FUTO Swipe – A new swipe typing model

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall reception

  • Many commenters are enthusiastic: this is the first open-ish, high‑quality swipe model they’ve seen that approaches or matches Gboard/SwiftKey in accuracy.
  • Several long‑time Gboard/SwiftKey users report that this new swipe update finally makes FUTO “usable” or “good enough” to switch full‑time, though some still find Gboard more accurate.
  • Others tried the web demo and found it weaker than expected (e.g., simple words like “hello” misrecognized), suggesting the demo may not fully reflect the on‑device experience.

Swipe quality vs other keyboards

  • Compared to Gboard and SwiftKey, opinions are mixed: some say FUTO is now on par, others still see more nonsensical suggestions and poorer context handling.
  • Users highlight strengths like responsiveness and long‑word swiping, but note issues with short ambiguous words and random capitalizations.
  • Two‑finger/multi‑finger swipe is widely praised on a competing keyboard (HeliBoard); FUTO’s library supports multi‑finger swipe but it’s unclear how fully the Android app exposes it.

Licensing, openness, and distribution

  • The swipe library is GPLv3, but the Android keyboard and model use custom “FUTO” licenses with non‑commercial and payment‑nag restrictions.
  • Some call these licenses non‑free and incompatible with FOSS distributions (e.g., Debian, main F‑Droid repo); others argue they’re reasonable commercial protections against reselling and still give users source access.
  • FUTO also funds fully open‑source projects, which some see as mitigating the licensing concerns.
  • The keyboard is not in the main F‑Droid repo; users must add FUTO’s own repo.

Features, UX, and language support

  • Positives: offline voice dictation with larger optional models, good performance, arrow keys, text‑editing shortcuts, clipboard history, resize/floating modes, and support for swipe‑optimized layouts like ClearFlow.
  • Negatives: no GIF search by design, aggressive or annoying donation/licensing prompts for some, and missing or weak support for many languages and true multilingual swipe/code‑switching.
  • Some banking apps flag the keyboard as “insecure,” forcing users to uninstall it.

Alternatives and related work

  • Heliboard (with a proprietary Gboard swipe library but an open swipe project in progress) is frequently cited as an open‑source alternative, especially for two‑finger swipe.
  • iOS users mostly feel left out; FUTO has no iOS version and some commenters frame that as a principled refusal to accept Apple’s distribution model.