Thumb-Key vs Traditional T9
Side-by-side comparison of two open source alternatives
Thumb-Key
Thumb-Key is a privacy-conscious smart keyboard, made specifically for your thumbs. It features a 3x3 grid layout, and uses swipes for the less common letters. Its easy to learn, and designed for fast typing speeds. 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) MessagEase Keyboard, which is its main inspiration.
Traditional T9
TT9 is a Nokia-style 12-key T9 keyboard. It provides predictive text input in 40+ languages, configurable hotkeys, clipboard, undo/redo, and extensive customization. It works on touchscreens, physical keypads, and TV remote controls. And best of all, it doesn't spy on you! Supported languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Simplified Chinese (Pinyin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati (phonetic), Hebrew, Hindi (phonetic), Hinglish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese (Romaji), Kiswahili, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (European and Brazilian), Romanian, Russian, Serbian (Cyrillic), Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Moroccan Tamazight (Latin and Tifinagh), Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Yiddish. Philosophy: - No spying, tracking, telemetry, reports, or data collection of any sort. - No ads or unnecessary bells and whistles. It only does its job, typing. - No unnecessary network connections. The Full version operates entirely offline, and the Lite version connects only to download dictionaries from GitHub. Voice Input may require Internet access, depending on the available voice services. - Open-source, permitting you to verify all the above yourself. - Created with help from the entire community. - Things it will (probably) never have: QWERTY layout, swipe-typing, GIFs, and stickers. - Not intended as a clone of TouchPal, Sony Ericsson, KaiOS, Samsung, etc. While it captures the feel of the classics, TT9 offers its own experience and won’t replicate any device or app exactly. Thank you for understanding, and enjoy TT9!
| Feature | Thumb-Key | Traditional T9 |
|---|---|---|
| License | AGPL-3.0-only | Apache-2.0 |
| Install sources | F-DroidGitHubIzzyOnDroid | F-DroidGitHub |
| Categories | ProductivityBrowserKeyboard | ProductivityKeyboard |
| Features | Ad-FreeOpen SourceNo Tracking | Ad-FreeOpen SourceNo Tracking |
| Platforms | Android | Android |
| Website | ||
| Source code |