After several years of requests from developers, Apple has allowed alternative keyboards to be used in iOS 8 system-wide. Users will be able to swap out the standard Apple keyboard with alternative ones. In iOS 7 and below, custom keyboards aren’t possible without jailbreaking. Some companies have made custom keyboards for the device, but they only work within that application. This has led to SwiftKey making a note-taking application for Evernote earlier in the year that featured an adaptation of its keyboard on Android.
After the announcement several prominent keyboard developers for Android announced that they’re already working on iOS versions, and intend to release their apps as soon as possible.
Alternative keyboards aren’t just extra buttons or themes: they can sometimes offer time-saving, ingenious features. For example, Swype and SwiftKey both allow users to type their words by just drawing a line across the relevant letters, making one-handed typing much faster. The feature was so widely praised that Google added it to its own official Android keyboard.
