1.5.0 beta: there's a QWERTY mode now. T9 isn't going anywhere, and there's one fix in here for the rest of you who'll never touch it.
Let me get the scary part out of the way in the first line, because I know what "T9 launcher adds QWERTY" sounds like to people who've been here a while.
Nothing changes for you unless you go turn it on. Default is still T9. Your keypad, your 9 Super Shortcuts, your long-press bindings, your layout - untouched. There is one new dropdown at the top of Settings › Keyboard and if you never open it, 1.5.0 looks exactly like 1.4.9 with fewer bugs.
Okay. Now the fun part.
Why this exists
I've been staring at the Clicks Communicator (~$499) and the Minimal Phone 2 (~$599) for months. Two devices whose whole pitch is what if your phone had a real keyboard again. Both cool. Both more than I'm willing to spend on a keyboard I might hate in a week.
So: poor man's version. The one I can afford to be wrong about.
If you switch to QWERTY
BlackBerry is the default layout (Standard, QWERTZ and AZERTY also ship). The detail I'm smug about: the 1-2-3 / 4-5-6 / 7-8-9 block lands on wer / sdf / zxc. Your number muscle memory from T9 keeps working. And Super Shortcut slots are positional, not per-key-label - so the shortcuts you already have on 1–9 are the same shortcuts sitting on wer/sdf/zxc. Switching modes doesn't orphan your setup. That was the hard requirement I set myself before writing any of it.
One hold, three outcomes. Hold a letter → a bubble shows that key's symbol-layer character. Drag up = type the symbol. Release in place = fire the Super Shortcut. Drag down/sideways = cancel, nothing happens. That last one is new even conceptually - on T9, a mistimed long-press always did something.
17 more Super Shortcuts. 26 letters instead of 9 digits. G → Gmail, M → Maps. Turns out "the letter the app starts with" is a thing you don't have to memorize.
Enter wears the icon of whatever it'll open. Type three letters, glance at Enter, see the Spotify icon, hit it. Smallest feature in the release, the one I use most.
If you stay on T9 - read this part
The dropped-keypress thing was real and it was never your thumb.
Some of you have mentioned typing feeling unreliable and I kept not finding it, because I kept looking inside the keypad. It wasn't there. The swipe-up-to-open-drawer handler was stealing taps at 1.3 mm of finger drift - less movement than Android itself counts as "moved at all." No error, no log, the key just silently didn't fire.
T9 keys are big enough that you blamed yourself instead of reporting it. Sorry about that. It's a 3× wider tolerance now, on both keyboards.
Haptics got rebuilt from measurements I ran dumpsys vibrator_manager while typing on Gboard to see what it actually asks for. It doesn't build an effect at all - it requests KEYBOARD_TAP and Samsung hands back a pattern Samsung tuned. Everything generic feels mushy next to that. It's a match now, there's a Light/Medium/Strong slider, and the click fires on finger-down instead of finger-up (that lag was reading as "spongy keys").
Your reports, shipped
- The Japanese review that said the design was nice but kanji made it unusable - kanji and kana now romanize, so denwa finds 電話 and kamera finds カメラ. Measuring that exposed the same class of bug in Korean, Chinese and Russian, all fixed in the same pass.
- The Urdu ask - "how can we be sure of our search if the characters aren't on the keys" - the keys now print the script. Same treatment for Thai, Devanagari, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic.
Known trade-offs, since you'll find them anyway
- QWERTY only: Super Shortcut now fires when you lift your finger, not the instant the hold completes. Unavoidable - if it fired early you could never drag up to the symbol. T9 is unchanged.
- % isn't typeable on the Standard layout right now. It's on BlackBerry row 3. My fault, it's on the list.
What I need from you
This is a beta, and a lot of it I've only verified on one phone. Specifically:
- QWERTZ / AZERTY users - are the letters where you expect? Does ?123 line up? Do the hold-for-symbol characters match your muscle memory?
- The flashlight key's green dot - turn the torch off from Quick Settings and tell me if the dot follows.
- T9 people: anything at all feel different about typing? It shouldn't except for being more forgiving. If it feels worse, that's the highest-priority bug in the release and I want to know today.
What still in progress
- Phones with physical Keyboard: I want everyone to experience it as soon as possible, so support for Unihertz or Minimal 2 will be done after this Beta period.
- Blackberry Keyboard Inspired Theme: I'm really crazy about Blackberry's virtual keyboard theme on their devices, just look at the attached photo.
- Multilingual support: Sure, I know you'll ask me to do this anyway, it's just that I've been sleeping less than 5 hours/day for the past week so please wait a little longer.
Thanks for sticking around while the launcher got weird.
Loi
