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Comment by circularfoyers | Hacker News Reader

I don't see any reason why someone would use OpenBoard over AnySoftKeyboard. It would of been nice if there was an explanation of what differentiated it. If someone just wanted a different looking keyboard they could just have created a new theme for AnySoftKeyboard.

AnySoftKeyboard also is the only open source keyboard for Android that has gesture typing. Which is something I grew to love from when I used Gboard.

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The search function on FDroid is atrocious. I find all the language packs for Anysoftkeyboard but not the keyboard itself.

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.menny.android.anysoftkeyboa...

I think the search function is working fine, the app is just called "AnySoftKeyboard 3D Theme" in the F-Droid app but not on the website for some reason.

Then why I can't find it even with your keywords?

The other possibility is that it's not present for me because it might not be compatible with GrapheneOS?

But I have problems with search even for other apps. I'm OK with it it because FDroid is very good otherwise.

It shows up for me on GrapheneOS. I don't think the F-Droid search is OS-dependent anyways besides maybe the major Android version number. As the GP noted, for some reason the name is listed with the "3D Theme" addendum in the app which is a little bizarre. Does your browser support opening the link in an app, i.e. F-Droid?

With all default repos + IzzyOnDroid enabled and searching exactly for that package name I get all the language packs and a 7 years old PC theme, but not the app itself. I'll just download the APK, I guess.

For future reference you can use the "Open in app" option in Firefox to open the app in F-Droid from the website link in the parent.

When I do that it does open in fdriid but to the "Armenian for AnysoftKeyboard".

Edit: thought I would install it and it turns out its English. Using to type this.

Yeah, the app name got screwed up for whatever reason.

This appears to be a known issue: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/issues/2014

When I installed that, my Apps settings page listed the Armenian layout "app".

I concur, Foxy Droid works much better for me.

Swyping didn't work reliably when I tried one year ago, so I switched back to one of the keyboards of my phone (SwiftKey because I find it slightly better than Samsung's one.) Did they improve it in the last releases?

For me, it just doesn't do the job. I love ASK but this feature isn't competitive with the closed source alternatives.

Alas, I wish it were. This is all that's missing IMO.

Can't upvote this enough.

There is a pull request open which improves the algorithm massively. Author couldn't finish it because of health issues sadly. I've installed it on my phone and it works great but I had to update some parameters in the code so it'd work.

I'm not sure if they improved it or it just works more reliably with the default theme. But about a year ago it was unusable but now I'm able to use it with only occasional errors.

Of course it's still not as good as Gboard, but I'd rather put up with the slight inconvenience for it being open source.

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