Android has secured its dominant position in the smartphone market largely thanks to the level of customization the platform offers. It’s the perfect foil to Apple’s obsession with keeping the UI consistent and tightly controlled at all costs. One of the long-time advantages Android’s approach has offered is a wide assortment of great alternative keyboards. Now one keyboard developer is making a play for the iOS ecosystem by bumping off the iOS keyboard one app at a time.
Fleksy first debuted on Android a few months back as a beta app. On that platform it operates like any number of other third-party keyboards — you simply tell Android to open Fleksy in place of the stock keyboard that came with your phone. Apps like SwiftKey and Swype work the same way, but the folks behind Fleksy think they can move beyond Google’s platform by wooing iOS developers as an end run around Apple’s rules.
Apple does not allow users to replace its multitouch keyboard as the default input method, but developers are able to replace the keyboard inside their own apps. This allows software with a very specific purpose to have more suitable input options. For example, an app that helps with statistics or math can produce a different keyboard with various operators and symbols. Fleksy is hoping that app developers will see fit to integrate its keyboard with the help of an SDK.
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