14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft will give up on its Word Flow keyboard app for Apple’s iPhone, choosing instead to concentrate all efforts on SwiftKey, a project that the company purchased last year and which is currently one of the most popular apps of its kind of Android and iOS.
Developed for Windows phones, Word Flow made it to the iPhone in April 2016 as an experimental project of Microsoft Garage. A major update was rolled out in August last year when Microsoft introduced features like GIF search, contact support, and a bunch of other improvements, but since then, Word Flow has retained pretty much the same feature lineup.
Word Flow, which was highly praised for its swiping system that intelligent word prediction engine, has become more or less obsolete on non-Windows devices, mostly because of SwiftKey, the application that Microsoft updated several times in the last months.
All-in on SwiftKey
And with SwiftKey also offering swiping and a super-advanced word prediction feature, it only makes sense for Microsoft to abandon Word Flow for iOS.
“We will be wrapping up the Word Flow experimental project with the Microsoft Garage. The feedback and lessons learned will be used to improve the SwiftKey keyboard to continue to bring users a blazing fast keyboard with super-accurate autocorrect and intelligent next-word predictions. The SwiftKey product team is frequently building and evaluating new features for SwiftKey and shipping updates,” the company said.
As for the future of Windows phones, Word Flow will continue to be available, pretty much because SwiftKey is not offered here and by the looks of things, there are no plans to bring it to the platform anytime soon either.
iPhone users who have already installed Word Flow on their devices can continue running it, though it goes without saying that since no other updates would be released, it’s just a matter of time until everyone gets rid of it.