5 Best Alternative Keyboards for Android Devices

One of the many perks of having an Android device is being able to swap the on-screen keyboard with third-party keyboard apps. These third-party keyboard apps come with extra and innovative features that are vast improvement from the default keyboards.

Today, there are hundreds of third-party keyboard apps on Google Play Store to choose from. You can change your keyboard until you find the one that suits you most. With this in mind, we've narrowed down the 5 best keyboard apps for your Android devices.

5 Best Alternative Keyboards for Your Android Device

SwiftKey

SwiftKey is a free, award-winning keyboard app that is advertised to deliver smarter autocorrect, next-word prediction, support for over 800 emoji, emoji prediction, and much more. To this day, its biggest strength is its ability to predict what you're about to type and actively learn from the way you type based on your emails, text messages, and social network posts to offer you better word and spelling suggestions. Aside from predictive typing, SwiftKey also supports gesture typing and swipe-to-type, including its Flow through Space feature, which allows you to type whole sentences without having to lift your finger. Furthermore, SwiftKey has a multitude of visually appealing themes that you can choose from, including tablet keyboard options. It also supports cloud syncing for your custom dictionary and saved texts, so you don't have to start from scratch on a new device.

SwiftKey is available at the Google Play Store free of charge.

Swype

Swype is the pioneer in the swipe-to-type and gesture typing, boasting it to be the most accurate gesture keyboard available. It has split-keyboard options, tablet-friendly layouts, easy language switching, smooth typing, and speech recognition. With the new and improved Swype, you can now enter words from two different languages at once. Also, you can adjust long-press delay, vibration duration, keyboard height, and mini left/right keyboards in landscape mode. Furthermore, Swype has improved its predictive typing and has added crowdsourced dictionaries.

You can download Swype and try it out for 30-days for free at Google Play Store.

Google Keyboard

Google Keyboard has taken some of the best features offered only by premium third-party apps and made them available for free. Although it doesn't have as many features as SwiftKey and is not as fluid as Swype, it has decent prediction and gesture typing. Also, its understated appearance adds to its familiarity. According to Google Play Store, Google Keyboard has the following key features:

• Personalized suggestions, corrections, and completions
• Keypress popup animations
• Emoji entry point and layouts (Android 4.4, KitKat or later)
• Gesture Typing with dynamic floating preview
• Space-aware Gesture Typing: No need to lift your finger while typing – just gesture through the space bar
• Voice Typing
• Dictionaries for more than 25 languages
• Advanced keyboard layouts
• Works across your Android devices (tablets and phones)

Google Keyboard is available for free at the Google Play Store.

Fleksy

Fleksy is a keyboard app that uses Geometric Intelligence to guess what you want to type even if you hit all the wrong buttons. It doesn't just look at the letters you press, but actually where you type, and analyzes your individual typing pattern to understand what you are trying to type. This is the reason why it is the keyboard that broke the Guinness World Record for Fastest Texting in your hands.

You can download Fleksy for $4 at the Google Play Store, or try the free version first.

Minuum

Minuum as the name implies, is a minimalist keyboard that takes a different spin to typing. Minuum does not use the traditional QWERTY keyboard. However, it relies on a proprietary keyboard that only takes up half of the screen of the regular keyboard. It is easy to use even if you have large fingers.

You can download Minuum for $4 at the Google Play Store, or grab the free version for free.