[cwyers]

The SMS permission is so that it can read your SMS messages to use as training data for their word-completion prediction features.

As to why SwiftKey doesn't strip out most of the features that makes it better than the official keyboard and sell it to a small market of people who don't want the features that are the app's actual selling point... well, that's why, those are the features that differentiate them, without them they're not really that special.

[drdaeman]

> The SMS permission is so that it can read your SMS messages

Either it's a bug in a Play Store, or we're talking about different permissions. For me, it says (in Russian, no idea how to switch language) "Отправка SMS и MMS (может взиматься плата)" which translates to "Sending SMS and MMS (fees may apply)".

Unless Google broke something with their recent permission revamp, I assume it's SEND_SMS, not READ_SMS permission. And that's worrying - I fail to see why should I grant such permission to a keyboard. It's not SMS-sending app, I have a separate one for that.

[crazypyro]

Appears to be a localization error? Here's what it looks like in English.[1]

[1]http://i.imgur.com/li8jHu2.png

[drdaeman]

Interesting. No idea, but guess so.

Or maybe they have separate builds (doing A/B testing, having region-specific versions or something like that). But I guess localization error is a more probable version. Where do I report one?

[swiftkey]

Thanks for flagging this discrepancy, we're looking into it but it appears to be a translation error.

[swiftkey]

Hi drdaeman please can you send us a screenshot of where you're seeing the text you mention to [e-mail] and briefly recap the issue? We'll get our Support Team to investigate for you. Thank you.

[drdaeman]

Sure. Sent an email.

I've also checked the installed APK, and it's certainly Google's l10n fault - the APK has READ_SMS declared, not SEND_SMS one.

[drdaeman]

As for features... I thought their primary selling point is being smart - their pattern recognition logic, that translates swipes to words and sentences. A good dictionary, a good language model and so on.

I really doubt the thing that differentiates them from other keyboards is that they learn from message history and sync that over the network.

[michaelmior]

I can't be sure, but from trying different keyboards, I found SwiftKey seems to be faster to adapt to my particular patterns of language usage. I assume this is because it has access to a reasonable amount of text written by me. In any case, I have found the prediction to be superior to other keyboards I've tried. (Although I haven't tried Fleksy yet. Looks quite promising.)