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.

Comments

Maybe the coiuldn't fidn a market...

[Excelcia]

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.