Here is something most people never think about: every word you type on your phone's default keyboard could be sent to a remote server. Your messages, passwords, search queries, all of it. The keyboard is one of the most data-hungry apps on any device, yet most people never change it.

If that bothers you, you are not alone. A growing number of developers and privacy-minded users have started looking for privacy-first Android keyboard alternatives that do not phone home with everything you type. The options have genuinely improved in 2026, and some of them are surprisingly capable.

Why Your Default Keyboard Is a Privacy Problem

Most popular keyboards work by sending your typing data to cloud servers. The stated reason is usually to improve autocorrect and swipe predictions. The actual result is that a third party holds a detailed log of your language patterns, habits, and sensitive inputs.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has long flagged keyboard apps as a significant privacy risk category. Unlike a browser where you can see network requests, a keyboard operates silently in the background. Most users have no idea what data leaves their device.

This is especially relevant for developers who type API keys, database credentials, and internal URLs directly on their phones. The risk is real, not theoretical. If you want to understand your broader exposure online, running a digital footprint audit tool can reveal just how much of your data is already out there.

The good news is that on-device machine learning has matured enough that you no longer need cloud processing to get accurate predictions. Several keyboards now run everything locally, and the quality gap with cloud-based competitors has narrowed significantly.

The 5 Keyboards That Actually Respect Your Privacy

1. FUTO Keyboard

FUTO Keyboard is the most technically interesting option right now. It uses the open FUTO Swipe model family, which runs entirely on-device. The model architecture is lean: the encoder sits at around 635,000 parameters and the full stack totals under 2.5 million parameters. That is tiny by modern ML standards, yet it achieves a top-4 fail rate of roughly 4% on their test set according to FUTO's own benchmarks.

What makes this interesting from a technical standpoint is the three-model approach. There is an encoder for general predictions, a small language model (called ContextLM) that eliminates nonsensical word suggestions based on context, and a decoder that learns layout-specific quirks. All three run locally in milliseconds, even on mid-range hardware.

Keyboard Privacy Risks Overview

100%

Data Sent by Default Keyboards

70%

Users Unaware of Risks

Keyboards with Local Processing

Privacy-First Keyboards Available

The swipe dataset behind the models was collected ethically. FUTO ran a voluntary data collection effort starting in August 2024, gathering over one million QWERTY English swipes from consenting users. That dataset was released under the MIT license in March 2025 and is available on HuggingFace. Transparent data practices like this are rare in the keyboard space.

2. OpenBoard

OpenBoard is a fork of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) keyboard. It is fully open source, contains zero network permissions, and has no telemetry whatsoever. What you see is what you get: a clean, fast keyboard that simply types.

The tradeoff is that OpenBoard does not have swipe typing or advanced ML predictions. It is a solid choice for users who prioritize absolute simplicity and trust over convenience features. You can find it on GitHub and audit every line of the code yourself.

3. Unexpected Keyboard

Unexpected Keyboard is a niche pick, but developers tend to love it. It is designed for people who need special characters, arrow keys, function keys, and programming symbols accessible without mode-switching. It has no network access by design and no autocorrect engine at all.

If you spend time SSHing into servers or writing code on your phone, this keyboard makes the experience far less painful. It is also available on GitHub under an open license. It will not win any design awards, but functionality is the whole point here.

4. HeliBoard

HeliBoard is a newer open-source keyboard that picks up where OpenBoard left off. It adds multilingual support, customizable layouts, and optional dictionary-based suggestions that run entirely offline. No cloud, no analytics, no surprises.

The project is actively maintained and has been gaining traction among users who want something closer to a full-featured keyboard without the privacy compromises. Check the HeliBoard GitHub repo for the latest release notes and supported languages.

5. Simple Keyboard

Simple Keyboard does exactly what the name says. No autocorrect, no swipe, no predictions, no internet access. It is the keyboard equivalent of a static HTML page: nothing to exploit, nothing to leak.

This is worth keeping as a secondary keyboard for when you type anything sensitive. Passwords, 2FA codes, and API keys should never pass through an autocorrect engine anyway. Pairing this with a comprehensive VPN guide gives you a reasonable baseline of mobile security.

How On-Device Swipe Typing Actually Works

Understanding the mechanics helps you evaluate which keyboard fits your needs. Swipe typing is not magic. It is a pipeline with several distinct stages that have to happen very fast.

Comparison of privacy-focused Android keyboards on a smartphone screen

First, the app records the path your finger traces across the keyboard layout as a sequence of coordinates. Then it passes that path through a model that scores candidate words based on how well the path matches each word's expected trace. Finally, a beam search algorithm (a way of exploring multiple candidate sequences simultaneously without checking every possibility) narrows down the top results and ranks them.

Here is a simplified look at what that coordinate path might look like before it hits the model:

{
  "swipe_path": [
    {"x": 0.312, "y": 0.45, "t": 0},
    {"x": 0.401, "y": 0.38, "t": 45},
    {"x": 0.523, "y": 0.29, "t": 90},
    {"x": 0.612, "y": 0.41, "t": 135},
    {"x": 0.698, "y": 0.45, "t": 180}
  ],
  "layout": "QWERTY",
  "language": "en-US"
}

The challenge is doing all of this in under 50 milliseconds on a phone that might also be running a dozen background apps. Cloud-based keyboards cheat by offloading the heavy computation to a server. On-device keyboards have to be architecturally efficient from the start. FUTO's approach of using a tiny encoder plus a dictionary-constrained beam search is a smart way to hit that performance target without sacrificing too much accuracy.

The C++ inference library that FUTO open-sourced handles the beam search and decoding steps. Developers who want to build their own keyboard or integrate swipe typing into another app can use this library directly rather than reinventing the wheel. That kind of composability is what separates a useful open-source project from one that just checks a transparency box.

What Developers Should Know Before Building with Open Keyboard Models

If you are thinking about integrating swipe typing into your own app, there are a few practical things worth knowing before you start.

License boundaries matter more than people expect. FUTO Swipe uses the FUTO Model License for the models and the GPL for the inference library. GPL is a copyleft license, which means any software that incorporates the library must also be open source under compatible terms. If you are building a commercial closed-source app, you will need to either negotiate a separate license or build your own inference layer.

The React Native documentation is worth reviewing if you are considering a cross-platform keyboard component. Native keyboard extensions on Android require specific system-level permissions that React Native bridges do not always handle cleanly. Going fully native with Kotlin or using the C++ library via JNI (Java Native Interface, a way to call C++ code from Java or Kotlin) is often more reliable for production use.

Testing swipe accuracy is harder than testing regular text input. You cannot just write unit tests with static strings. You need a representative dataset of real swipe paths, which is exactly why FUTO's public MIT-licensed dataset of one million swipes is genuinely useful. It gives you a baseline to measure against rather than guessing.

Benchmark your model against out-of-vocabulary words separately. They skew accuracy metrics significantly.
Test on low-end devices early. A model that runs in 20ms on a flagship might take 200ms on a budget phone.
Consider the beam width tradeoff: higher beam width means better accuracy but more CPU time per prediction.
Handle multi-language users explicitly. Switching between layouts mid-sentence is a common edge case that breaks many implementations.

Privacy architecture decisions also affect your app's trust posture. If you are building something that touches sensitive input, think about how to make your data handling verifiable, not just stated. Open-sourcing your keyboard component or publishing a clear privacy policy with technical specifics goes a long way. You might also want to check OWASP's Top Ten for input handling risks that apply to custom keyboard implementations.

The Privacy Tradeoff Nobody Talks About

Here is the thing that often gets lost in these conversations. Privacy and convenience exist on a real spectrum, not a binary switch. Giving up cloud-based prediction does cost you something.

On-device keyboard model inference diagram showing no cloud connection

Cloud keyboards improve over time because they aggregate behavior across millions of users. Your on-device model does not benefit from what someone else typed last week. For most common words this does not matter. For proper nouns, slang, and newly coined terms, the gap is more noticeable.

Best Privacy-First Keyboards Comparison

FUTO Keyboard On-device swipe typing, no data collection

OpenBoard Open source, local predictions

HeliBoard Privacy-focused, offline capabilities

Other Options Various features, check for privacy

The honest answer is that on-device keyboards have closed most of the accuracy gap for everyday use. They still lag on very new vocabulary and highly personalized suggestions. Whether that tradeoff is worth it depends entirely on your threat model and typing habits.

For a developer typing code, commands, and technical terms, a privacy-first keyboard often performs better anyway because cloud keyboards are not trained heavily on that vocabulary. For someone who types dense casual conversation with lots of new slang, the cloud option might still feel more responsive.

It is also worth thinking about what other apps on your device might be leaking. A digital footprint audit tool can surface accounts and services tied to your email that you may have forgotten about, giving you a clearer picture of your overall exposure beyond just keyboard data.

Practical Setup: Switching Keyboards Without Losing Your Mind

Switching your default keyboard takes about two minutes on Android, but there are a few things that trip people up.

Install the new keyboard app from F-Droid or the Play Store depending on which option you choose.
Go to Settings, then System, then Language and Input, then On-Screen Keyboard.
Enable the new keyboard in the list. Android will warn you about the data access risk, which is worth reading.
Tap Manage On-Screen Keyboards and set your new choice as the default.
Open any text field and use the keyboard switcher in the bottom navigation bar to confirm the switch worked.

One practical tip: keep a secondary keyboard installed for the first week. Muscle memory is real, and swipe typing on a new layout feels awkward until your brain recalibrates. Most people find they adapt within three to five days of regular use.

If you are building something for other users and want to make sure your app is discoverable by AI tools and search crawlers, consider using an LLMS.txt generator for AI discovery to help chatbots and LLMs surface your project accurately. It is a small step that pays off as AI-driven search becomes more dominant.

Wrapping Up: Your Keyboard Should Work for You

The keyboard sits between your thoughts and the digital world. It deserves more scrutiny than most people give it. The good news is that in 2026, you do not have to choose between accurate typing and keeping your data private.

FUTO Keyboard is the most technically impressive open option right now, especially for anyone interested in swipe typing. OpenBoard and HeliBoard are excellent for users who want something simpler and fully auditable. Developers building their own tools now have access to open datasets and inference libraries that did not exist a couple of years ago.

Want to go further with your device privacy? Check out resources from EFF on digital privacy and verify your accounts have not been compromised at Have I Been Pwned. For staying secure on public networks while you type, a comprehensive VPN guide is a solid next read.

Pick one of these keyboards, give it a week, and notice how quickly you stop thinking about it. That is exactly how a good keyboard should work.