
Swype pioneered a new way to type on smartphones–now it’s dead - rbanffy
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/swype-keyboard-it-lived-everyone-copied-it-and-now-its-dead/
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canistr
This is really too bad. I loved Swype and used it since it was in beta. It was
always (and still is) better than every other keyboard and gesture-keyboard
for me. I tried switching to GBoard for a while because I felt it was
inevitable that Swype would eventually be discontinued due to lack of updates.
But even after several months of usage, Swype was still significantly more
accurate, fast, and responsive than GBoard.

RIP Swype.

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inanutshellus
So weird to hear of folks here trying and rejecting gesture-keyboarding. It's
orders of magnitude faster for me and so much less frustrating than thumb-
pecking.

Honestly I'd like it to go further. Like a keyboard gesture to autofill my
email address into a text area.

Anyway, I love it. Y'all crazy.

~~~
wycs
> It's orders of magnitude faster

This always make me laugh when said figuratively.

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simplify
Just imagine: If it takes you 10 seconds to type a sentence normally, with
swype you can do it in 100ms! :)

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tolmannator
I like the idea and have tried it myself, but there's no way I'd install a
third party software keyboard on a device I remotely care about. That's just
crazy. Second, Google's gesture typing is not part of their AOSP offering and
so it requires adding the unfreely licensed libjni_latinimegoogle.so file to
an Android phone running AOSP (which usually requires root). So for now, I do
without.

~~~
Sylos
Yeah, Android is so broken when it comes to third-party keyboards. Gives you a
big bloody warning that this keyboard could steal your passwords and whatnot
(with which it is absolutely right), but then doesn't even offer you the
obvious solution - blocking internet access for the keyboard app.

~~~
acct1771
If it was me, I'd keep the warning, because it doesn't have to have net access
to store a payload for later retrieval, or another app to suck up.

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itsdrewmiller
Why didn't their patent hold up? It seems like it was a novel idea that they
invested a lot in bringing to market.

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losvedir
I was curious about that, too, especially since the article so eloquently put
it: "for whatever reason".

It linked to the patent[0], and it struck me that in the abstract, it ends
with: "The present invention then generates a list of possible words
associated with the entered part and presents it to user for selection."

That's kind of a... specific... outcome of the swiping and I'm surprised
that's in there. As I understand it, people get all up and arms about
ridiculous patent titles, but it's the full abstract that determines what it
exactly covers, and if you deviate just a bit, the patent doesn't apply. In
the case of the Google keyboard I use, when I finish swiping it doesn't
"present a list of possible words for selection" \- it just chooses the "best"
one. There is a list elsewhere of alternatives, but I wonder if that's just
different enough of a UX that the patent doesn't apply.

[0]
[https://patents.google.com/patent/US7098896](https://patents.google.com/patent/US7098896)

~~~
alexbeloi
>In the case of the Google keyboard I use, when I finish swiping it doesn't
"present a list of possible words for selection" \- it just chooses the "best"
one.

IANAL. They probably dropped the ball in writing "presents it to user". If
they had stopped at "generates a list of possible words associated with the
entered part." There would very likely be a sub-process that generates a list
of possible words in all other implementation, that sub-process should be
violating the patent regardless of what the user sees.

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cannam
I like Swype, and continued using it on Android in preference to other swipey
keyboards.

But the glory of it initially was that it made it possible to go fast on much
smaller screens. I first used it very happily on a Nokia 700 (Symbian Belle
phone) with a 3.2" screen that can't have been more than 4cm wide.

I briefly hoped that swipe typing would become popular enough to stall the
trend for bigger and bigger screens on phones, or at least make it economic
for some manufacturers to provide at least one small phone. But it seems like
the opposite happened, huge screens were popular enough to make swiping
pointless for most people.

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earenndil
It seems like everyone has replaced it for the most part with gboard, but I've
heard precious few people talking about wordflow. MS released it briefly on
ios (and possibly android) and it had way better success rates than any other
keyboards I tried. Wordflow, which is also from MS, was way worse. I still
have it downloaded and in my purchased even after they removed it, still
wonder why they did.

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njarboe
I like gesture-keyboarding and saw it as a great improvement (rare situation)
when it showed up on my Andriod phone. I think this is in part because my
natural pointing motion causes my finger to hit hit the screen to the right of
where I think I am pointing at. I have to turn my finger sideways or aim to
the left of buttons to hit them consistently. Can't find a way to adjust my
touch response that is not some third party ap of dubious origin.

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acjohnson55
I've been a swiper for years now, beginning with Swype Beta. But I've been
using SwiftKey instead for the past couple years because Swype kept changing
things I liked and not adding useful improvements. Well, I suppose if they're
collecting sweet patent royalties from their competition, why bother
maintaining a product team of their own?

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nephrite
The idea of swiping seems cool at first but when you actually use it, appears
that to type a word you should know in advance the gesture needed, which kinda
kills the purpose. Idk maybe it works for language with shorter words like
English, but with longer words it's just awful.

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t0mbstone
Sounds like Swype's mistake was either not getting a proper patent, or not
enforcing it.

To be honest, though, I never did like using gesture based swipe typing. It
always felt like a sloppy and imprecise input method to me.

~~~
zodPod
I think the biggest problem Swype had (once it published) was probably
ignoring its user base. I was one of the early adopters when it showed up on
the play market and I loved it. It was one of the bigger available apps at the
time so I gravitated toward it. However, they messaged a bunch of things up
and didn't give us ways to turn off their "new features" and a keyboard is not
something you want to change often. So, since there were copycats, I moved to
one of those that gave me the freedoms that I wanted and didn't have the
annoying features that I didn't. I remember the forums at the time having a
HUGE amount of people claiming to be doing the same thing.

I use GBoard now and it has this horrible "correct the previous word" feature
that I can't turn off. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, Google is big
enough to keep it around forever without really listening to us. But this
feature is awful. For an example, I'll type something like "a little bit of
mambo" and, for some reason, it'll decide to replace "of" with "if" or
something along those lines. It's not a consistent thing with any combination
but I really don't want to have to erase two words to correct something that I
had already dubbed correct before moving on.

~~~
novia
"I use GBoard now and it has this horrible "correct the previous word" feature
that I can't turn off."

I've been having this exact problem with both swype and SwiftKey. anyone know
a gesture keyboard without this crap?

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forkLding
Guess its pretty hard to compete with large companies over patents simply due
to the networks and connections large companies can use to distribute their
stuff more efficiently.

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cookiecaper
Yes. Small companies take note. Getting "NetScaped", where a big platform
vendor re-implements your application and gives it away for free, is 100%
normal. It appears that Swype wasn't naive about this and attempted to patent
their innovation, but that BigCos conveniently circumvented that. It's
practically always going to be cheaper to lock 3-4 engineers in a closet for a
year and have them re-implement your software than to acquire a company.

Software companies do not get acquired for the software. They get acquired
because they offer access to something that BigCo can't easily replicate,
usually a loyal audience in a sector that BigCo covets (e.g., Facebook and
Instagram). Sometimes it can be about intellectual property, but as we see in
this case, they have big fancy lawyers and you don't, and they'll work hard to
circumvent you, so you'll have to have a very robust and thorough IP base to
get them to decide it's better to just buy you.

Swype is by no means the first innovative phone app to get NetScaped like
this. It happens all the time.

If you're building a company in this space, where the platform operators are
_also_ the main distributors and therefore don't need your audience, be very
careful. It's dicey. [This may be a good argument for alternative app stores a
la Amazon's Android offering.] Blockbuster anti-trust cases only happen for
companies that are the darling of 1996 Silicon Valley and the symbol of the
nascent internet revolution (i.e., not you).

~~~
forkLding
Agree on this, its really not the innovative tooling (although could be if
you're ahead by many years or have already the best minds in your company with
an on-the-way revolutionary product) but really the customers/distribution and
existing relationships the acquirer is looking for.

Simply put, a technology advantage is still hard to really to quantify in
business or acquisition strategy unless it already has a large amount of users
or a huge advantage over building it yourself.

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philippeback
Used it but it never stayed for long. With larger phones, typing works fast
enough for me. Also I need a somewhat accessible keyboard.

