I think it’s always been pretty bad, tbh, but it seems to have gotten especially bad in the past year or two. It’s always screwing up “if” and “of”. You’d think it would know which would make sense contextually.

I want to replace it, but I can’t find any decent keyboards that types Japanese.

I thought I was just getting old and incompetent

Yes. Just switched to the Samsung built-in keyboard for now.

It was very good on predicting the word and the next word, then it it started to act like it’s guessing randomly.

Notice an increase on battery drain too.

all keyboards have gotten worse for me. I tried swype when it was new and it was getting better and better until it suddenly tanked. I’m not sure if it was before or after it sold. Then I tried swiftkey and gboard and idk what else but almost every closed and open source keyboard that was free and not obviously malicious.

Gboard was great for a while and I used it for looking up kanji by thumb writing them with typical stroke order and having it deduce usually the correct one while playing ace attorney vs layton back when they said it would never get an english version. It got an english version in the end. The swipe inputs for english and Spanish were excellent but English at least seems to have gotten worse to the point of needing 5+ attempts per word. Also disclaimer: Idon’t actually speak spanish. Manual typing is just mentally draining due to recurring typos that get automatically added to suggestions but not a deletable dictionary entry as far as I can tell. I also don’t trust google at all.

Almost everything else is equally untrustworthy and/or bad, with at best on par manual typing. The foss options with swipe input literally use closed source google modules and are all equally crappy as google.

I was using a ghetto usb knockoff blackberry keyboard for a while but while it is nearly perfect as far as typing goes, it’s also an immensely inconvenient extra accessory that eventually snagged on something and broke.

Basically everything sucks and its still the fault of billionaires like everything else.

I once had the thought of a back of phone mounted backhand stenography input, but I feel like it would also suck.

Yup, way more typos. Used to be able to swipe with very little error, now having to correct several times along the way. I don’t type on my phone often enough to be that annoyed yet, but maybe I should look into other keyboards too …

Thanks to parent for posting this. I’m now in the market for a new keyboard because I just hadn’t paid enough attention but gboard is complete garbage.

Yup. Steady decline in accuracy when swiping, words/names I use everyday (and have added to a custom dictionary) aren’t chosen from the swipe, and even on actual touchtype it corrects to words I never/rarely use.

Yes

All keyboards have been getting worse (both on Apple and Android). It’s impossible to type anything without typos anymore.

i have all predictive text disabled everywhere i can find such a setting.
and i don’t swipe.
mine works fine.

I have disabled auto-correction some time ago because it would make things worse more often than not. Used not to be that bad, if I remember correctly. Now I send a lot of typos, but at least the recipient has chance to guess what I meant.

What’s a Gboard

There’s two or three problems happening.

First, transferring a full-size keyboard to a phone is a GARBAGE concept.

Second, you know it’s a garbage concept because almost all the innovation in this space is based around, " How can we make this GARBAGE concept work?" So you have lots of clever work around like autocorrect and swipe.

Third, because these solutions require a bit of programming oomph, they are liable to corporate whimsy.

My solution: ditch the full size keyboard for an input method designed for small screen. Suck it up for a month, learn a new system, and be set for life.

I use this guy: https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key , a 9-key system that has buttons big enough that you can actually confidently type when you mean to type without autocorrect, auto predict, or any kind of statistical-computational shennanigans. Learn it once and never worry about this shit again.

Edit: Please reply with “I’m too lazy to learn a new input method and don’t appreciate you making me confront that fact” instead of downvoting.

I haven’t been experiencing any differences. Been using it for 4+ years.