Which Android keyboard are you using?

The ability to change the stock on-screen keyboard that comes with your phone, for a better one made by a third-party developer, is a big part of Android's open experience. Devs have consistently proven they can come up with some of the best ideas in the industry to improve the challenging life of the virtual typist in all of us. Innovative input methods like gesture typing and geometrical intelligence are pushing the concept boundaries, allowing you to reach levels of typing speed and
precision attributed only to ergonomic physical keyboards before, and sometimes even surpassing them.

We recently rounded up a few of the best on-screen keyboards available for Android, to facilitate your search for the one and only keyboard that will suit your current needs best. There are a lot of great choices in there, and the list is by no means exhaustive, as our phones' Android overlays come with their own decked-out keyboards, and even Google's stock Android one is a great contender now. That is why we wanted to ask you which of the many stock or third-party Android keyboard choices are you using on your phone or tablet. Checkmark your current thumb-wrecker situation in the poll below, and tell us why did you choose what you have in the comments.

Type on: The best alternative keyboards for Android

1. SwiftKey

Oh, SwiftKey, can we even stress enough how good you are at what you do? Leaving aside ergonomics, gesture typing, layout customizations and skinning options, which are stellar with SwiftKey, the predictive text algorithms it employs are as good as it gets.

You can grant the keyboard access to your texts, Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as RSS feeds, for instance, and SwiftKey will learn from the way you type there.

Not long after starting to use it, you will notice that not only can it predict your whole sentence without having to type more than a few letters, but it has also adapted to your writing style and most used words as well. How good is it? Well, it's been a constant in the top three paid apps in the Play Store for a while now, and always an Editor's Choice. It recently went completely free, so it's march towards the top gratis app there is a given as well.

2. TouchPal Keyboard (free)

TouchPal is used by a variety of phone makers, like Sony or HTC, as their stock overlay keyboard. It combines regular with swipe-style text input, and does it in a compact and polished interface, with a handy keyboard toggle and easily accessible edit buttons. The TouchPal Wave and Curve are unique gesture typing modes that can predict your whole sentence, and TouchPal also offers optional cloud sync, and a lot of add-ons. TouchPal has simultaneous multilanguage input, where it tries to recognize what language you are going for in the next word, and offers the respective suggestions. Auto correction and text prediction could be a bit better, but you are getting a pack of 800+ emojis gratis with the latest TouchPal version now.

3. ai.type Keyboard 2.0 Version ($3.99, with free limited version) 

One of the best Android keyboards currently, this Artificial Intelligence creation recently got a massive update, capitalizing on stellar text prediction, swipe gesture typing, cursor and editing keys, resizing and customization options. In addition, it features built-in spelling and grammar correction, powered by Ginger. It lacked in the skinning department before, but now features the all-trendy flat and minimalistic design you are accustomed from the newest Android overlays, and comes with cool additional themes, too. The only downside is the somewhat limited language support, and the fact that you have to shell out $3.99 for the huge emoji pack, and the swipe-typing option, but no pain, no gain
.