If you loved what you saw from Google‘s keyboard in Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, we have some excellent and rather unexpected news this evening. Google has just packaged up and delivered their completely stock (and amazing) keyboard and released it to the Google Play Store. That means most Android devices can now enjoy that absolutely stock Jelly Bean keyboard with gesture typing and all.
Google has slowly added all of their stock Android apps to the Play Store, which is enabling them to improve Android as a whole without updating the OS in general. We’ve seen this with Google Search and Google Now, Calendar, and other apps, and now their impressive keyboard can do the same. Sadly this appears to be for Android 4.0 or above devices only, and is currently only available in English.
The stock keyboard from Android 4.2.2 is now available to everyone, and it’s still one of my favorite keyboards to date. Google rivals SwiftKey and Swype with their gesture typing experience, which also offers a dynamic floating preview of the word. Then of course you’ll have the awesome voice typing experience of stock Android, instead of relying of Dragon dictation like Swype. Here’s the full feature list.
• Gesture Typing with dynamic floating preview
• Voice Typing
• Next-word suggestions and current-word completions
• Dictionaries for 26 languages
• Advanced keyboard layouts
• Works across your Android devices (tablets and phones)
That dynamic floating preview will suggest words before you even finish gliding your finger. Once the preview guesses the word you want just let go, you don’t even have to finish typing. Google also has a pretty impressive next-word prediction engine, which is enabled by default, but can be removed in the keyboard advanced settings for those who’d rather not have that present. Disabling “next-word prediction” replaces the top prediction area with a pretty great punctuation prediction, so that’s helpful.
Google’s keyboard has the most accurate swiping gesture-based experience in my opinion, and many should be extremely happy to give this a try. Take notice. Every screenshot on the Play Store for the keyboard has 4:30 as the time. Hinting at Android 4.3, as previous screenshots have all been 4:20 lately. Of course it is completely free so grab it from the link below and enjoy!
Update: Sadly this is region restricted because the keyboard only supports English, but we’re expecting an update soon. In the meantime hit the link below to download the APK.
SOURCE: Play Store
Download: Google Keyboard
yay, was missing the stock KB on my htc one!
Yeah, so I go to Play store to install it and it says it’s incompatible with both of my android devices. So much for being “for everybody.”
What are your devices?
its not compatible with a droid incredible 2
It said that you have to at least be 4.0 to get it… Droid incredible 2 only ever got 2.3… So that’s your problem right there… And you’re on Verizon. That last part was just a personal opinion. Switch to att and then sell the phone you got from them get a nexus 4. Problem solved.
It isn’t compatible with my devices either, but the reason mentioned for me is that it’s not compatible with my country. Google has never launched an app on the Play Store without making it US exclusive for at least a month. Google Reader was US exclusive for over half a year!
Use a free US-proxy (or sign up for UnBlock us which is very usefull for US-only content on Netflix and Hulu 😉 ), sign in to Play Store on your computer and install it from there. That at least in my case tricked the phone to install an update to the existing keyboard (GNex). ;-P
Living in Finland.
usually I just search for apk and side load it, but US-proxy is handy too
It’s a great keyboard until you have a few choice words for someone.
You can train it.
I still think that SwiftKey keyboards next word predictions are better and they have auto space when you hit the prediction… I almost never hit the space bar. If they could add that in the options I’d leave SwiftKey. I’d rather be stock. I’d miss the themes though.
Works perfectly for me on my s4, and it’s awesome 😀 just go to the “download” link and you should be fine, i live in Sweden and no problems here with compatability 🙂 have been using swiftkey for a long time now, but this might make me reconsider a switch