The favored SwiftKey smooth keyboard hasn’t been up to date for iOS customers for greater than a 12 months. Now we’ve discovered that there’s an disagreeable motive behind the plain neglect; Microsoft are going to delist the app from the Apple App Retailer. SwiftKey iOS shall be axed from the shop on October 5, however current customers will have the ability to proceed prodding and swiping on it, unsupported, till they refresh their system or get a brand new one. No reasoning was offered for the withdrawal of this app from the iOS ecosystem.
SwiftKey was initially a massively fashionable app for Android units and nonetheless has loads of customers who would balk at its disappearance. In 2012-13 it was the best-selling paid app on Android—fairly an achievement. It gained traction with the general public for its intuitive swipe-style enter, good AI-powered predictive language algorithms, and customizable appear and feel.
When Apple opened iOS as much as third-party keyboards in 2014 (with iOS 8) I bear in mind I rapidly put in SwiftKey on my iPad to learn from the identical predictive library that had been constructed up on my Android smartphone, and produce a slick swiping textual content enter technique to iOS. Nevertheless, Apple by no means allowed correct full-integration of third-party keyboards, and thus SwiftKey iOS felt restricted in comparison with the Android model, with customers thrown again to the minimal Apple keyboard when getting into safety delicate and another OS dialogs.
The shallower integration of SwiftKey with iOS may be one of many telltale indicators of why Microsoft, who purchased out SwiftKey in 2016, determined to withdraw this app from iOS units. Home windows reporting stalwart Mary Jo Foley couldn’t wheedle any causes behind the transfer from a Microsoft spokesperson. Nonetheless, the senior ZDNet editor has suspicions about Apple’s insurance policies that safeguard, and restrict rival corporations’ potential to monetize, its walled backyard. SwiftKey depends on accumulating a good quantity of consumer information to feed its predictive engine. It isn’t farfetched to imagine this follow has met important resistance from Apple’s more and more privacy-focused stance.
Microsoft has no plans to withdraw its SwiftKey keyboard app from Android app shops, and it continues to make use of the identical swiping and predictive applied sciences in its smooth keyboard for Home windows customers.
