Hi Product Hunt! About four years ago I switched from Android to iOS, and the keyboard situation in my language (Estonian) was night and day. On Android I had used SwiftKey, and even Samsung's own keyboard was decent. On iOS I suddenly missed the long-press symbols under keys, which SwiftKey and Gboard were missing too. The stock keyboard had no swipe typing and no suggestions, and its long-press accents were full of letters my language never uses. SwiftKey on iOS had a fraction of its Android customization, and more than once an update broke it so badly it would not even open. I also wanted a keyboard that could not spy on me, even in principle. Back on Android, researchers had shown that both Gboard and SwiftKey send data about every word you type (https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Lei...). I did not want to wonder what the iOS versions were doing. So, being a developer (though Node.js, not Swift), I thought: why not try building one myself? The outcome was keyboard2. I added the long-press symbols I had missed, auto-capitalization, a number row, double-tap spacebar for a period, the usual smart typing features. But I could not compete on swipe typing, I simply did not know how to build it back then. Predictions relied on language files you downloaded inside the app, which I had put together myself by scraping articles and blog posts and cleaning out the inappropriate words, then predicting the next word from word pairs. It kind of worked, but it was not SwiftKey. I gave up. I kept the app alive for a while and it got some traction, but I still typed on SwiftKey myself, because I needed swipe typing. Eventually I stopped paying Apple the 99 dollars a year to keep the app in the store, since at 3.99 it was not finding new users. Then one day SwiftKey crashed on startup again (it still does for me), I happened to be on vacation, and in the meantime AI tools had arrived. So I thought, why not give it another shot. A few weeks later keyboard2 had everything I had dreamed of. Swipe typing finally worked, once I figured out the n-gram approach with AI's help. Predictions, suggestions and autocorrect no longer depend on downloads: 34 languages ship inside the app. After enough fine-tuning, swiping got good enough that I did not need SwiftKey anymore. It finally felt better. I put the app back in the App Store. Today keyboard2 has more customization than anything I ever used on iOS: 100+ themes and your own themes you can build and share as a code, 30+ layouts and your own layouts, built from an existing one or from scratch, almost key by key, including what a long press gives you. Fonts, key heights, gap sizes, long-press timing, a toolbar with copy and clipboard history, and backup and restore of your settings to a file on your own device. And most importantly, everything is private. No internet connection at all. Everything stays on your device. Coming from the Android world I hate subscriptions, but to keep the app alive I replaced the old 3.99 price with three options: 1. 0.99 per month, 1 week free trial 2. 7.99 per year, 1 week free trial 3. 17.99 lifetime The free trial exists because users asked for it back then. I am finally happy typing on the keyboard I missed for all these years, and I want to share it. If you have ever felt the current options are not enough, then maybe, just maybe, keyboard2 is good enough for you. And if not, tell me, and we will add even more cool stuff to it.

keyboard2

The private keyboard. No internet, no tracking, 34 languages

The private keyboard. No internet, no tracking, 34 languages