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Swapping keyboards in Android


Dlezcano

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Recently I changed my smartphone from iOS to Android and the biggest problem after 2 months of usage is I still do not feel comfortable with the way of changing between keyboards.

In iOS I just had to press one button to change to any keyboard; because I use Spanish, German, English, Chinese and Japanese keyboards I mostly used the long press in order to choose quickly from the keyboard list, but unfortunately this isn't anymore the case in Android and I feel quite annoyed.

First, the keyboard icon in Android was in the right-down corner, so It was in some way convenient since I am right-handed, unfortunately when I activated the gestures option (which disables the navigation bar) that Icon went to the left, so it isn't handy anymore since my thumb can't reach it because the screen is too wide.

On the other hand I downloaded Gboard, which I think is the most accurate for Spanish, German and English; unfortunately it is quite poor for Chinese, so I downloaded Sougou and Xunfei which I think are much better. The problem is that it is great swapping between keyboards with the globe button within google keyboards, but once you leave for sougou or Xunfei it is much more cumbersome switching back to google. It is not only the fact that my thumb does not reach the icon on the left-down corner, it is also that I mostly have to do two or more button presses since pushing that icon only shows the label "Gboard" and not the keyboards inside.

I already have tried many options but none of them is satisfactory, although Sougou allows me to install keyboards for other languages, they work worse and they do not support 滑行输入. On the other hand, Xunfei has a handy icon just over the keyboard, but each time I use it I have to do at least 4 presses.

So my question is:

 

Is there any way to setting a button (preferably on the right side of the screen) that shows a list with all keyboards on Android no matter what keyboard you are using at the moment?

 

Thanks in advance for any help or advice!

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Answering my own question, I found an app called "Keyboard switcher". The good thing is it adds a floating button you can put anywhere you want, but the drawback is it stays floating always at the same position even though you are not using any keyboard, so for instance it will show even on a full-screen video.

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  • 1 month later...

I use Swiftkey on my phone because I can use English, French and Spanish at the same time without switching. The AI/IME behind it has always been good and from the get go knows which language I am actually using... no problems whatsoever.

 

And then switching to Chinese (and now Japanese as well - albeit I don't have yet much stuff to write lol) is simply done by dragging the space bar to one of the sides (you can configure in which order will the keyboards rotate). For me it's more practical than Google Keyboard in Android or Apple's native keyboard, but I must say that Swiftkey's IME is not as as good as googles and many times it has trouble showing me even the most basic characters.

 

Technically the best possible keyboard for Chinese is Apple's, followed by something like Sogou on Android... if you care for installing that. A Samsung phone I bought in the Mainland also had a pretty good keyboard out of the box, but sadly you can only get it on Chinese versions since it has integration with Sogou, which is not the case for international versions.

 

 

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