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Security Researchers Warn that Third-Party GO Keyboard App is Spying on Millions of Android Users (betanews.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Security researchers from Adguard have issued a warning that the popular GO Keyboard app is spying on users. Produced by Chinese developers GOMO Dev Team, GO Keyboard was found to be transmitting personal information about users back to remote servers, as well as "using a prohibited technique to download dangerous executable code." Adguard made the discovery while conducting research into the traffic consumption and unwanted behavior of various Android keyboards. The AdGuard for Android app makes it possible to see exactly what traffic an app is generating, and it showed that GO Keyboard was making worrying connections, making use of trackers, and sharing personal information. Adguard notes that there are two versions of the keyboard in Google Play which it claims have more than 200 million users in total.
Swyping functionality used to be a big one.
Language support that the default phone doesn't include.
Handwriting mode, if you're into that.
Better autocorrect libraries
Alternative layouts, if you like dvorak
New features, such as syncing personal word lists to the cloud.
That's what comes off the top of my head, if I thought about it I could come up with dozens more.
(Bias note: I worked at Swype, the first popular 3rd party keyboard).
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I can't speak for the Go keyboard. I've never used it. Nor am I going to tell you the 3rd party software keyboard that I use, I think people should just try different keyboards until they find one that's right for them.
But for me, it offers speed and convenience (at the cost of privacy).
In other words, if privacy is your number one concern, please read no further, custom 3rd party keyboards are not for you.
My own keyboard knows what I'm going to say before I say it. It has access to my last twenty years of emails, sms/texts, and the little bit of social media content I've generated. It remembers previously used phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses. It shares information to the cloud and across devices. If I'm typing a previously used address into Waze or Google Maps on a new phone, it will do a better job of completing that address than either of those two applications will.
But don't visualize the typical auto-complete search form you might find on google, nor the typical PC auto expander application you might download from a shareware site, my keyboard may know the next words that I'm going to write, since it doesn't need me to type a single letter before suggesting words, but it still offers its suggestions word by word in case I need to deviate from my usual pattern (and offers me alternative suggestions from other patterns I've used). And in that sense, I think it's much less distracting than the auto-complete mechanism used on a google search form (on the google search form, auto-complete is more of an exploratory mechanism).
My keyboard knows grammar and spelling for my native French which I do not remember perfectly. It can do French accents, without me having to press and hold a key, or without me having to go into an alternate keyboard. It allows me to mix French and English when writing to family members (instead of highlighting all my mistakes in French when enabling the English spell checker, or highlighting all my mistakes in English when enabling the French spell checker). If you're trilingual, it allows you to use or mix up to three European languages at the same time.
I don't know how it handles non-European languages, but I would assume that there are third-party keyboards that specialize in Asian, Middle-Eastern, and other exotic languages. And if god forbid, if I don't want it to remember a particular porn website I use or the search keywords that I use on that porn site, I just long press on the suggestion to delete it from its database. Also, the keyboard is designed not to save what's entered into password fields.
And the default Android keyboard is great, in fact, it copied many of the great features 3rd party Android keyboards pioneered, but it is still playing catch up to some of those other 3rd party keyboards.