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Microsoft's Windows Phone Keyboard For the iPhone Is Dead (theverge.com)
Microsoft's Word Flow keyboard for the iPhone had one unique feature when it launched more than a year ago: a one-handed mode that could be used with either your left or right thumb. Now, according to a support note spotted by Windows Central, it appears Microsoft is consolidating and removing the keyboard from the App Store, encouraging users to download SwiftKey instead. The Verge reports: Microsoft has tested out a number of iOS keyboards, and it now appears the company is focusing solely on SwiftKey after acquiring the app last year. We haven't seen any major additions to SwitftKey since Microsoft acquired it, apart from a separate Swiftmoji emoji predictor in July last year. Microsoft's SwiftKey keyboard now competes against the likes of Google's Gboard keyboard and various other iOS and Android keyboards. Have you been using Word Flow on your iPhone? If so, what has your experience been with the application? Do you plan on switching to Gboard or another third-party keyboard now that Word Flow is no longer supported?
Another feature of WordFlow was the promise of security. Microsoft, surprisingly, created the keyboard with privacy as a primary feature. I use it personally because I find it to be as good as other swiping keyboard in all regards but superior in terms of privacy.
The onscreen surface keyboard is actually pretty nice. The special characters aren't as hidden as they are on Android/iOS so you can... you know... actually TYPE a password or directory/url in a reasonable time.
Everything else about that closed-shit-system however... not so nice.
p.s. Fuck Microsoft for selling Windows RT tablets... and then discontinuing their support immediately.
If one has an iPhone, why would one download a keyboard from either Microsoft or Google - why not just use Apple's own?
Not only I downloaded Swiftkey, but it's actually one of the very few apps I actually paid for (before it became free). Please note, I can only speak about Swiftkey pre-Microsoft fuck-up. Before it got purchased by Microsoft and ported to Azure, Swiftkey was awesome!
It supported multiple-languages out of the box and it allowed me to mix French (accents included) and American English within the same message without switching keyboard/dictionary. I use a mixture of French and English when writing to my own family. The second feature I liked was the option of adding arrows to the keyboard. At the time, the Android support for selecting and navigating through text wasn't very good.
Later on, they also added Swipe, but I never really got used to that feature. I just used that keyboard without swiping.
Only thing I've ever bothered to get was a Bluetooth keyboard that I could use to type, if I needed to do extensive typing on a phone.
Me, I did the opposite, especially when I needed to write in French and use French accents. It was much faster for me to switch from my Mac's physical keyboard to my Android phone with its Swiftkey keyboard. Also, my phone knew what I was about to write before I wrote it, before I even typed a single letter or a single word. To this day, no physical keyboard on any Mac or PC can even come close.
Similarly, why would any Apple user use Cortana instead of Siri? Why would any Amazon user use Siri instead of Alexa?
People that have different accents and use different languages for one thing.
Also, not everyone uses iTunes, or Amazon Videos, or Google Play Movies for their latest movie cravings. Even when I was an Amazon Prime member, only a small portion of movies I watched came from Amazon Prime Videos. And thus far, only Google seemed to have realized this, because the media search on Google TV (now Android TV) has no problem detecting that I have Netflix installed and that it should search through Netflix movies when I want to watch a particular movie.
I really like how finding the right tool for the job suddenly becomes an argument that shows what "camp" everyone is in. If it was an app that was made by any other company, the rest of this discussion wouldn't be happening. And yeah, if Cortana was available for iPhone... I might try it because Siri isn't good. Word Flow is a good tool. Everything else is just unnecessary campy political commentary.