In the wake of the slew of software announcements at WWDC this week, you may have missed one of the more notable gems to emerge from the annual developer event: third-party keyboards are going system-wide on iOS. This spells good news for the likes of SwiftKey, Swype and Fleksy, as it opens a huge new market for them.
Now, however, Fleksy has given a first glimpse of what its keyboard app looks like on the next version of Apple’s mobile OS, posting this image to its Twitter account of the app running on the iOS 8 APIs, alongside the message: “Fleksy is already running on iOS 8“.
Founded in San Francisco back in 2011, Fleksy uses what it calls ‘Geometric Intelligence’ to combat sloppy and inaccurate typing, predicting where it thinks you meant to hit on the keyboard based on your typing patterns. This, in theory, should help users type more quickly.
Fleksy is perhaps the most notable third-party keyboard app with an existing iOS footprint, catering for blind users on the platform since 2012. Indeed, it has had an iOS keyboard alternative on the App Store for a while, letting you export text to other services, including Facebook and Twitter. And back in February, the company ramped up its presence across iOS by opening the Fleksy SDK to all third-party services, meaning any developer could use its keyboard within their app.
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While it’s still very early stage, and the public won’t be able to use any third-party system-wide keyboard app until the autumn, it’s still interesting to see that work is well underway at Fleksy towers, even if it is an early version.
“We will be working all summer to make it more awesome,” Fleksy founder Ioannis Verdelis tells TNW.
➤ Fleksy
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