Why SwiftKey Needs ‘Full Access’

This was very confusing to me when I tried out the SwiftKey keyboard for iOS:

Full Access simply means you are giving the keyboard extension permission to interact with the app (the SwiftKey app on your homescreen). None of your language insights leave your device unless you opt in to SwiftKey Cloud, which is a backup and sync service that also lets SwiftKey learn from your writing on sites like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Good to know that nothing at all gets sent over the network unless you opt-in.

My one-day impression: for two-thumb tap-typing, SwiftKey feels a lot like the iOS system keyboard. (That’s a compliment.) “Flow”, SwiftKey’s swipe-around-without-lifting-your-finger method, feels really slow for me. Judging from my followers on Twitter, it’s really popular with people who type one-handed on their phones, but personally I almost never do that. And when I do need to type something one-handed, I just use the speech-to-text dictate button. So SwiftKey is not for me, but I can see why one-hand phone typists love it.

★ Tuesday, 23 September 2014