Swype pioneered a new way to type on smartphones–now it’s dead

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.

> It's orders of magnitude faster

This always make me laugh when said figuratively.

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)

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.

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.

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 '@'.

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.

Yeah, Android is so broken when it comes to third-party keyboards. Gives you a big bloody warning that this keyboard could steal your passwords and whatnot (with which it is absolutely right), but then doesn't even offer you the obvious solution - blocking internet access for the keyboard app.

Apple does this right, the installed keyboard is not used for passwords. So while it can see what websites you are visiting, even in Incognito mode, it doesn't ever see URLs or anything very sensitive.

I was curious about that, too, especially since the article so eloquently put it: "for whatever reason".

It linked to the patent[0], and it struck me that in the abstract, it ends with: "The present invention then generates a list of possible words associated with the entered part and presents it to user for selection."

That's kind of a... specific... outcome of the swiping and I'm surprised that's in there. As I understand it, people get all up and arms about ridiculous patent titles, but it's the full abstract that determines what it exactly covers, and if you deviate just a bit, the patent doesn't apply. In the case of the Google keyboard I use, when I finish swiping it doesn't "present a list of possible words for selection" - it just chooses the "best" one. There is a list elsewhere of alternatives, but I wonder if that's just different enough of a UX that the patent doesn't apply.

[0] https://patents.google.com/patent/US7098896

The patent can be either used to block competition from implementing the same features so your product is unique, or licenses could be sold to use it by others. I'm convinced that the latter is happening and the Swype app just got redundant.

That's discouraging. I have an idea for a writing (not typing) system and it seems I will archive it for good.

I think the biggest problem Swype had (once it published) was probably ignoring its user base. I was one of the early adopters when it showed up on the play market and I loved it. It was one of the bigger available apps at the time so I gravitated toward it. However, they messaged a bunch of things up and didn't give us ways to turn off their "new features" and a keyboard is not something you want to change often. So, since there were copycats, I moved to one of those that gave me the freedoms that I wanted and didn't have the annoying features that I didn't. I remember the forums at the time having a HUGE amount of people claiming to be doing the same thing.

I use GBoard now and it has this horrible "correct the previous word" feature that I can't turn off. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, Google is big enough to keep it around forever without really listening to us. But this feature is awful. For an example, I'll type something like "a little bit of mambo" and, for some reason, it'll decide to replace "of" with "if" or something along those lines. It's not a consistent thing with any combination but I really don't want to have to erase two words to correct something that I had already dubbed correct before moving on.

According to the comments on that article they do have a proper patent and do collect licensing fees from other businesses. Which may be partly why they see their consumer app as being redundant.

You are assuming that no one pays royalties, and I don't blame you because that's also implied in the article, but I have hard time to believe that companies like Google or Samsung would do that.

I think when Nuance purchased Swype all they wanted is the patent, and simply didn't want to spend resources on developing Swype when they could get money through royalties. The original Swype preferred to be sold to OEMs, but OEMs typically want to make their Android version unique, so might actually prefer to implement their own keyboard with that functionality. This plus the fact that Swype quality degraded since Nuance's purchase makes me believe that they just went the route of permitting other companies for using their patent in exchange for royalties.

I occasionally give gesture typing a try since it's built into a lot of keyboards now and I've also found it to be imprecise. On a normal software keyboard I can type as fast as I want and count on autocorrect to fix most of my mistakes. When swiping I find myself stopping after every word to make sure it got the right one (it often doesn't) resulting in a halting style of typing that ends up being slower than regular typing.

For producing "normal" English with longer words it was invaluable. It also handled multiple languages with ease compared to the default iOS keyboard. But I could tell the last few years that they weren't really maintaining it. I'll probably use it until it stops working and then switch to the current state of the art.

Have you ever tried Gboard? It's way better than the first gen of swipe typing.

Yes. Small companies take note. Getting "NetScaped", where a big platform vendor re-implements your application and gives it away for free, is 100% normal. It appears that Swype wasn't naive about this and attempted to patent their innovation, but that BigCos conveniently circumvented that. It's practically always going to be cheaper to lock 3-4 engineers in a closet for a year and have them re-implement your software than to acquire a company.

Software companies do not get acquired for the software. They get acquired because they offer access to something that BigCo can't easily replicate, usually a loyal audience in a sector that BigCo covets (e.g., Facebook and Instagram). Sometimes it can be about intellectual property, but as we see in this case, they have big fancy lawyers and you don't, and they'll work hard to circumvent you, so you'll have to have a very robust and thorough IP base to get them to decide it's better to just buy you.

Swype is by no means the first innovative phone app to get NetScaped like this. It happens all the time.

If you're building a company in this space, where the platform operators are also the main distributors and therefore don't need your audience, be very careful. It's dicey. [This may be a good argument for alternative app stores a la Amazon's Android offering.] Blockbuster anti-trust cases only happen for companies that are the darling of 1996 Silicon Valley and the symbol of the nascent internet revolution (i.e., not you).