The company is coming back to the App Store

Nov 19, 2022 20:02 GMT  ·  By

If you live in the United States, you probably believe that Apple’s iPhone keyboard is just perfect and no further improvements are needed.

But in reality, the default iPhone keyboard is a huge mess and offers a horrible experience in any other language than English US – and to be honest, I think that it’s far behind the likes of SwiftKey and Gboard even with this language setting as well.

But when Microsoft announced earlier this year that it plans to kill off SwiftKey, learning to live with the awful iPhone keyboard was for many, myself included, the only way to go.

First and foremost, SwiftKey is by far the best keyboard app out there, not only on iPhone but also on Android. So Microsoft’s announcement came as a big shock for many, again myself included.

“We are ending support for Microsoft SwiftKey iOS. Thank you for being a user of our product. Please visit data.swiftkey.com for details on how to manage your data. The app will be delisted from the App Store on October 5th, 2022,” the company said in an announcement earlier this year.

Indeed, the app was removed on October 5, so downloading SwiftKey was no longer possible (unless you used that little trick when you could find the app in the app library on your iPhone).

“We have ended support for Microsoft SwiftKey iOS. Thank you for being a user of our product. Please visit data.swiftkey.com for details on how to manage your data. The app has been delisted from the App Store on October 5th, 2022,” the company then said.

After the removal of SwiftKey, I tried literally every option on my iPhone. Gboard is good but doesn’t even compare with SwiftKey, while the default iPhone keyboard is, as I said earlier, a huge pain in the neck. Without SwiftKey, typing on an iPhone turned into a ridiculously difficult thing, especially on the Apple keyboard. Of course, given I had no other option, I somehow trained my fingers to struggle with this nightmare, so at some level I ended up getting used to the whole thing. But the way I was typing was still substantially slower than on SwiftKey, not to mention the typos.

But thank God, Microsoft has heard the message.

The company announced that SwiftKey is coming back to iOS, and what’s more, it’s already working on some new features for the app. The aforementioned messages – and the page announcing the demise of SwiftKey for iOS – have already been pulled, and the app is once again in the App Store and available for download.

Needless to say, this is fantastic news for iPhone users. I downloaded SwiftKey right away on my iPhone, and typing is once again pain-free.

However, while everybody is waiting for the major updates that Microsoft has already teased, SwiftKey needs urgent fixes. Signing in still doesn’t work – for what it’s worth, I tried with every single option, including both Apple and Microsoft accounts, but the whole thing appears to be broken. Of course, I now use SwiftKey without an account, and this is still better than sticking with the iPhone keyboard, but I want my data to be stored in the account for long-term reliability.

At this point, it’s not known when SwiftKey would start getting updates once again on iOS. The latest update was shipped more than a year ago, so fingers crossed for SwiftKey to receive more love in the coming weeks and months, as it’s pretty much the only way to type on an iPhone without breaking your fingers.