this reply and it can't cope with the extra s). The annoying side effect is that I sometimes end up with completely the wrong word.

For me, Swype style is faster, if and only if I know how to spell a word.

If I don't know the correct spelling, gesturing is useless. It predicts a completely different word.

(Side note: unlike other teens, my spelling massively improved after I got my first cellphone at age 15 and used nokia's T9 predictive texting. Simply because after you made a mistake, it stopped predicting valid words)

Modern Android keyboard actually recognizes common misspellings and just types the word you meant. It's not perfect but it's very good. And usually there are suggestions at the top that're right if it didn't figure it out.

Definitely the opposite for me. Having to keep your thumb pressed on the screen while moving it around is, for me, clearly way slower and more difficult. Plus I almost always type with two hands, which doesn’t seem to even make sense with a swiping keyboard.

Same, I type on my phone with two hands. My experience typically has me going back and correcting words a whole lot more often with gesture typing, which kills any time savings and speed I may have initially gotten.

Typing one or two letters then hitting the suggestion has always been way more consistent for me.

thumb...? no wonder you don't like it.

thumb swiping works fine for 3-word responses, anything more than that and it's the index finger that goes to work.

Yeah. I had the same reaction. Who sw(i/y)pes with their thumbs!?

I swipe almost 100% of the time but I feel the system could be improved massively with some better prediction. The Android keyboard consistently gives me the wrong input for some really common words. How does "sine" appear so often instead of the everyday word I was trying to type (I think it's "don't" but I can't remember exactly)? Why doesn't it learn as I correct it every time? Why doesn't it look at the context.

I don't know why developers don't just use Zipf's law to pick the most likely of several possible candidates. I too get annoyed when rather obscure words are suggested in preference to ones that rank near the top of the language corpus. Google's one works a bit better than the stock offerings, but of course that means another vector by which you tell Google every thought you see fit to express via mobile.

Well now I’m really confused! If you’re holding the phone with one hand, the thumb is the only option. If you’re holding the phone with two hands, for me it’s significantly faster to essentially touch type with two thumbs rather than hold the phone with one hand and swipe with the index finger of the other.

I swipe with my thumb but I have no issues writing accurately at speed, certainly faster than I can type things out in all but a few edge cases.

Added advantage of not needing to look at the screen all the time to work, something that was previously only possible with tactile keyboards back in the day.

Enjoy! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.keymonk.la...

Different people have different tastes. I'm the type of person, who's even turned off autocorrect on my phone, because that already gets on my nerves when I type a word that it doesn't know and then it "corrects" it to a different word.

Also in particular annoying when I go back and forth between two languages. Then I have to switch language on my keyboard every other time I want to type anything. And I have to get used to the different layout, which with swiping seems to be even more annoying.

I turned off autocorrect on my wife's phone as her messages didn't make sense ;) (not bothering to check the autocorrected words).

As for multi-language, SwiftKey seems pretty good, you don't need to switch between languages, it handles two (maybe three) at the same time relatively well.

Yeah I get a lot of mistypes but it still feels a lot faster than peck typing. I can also do it while I'm not really looking which is nice on a non-tactile keyboard.

It's incredible.

I don't trust any of the closed source options.

Who wants to start a bounty on an open source replacement?

Swype has supported swiping your email addresses for years — just add them to the dictionary and swipe over 'a' for '@'.

WHOOAAAAA there's a "shortcut" option in here! Holy moly, that's so rad. I never actually pulled up the "Personal Dictionary" before, I just organically added words...

You made my day!

if you are rooted with Swiftkey, there is a great xposed module: "Exi for Swiftkey"

You can swipe for "navigation" and set new long-press strings.