Thumb-Key is a privacy-conscious smart keyboard, made specifically for your thumbs.
It features a 3x3 grid layout, as many older phones had, and uses swipes for the less common letters. Initial testing shows that you can reach ~25 words per minute after a day of use.
Instead of relying on profit-driven, privacy-offending word and sentence prediction for accuracy, as do most popular phone keyboards like Gboard and Swiftkey, Thumb-Key uses large keys with predictable positions, to prevent your eyes from hunting and pecking for letters.
As the key positions get ingrained into your muscle memory, eventually you'll be able to appromixate the fast speeds of touch-typing, your eyes never having to leave the text edit area.
This project is a follow-up to the now unmaintained (and closed-source) MessageEase Keyboard, which is its main inspiration.
It didn't take me too long at all, maybe a week or so, granted I'm just using it for english. I've gotten a lot faster since then but about a week to get comfortable using it.
I can't go back to a regular phone keyboard anymore, it's just so much nicer to use, I would fat finger and have to correct so much on regular keyboards, but now it's almost never.
Hope you enjoy it!
These are the comments that make me realize my time spent making it was worthwhile. Thank you!
I was about to open an issue about the broken hungarian layout but it turns out it's already fixed, f-droid is just slow to update. The izzyondroid version works great!
I've just switched from Messagease. I loaded up the layout and I'm already up to speed. Some behaviors are different though, like typing numbers with long press and accessing symbols on the letter keyboard.
Been using messagease for 5 years, and it took just a couple weeks to start typing eyes-free.
I learned by only doing crosswords (in MessagEase). I couldn't bear slowing down writing. Since crosswords feel more like letter-by-letter word-building instead of word-by-word sentence-building, it made progress less frustrating. Now, I use MessagEase nearly 100%, but I'm switching to thumbkey today.