12 Essential Apps Every Android Owner Should Always Have Installed – SlashGear

No virtual keyboard is perfect, but the one that came preinstalled on your phone is probably bad enough to make you mad. Endless typos, horrible haptics, and more can slow down your typing speed and turn that quick work email into a 10-minute chore. The great thing about Android is that everything is customizable, and keyboards have always been interchangeable, so do yourself a favor and switch to Gboard.

Plenty of decent keyboards are available on the Play Store, but Google’s own Gboard steals the crown. Thanks to Google’s machine learning, Gboard studies your typing accuracy to make sure you type the letter you meant to press, even if you’re a little off target. If you’d rather swipe type, that’s an option, too. And Google’s voice-to-text input is in a league of its own, especially now that users can download the voice model to be stored locally, allowing you to speak your words into existence, almost in real-time, whether or not you have an internet connection.

Rounding out the feature set are robust customization and theming options, a floating mode, one-handed mode, a searchable emoji keyboard, GIF insertion, and a clipboard history to easily attach text copied from elsewhere. And if you want to get really granular with your customization, you can pick which shortcuts are shown atop the letter keys, and even pick how many milliseconds a key can be held down before triggering a long press.