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The Swype Smartphone Keyboard Is Dead
XDA Developers is reporting that one of the pioneers in swipe-gestures in mobile keyboard apps, Swype, is dead. Swype's owner, Nuance Communications, has confirmed that they are discontinuing Swype for Android and iOS. From the report: In a post made on Reddit earlier today, a user claims that they reached out to Nuance support with an issue and received the following message: "However, we are sad to announce that Swype+Dragon for Android has faced end of development. Here is a statement from Swype Product Team: 'Nuance will no longer be updating the Swype+Dragon keyboard for Android. We're sorry to leave the direct-to-consumer keyboard business, but this change is necessary to allow us to concentrate on developing our AI solutions for sale directly to businesses.' We hope you enjoyed using Swype, we sure enjoyed working with the Swype community."
Curious, we went looking online and discovered a Zendesk article from Nuance that announced the iOS version of the app would be discontinued as well. In order to confirm this, we also reached out to Nuance PR and they confirmed that development of Swype+Dragon for Android has indeed been discontinued.
Curious, we went looking online and discovered a Zendesk article from Nuance that announced the iOS version of the app would be discontinued as well. In order to confirm this, we also reached out to Nuance PR and they confirmed that development of Swype+Dragon for Android has indeed been discontinued.
Swiftkey has a better keyboard anyways.
Proprietary software is not sustainable, because it's shut down for simple reasons like "it doesn't fit our business direction any longer" or "it's not making money" that would be irrelevant to an Open Source project.
Unfortunately it could be difficult to persuade Nuance to Open Source this, as they're concerned with holding their intellectual property close and probably would not want to take the expense to separate out Dragon and anything else they want to keep. And they probably don't want to have their patent claims practiced in Open Source.
The bottom line here is that functions not unlike their swiping keyboard are built into other keyboards, including Google's, and there is Open Source speech recognition now, so maybe nobody needs this. But if enough people do, it would make a good Open Source project.
Bruce Perens.
Maybe they couldn't find an under-the-table market for all the tracking data they had. Swype is notorious for activating your GPS and calling home with it, ostensibly to determine if it should load "regional words" into the dictionary, however the frequency it did it was staggeringly more often than required for the stated reason. It was obvious they were doing something with that data, because they switched from a pay-for-the-app to a free app where you just paid for the keyboard skins. No one is shelling out real money for a keyboard skin, so it's pretty clear their funding was from elsewhere.
The government stopped allowing people to use personal devices on classified military bases any longer, after they saw the maps those things were generating. And an entire market dried up!
Bruce Perens.
What a great adventure for The FOSS Community
Since I paid for Swype years many years ago but I stopped using it over a year ago as GBoard is now a better keyboard.
It started to get annoying since they ashed Dragon with it. I don't want to talk to my phone. I don't want my phone to record sound when I accidentally touch a button I can't remove and send it to their servers. They made it impossible to get rid of the feature and it ended up wasting space on the keyboard.
Why is the first comment on this site always a stupid ass-troll?
Swype may have been the first application that I didn't know I needed. It impressed me more than anything else on my first smart phone and I still use it.
I'm not an expert, but I think they're throwing the baby out with the bath water considering the size of their user base. I would be very shocked if Swype could not generate enough revenue to support its own development.
Is it just me that's going wtf!?
they bought us out @ equitrac at 3x valuation to fire everyone connected to the old products that they never could best. It was stupid and emotional, but Nuance has made so much money on the back of Apple via the IBM voice patents (Dragon dictate) that they are the violent bully with a pocket full of cash.
And now they are having to re-focus as their core business is devastated, they wasted so much money on absolutely pointless things, and have been neglecting their accidental empire.
I've often wondered how long it'll take for either Apple to do their own thing, or someone to basically 'ogg' their 'mp3'.
Hashtag Journalism Fail (Clue: real journalists don't write 'for whatever reason', they find somebody and ask a relevant question to get a quote)
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/swype-keyboard-it-lived-everyone-copied-it-and-now-its-dead/
a stupid ass-troll?
Obligatory XKCD
I used Swype for years (IIRC Samsung licensed it for the Galaxy S/Vibrant), but switched over to Swiftkey years ago primarily due to better autocompletion options.
I was also annoyed when they switched over to Dragon, though these days I might be more sad that for voice recognition on Android your choices now seem to be down to A) Google and B) Google.
fencepost
just a little off
Is There An Echo In Here?
Microsoft came out with Word Flow. It has a couple of minor issues, but man, I loved Word Flow. I hate that I can't install it on my new phone because Microsoft decided to kill it.
All these 3rd party keyboards... I wonder which one will die off next.
Swype was the only gesture word based keyboard which did not require you to approve it sending your input out over the internet. It was the only one you could use locally without accepting the dialog for accessing your phone.
People ditched it because it slowly got worse and worse.
The first few revisions seemed to identify my swipes pretty well, then they slowly got worse
Also one of the absolute KEY features (tricks?) is to delete suggestions you'll never use. I slowly but surely remove idiotic suggestions for words I never used, making it more and more accurate.
Then, every couple of updates, somehow the dictionary would be updated and all my damn deletions would be re added.
THAT was what finally got me off it. If I could just have a swype style keyboard which remembered my poor vocabulary, it would be vastly more accurate.
Offer Nuance $200M for it, then it can be yours and yours alone.
Now I've got to go find some other swype-clone. I tried several way back when, and Swype was clearly superior. The others were just ... horrible.
I hope at least one of them has improved since then.
Um it looks like Swift key is a Microsoft product!
https://support.swiftkey.com/hc/en-us/articles/201457632-How-do-I-install-SwiftKey-Keyboard-for-Android-
References their privacy policy which links you to:
https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement
We found the Shiny Object Du Jour and think we may have the next Aviato.
Swype was revolutionary. ... And then it became a standard feature of Google's own keyboard. What once was the first app to install on Android, very quickly became a completely pointless one. I'm not surprised. Gboard is a far better keyboard, especially if you have to type multiple languages.
Yeah. It is now. Like with Skype they bought it. Now only time will tell whether they turn it into barely usable garbage like they did Skype.
Did they just build a keyboard to mine text data to build an AI? If so, that's amazing.
Yes
Since similar swype functionality is built into gboard and several other alternate keyboards.
Swyper, no more swyping!
Oh Jesus, watched way too much Dora with my kids ðY
Why-do people have such a hard-time under-standing how to use-hyphens?
I have somewhat higher hopes for Microsoft as a product owner than for Nuance - I'm not sure I've ever really seen much of anything positive about Nuance from a business standpoint.
I've seen regular improvements in Swiftkey over time, including since MS bought them. The most recent one that I noticed was that now when you have something in the clipboard and click into a text field, until you type something the "autofill" button is the contents of the clipboard. I'm still getting used to using that instead of my old long-hold, Paste behavior but it's a nice touch.
fencepost
just a little off
Swype on ios used to be amazing, but then they made some update a while back and it's kinda sucked ever since. Really bizarre autocorrects, constantly mis-selecting the correct word, and most annoyingly, not actually remembering what i've previously swyped. So, sad to see it go, but it sucked anyway, so good riddance. I kept using it because I like the layout, and I kept hoping that they would update it.