0.1.26-rc1

This is a release candidate, please report if you experience any new issues or instabilities. Release notes subject to be changed and refined a bit for the final release.

Japanese language support

The mozc Japanese IME has been integrated into FUTO Keyboard to power the new Japanese flick-key and QWERTY layouts. After you download the dictionary file, you get full predictions in the new scrollable inline candidate strip. Importing MSIME/ATOK personal dictionary files, as well as manually adding words, is also supported in the updated personal dictionary menu.

[TODO: Some additional thanks to go here in the final release notes]

Autocorrect & Typing

Typing (in most languages) and voice input have been refactored to no longer use the text composing API. The text composing API was added very early on in Android to make input method engines easy to implement and feel responsive by displaying partial text directly in a text field with an underline and optional IME-defined styling. Unfortunately, many apps and websites over time have developed bugs or unexpected behavior relating to text composing, which led to bugs like letters or words duplicating themselves. Most keyboard apps now need to work around these bugs, and one such way is to just forego the text composing API altogether.

This means that your current word will no longer have an underline under it, nor will it have a blue underline to indicate a pending autocorrection, however you should no longer experience issues where words duplicate when typing or deleting. This has involved some fundamental changes to how typing is done, so if you experience any new issues, or any cases where text does duplicate itself, please let us know so it can be fixed.

Some general changes were made to input logic to improve predictions when typing - for example, you should no longer experience issues when typing immediately before a word, or splitting a word into two words. Behavior has also been improved when typing words containing dashes.

Word learning is now enabled even if you have autocorrect disabled, so that suggestions still adapt to your words. The emoji menu now stores 24 most-recent unique emojis rather than 128 total emojis used. Some more ASCII emoticons (well, technically they contain unicode) were added to the emoji menu and they have been made wider to accommodate. Inserting ASCII emoticons will now also insert surrounding spaces if necessary.

Typing question marks, exclamation marks in French will no longer insert an unnecessary space before, if the current line is empty.

New options

The new "Quick period key" option gives you a different kind of period key that you can flick quickly to access the most common punctuation symbols, more similar to some other keyboards: ! , . ?

You can now pick between two styles of number rows. An option has been added to disable the inline clipboard suggestions, it also obscures sensitive clips by default now. An option has been added to completely disable automatic spaces, and the automatic space options were renamed to better explain them.

We have implemented our own personal dictionary menu instead of relying on the system's menu to ensure better consistency and functionality across different vendors.

Contributions

[TODO: Full contributor list to go here in the final release notes]

Thank you to all who have contributed to translating the app! The full list is available inside the credits screen or in this source file.

Miscellaneous

• Key hints have been changed for better padding and visibility
• Improved color choice in payment dialogs and some other places to prevent unreadable text
• Various crash fixes, some performance improvements
• • If the voice input model is corrupted, you will now be told instead of just crashing
• A notice will now appear when a dictionary is not installed but is available for current language, to encourage the user to download it.
• Removed transformer finetuning. This feature was never stabilized and it mainly caused a lot of issues like battery drain or broken models. Automatic word learning is now meant to be handled by the dictionary instead (enabled by the "Personalized suggestions" setting). It will most likely be revisited in the future.
• Removed "Access network state" permission. This permission was used by the WorkManager library for the purpose of scheduling work with unmetered data requirements, which we used as a general heuristic to decide when to run finetuning, as metered data + charging might indicate you're traveling on a powerbank and finetuning would be undesirable. It did not permit actually accessing the network, only metadata about the current network such as whether it's unmetered or not. However it did cause some people to be worried, so we have now removed it.
• Improved currency selection logic, fixed issue with duplicate currency symbol in shifted symbols
• 16kb page size support apparently not for this rc
• Updated Android Compose libraries