iOS 8 to Include Support for System Wide Third-Party Keyboards
Apple today announced at its Worldwide Developers Conference that iOS 8 will support system wide third-party keyboards.
The company showed something that appeared to resemble the popular-gesture based keyboard Swype running on iOS 8, as software chief Craig Federighi noted that keyboards have the most restrictive sandbox to ensure user privacy and safety.
To this point, third-party keyboards such as SwiftKey Note and Flesky have launched for iOS, although their integration has been limited to note-taking in a separate app and allowing app developers to incorporate their keyboard, respectively. With this announcement, it is likely that both keyboards will launch for iOS with full integration at some point in the future.
Support for third-party keyboards will be included with iOS 8, with the new mobile operating system expected to launch this fall.
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Top Rated Comments
It's always been insane that, especially after mocking physical keyboards, Apple's own soft keyboard acts like a physical one by staying in uppercase.
(Plus I've lately had to explain to new iPad users why they're not typing what they think. Especially when iOS goes into auto-uppercase at the beginning of a sentence. That's can be very confusing to new iOS users, because while it's nice when you get used to it, it's unexpected, and they try to hit Shift which actually puts in back into lowercase mode.)
Uh... They do...
Google didn't invent Swype typing.....that would be Nuance - at least their app, Swype, was around before Google added it to the default Android keyboard.
Actually, Google took a bunch of 3rd party keyboard ideas and mashed them into the stock keyboard. Don't think there's anything "original" there.
Yet again shows, there's nothing new - its all been done in one form or another. Its the implementation that counts. In this case, Apple opening up to 3rd party devs isn't copying - simply shifting direction. They're also being far more cautious about it it seems with a specific extensions api that allows this type of thing in a highly sandboxed environment.
Implementation =/= feature.
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I'll be all over the Swype keyboard if they release it on iOS. Loved that about my Android phones. Looking forward to it on my iPhones and iPads!