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by lproven 1894 days ago
Sorry to hear that.

Swype was _by far_ the best keyboard for all-screen smartphones, and I miss it very much. It was markedly better than any other swiping keyboard implementation, as well as a substantially better feature set.

If MS silently switched Swype recognition and features into its Swiftkey product, but maybe kept Swiftkey's prediction engine – the only good thing about it – I would be happy to buy it again.
1 comments
schmorptron 1894 days ago
I think you can still get it if you look into your past purchses on google play, and I think last year I even managed to somehow download language packs for the multi-language support, indicating that the servers that host those are still up in some form?

EDIT: Yep- Just checked and downloaded the app & the german language pack successfully, will be fun swiping again. Neither swiftkey or gboard could replicate how good swype used to do it.

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lproven 1894 days ago
Oh yes. On Android, my licence still works, even on new devices.

But I got an iPhone 6S+ about 3Y ago – and the last time I owned an iPhone was before iOS supported replacement keyboards. After a lot of fussing around, I managed to copy a friend's installation onto it, but every time I restarted the phone, he had to authenticate it with _his_ Apple Store ID and password. Not convenient at all.

Also, AFAICS, the iOS version misses 2 crucial features from the Android version:

• it doesn't seem to have the edit-keys screen, with a cursor square and dedicated keys for delete forwards, delete backwards, cut, copy and paste;

• or the dialling-keypad screen (with the numerals in a phone-style square, as distinct from the numbers-and-symbols screen).

I've not seen any other Android keyboard with these. Some other swiping keyboards now support looping over a letter to double it (very handy in English, which is full of double letters – e.g. "cuter"/"cutter", "planing"/"planning"). I don't think I've seen any others which used swiping upwards off the screen to capitalise a word. Nor can any other I've seen handle swiping down to a punctuation mark to include it and keep going: "cant"/"can't", "were"/"we're", "ill"/"I'll", for example.

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