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The Swype Smartphone Keyboard Is Dead

Posted by BeauHD on from the life-support dept.

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.

3 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Proprietary software is not sustainable by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Proprietary software is not sustainable by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You can take up an Open Source project that's been abandoned. You can even cut and paste from the useful stuff. You can't get at a proprietary one that's locked up, or more likely bitrotted.

      --
      Bruce Perens.
  2. Maybe the coiuldn't fidn a market... by Excelcia · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.