We’ve become so used to the accuracy of its predictive text system and the swipe-and-spell of its one-handed use, that it’s hard to remember a time before SwiftKey was installed on every Android device in the office. It’s also hard to begrudge having paid for it, back in the day, even though as of today anyone can download and use SwiftKey for free.
Until now SwiftKey had been a $4 (R53.99) paid-for app with a free 30-day trial period for users who wanted to try it out before they bought it.
While the latest version of SwiftKey does away with its purchase price, it now includes a store where users can buy any of 30 new themes for their keyboards. For those users who had previously paid for SwiftKey app there is a pack of 10 themes that would normally cost R49, being offered for free as a thank you from the app’s creators.
Along with the changes to themes and pricing the latest version of SwiftKey also adds the ability to have a permanent number row on the top of the keyboard’s layout as well as a library of over 800 emoji characters which can be accessed with a long press of the ‘enter’ key (emoji are only available for SwiftKey users running Android 4.1 and above). These features come straight out of the beta version of SwiftKey that we have been using for a few months now and we think they definitely have made an overall improvement to the SwiftKey experience.
SwiftKey has confirmed that it will also be releasing a keyboard for iOS 8 when the new operating system from Apple debuts later on this year after it was announced that the new version of the OS would open up support for third-party keyboards.
