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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.
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.
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.
Swiftkey has better swiping recognition, but Swype has those awesome clipboard shortcuts. Basically ^A, ^C, ^X, ^V for select all, copy, cut, and paste. Have you ever been typing and get a text and need to respond to it before continuing what you're doing? A quit ^A, ^X, type your new text, send, then ^V to paste the old text and send. It's amazingly convenient. Trying to use clipboard functions without that is frustrating.
I think Swype's problem is that the Android built-in keyboard now has their 'killer feature' which was to be able to swipe between the keys to type.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
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'.
Apple built "Dictation" into macOS (and I think iOS, too) a few years ago (like five), and they even made it so you could d/l the libraries and keep the whole speech-recognition thing local. And their algorithms are speaker-independent and require no training.
So, in that regard, Apple "Did their own thing" a bit ago...
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.
I have switched from Swiftkey to Swype because Swiftkey was slow even on a reasonably modern hardware (Xperia Z5) and had worse multilanguage support.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap