Mike Wuerthele
One of the first third-party keyboards for iOS, Swype, has reached its end of life, and will see no more updates or development effort by its parent company.
Nuance's Swype keyboard, has been discontinued, according to a company representative. On Feb. 1, Nuance posted the news, saying that it will allow the company to focus its attentions elsewhere.
Nuance will no longer be offering the Swype keyboard on iOS App Store. We're sorry to leave the direct-to-consumer keyboard business, but this change is necessary to allow us to concentrate on developing our AI solutions for sale directly to businesses.We hope you enjoyed using Swype, we sure enjoyed working with the Swype community.
Nuance also develops the Dragon voice-recognition software for an assortment of markets, including the medical industry for transcription, and inclusion in vehicles.
The Android version of the keyboard has been axed as well.
Charles Martin
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35 Comments
I remember well the incessant blathering about alternate keyboards by trolls and those never, EVER satisfied with what Apple does. The castigating was intense because Apple wouldn’t allow Swype on iOS. And now it’s gone.
Can’t wait for the sadness and fawning praise for a now defunct product that was once the “reason” people weren’t going to buy iPhones. Apple, always doomed.
So the way I understand this is that these 3rd party keyboards aren't as popular as Android evangelists claimed they were before iOS also got them. I remember the endless ranting on how many couldn't live without them on the Android side and them deriding iOS for being so closed.
These 3rd party keyboards were all buggy, less responsive, and didn't add much.
I remember using this on my Android phones quite a bit, and tried using it on my iPhone a couple of times and I just didn't like it anymore. It got to the point where I could just type on the keyboard just as fast with the same accuracy. With Apple's addition of suggestions above the keyboard, I think it made something like swype even less useful.
There are lots of third party keyboards available. Swype was not the only one. And not even the only swipe style keyboard. For example, I use SwiftKey on a regular basis. It is also a swipe style keyboard.
Just because Nuance decided that this was not a business for them does not mean all non Apple keyboards have failed.