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:

1. QWERTZ / AZERTY users - are the letters where you expect? Does ?123 line up? Do the hold-for-symbol characters match your muscle memory?
2. The flashlight key's green dot - turn the torch off from Quick Settings and tell me if the dot follows.
3. 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

1. 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.
2. Blackberry Keyboard Inspired Theme: I'm really crazy about Blackberry's virtual keyboard theme on their devices, just look at the attached photo.
3. 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

Let me know what you guys think.

Would you like to experience it?

Hey everyone! Solo dev of Key Launcher here 👋

I’ve been down a bit of a hardware rabbit hole lately. Seeing all these new QWERTY keyboard phones and keyboard accessories popping up recently has triggered massive nostalgia for me. Honestly, I’m dying to buy one to test and play around with, but my budget says a very firm "not today." 😅

So, naturally, my dev brain jumped to the next best thing: What if I built dedicated QWERTY keyboard integration and features directly into Key Launcher?

Think hardware-first navigation, lightning-fast physical keyboard shortcuts, and layout optimizations tailored specifically for physical/QWERTY setups. As a tech enthusiast, I think it could be incredible.

However, as a solo dev, there’s a big catch I need to be completely transparent about:

The Reality & Trade-offs

• Everything else gets paused: Working on deep QWERTY integration would mean putting the current feature roadmap and backlog entirely on hold.
• Slower release cadence: Right now, I stick to a pretty rapid schedule of pushing updates roughly once a week. Pivoting to this would break that rhythm, meaning significantly longer gaps between releases for a while.

What do you think?

Since Key Launcher is built for you, I don't want to go down a long side-quest based purely on my own tech cravings if it's not something the community actually wants.

1. How many of you are actually using (or planning to use) a QWERTY phone / keyboard attachment?
2. Would you prefer I take this detour for full QWERTY support, or stick to the current roadmap and keep shipping weekly updates?

Drop your thoughts below, brutal honesty is always welcome!

Thanks as always for riding along and supporting Key Launcher! 🙏

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Photo: Generated with AI, not real one (of course 😂)

I really like the idea of using the monochrome color background and having it change color randomly every hour. I try to turn on these settings but my wallpaper color never seems to change. Have others had success with this? Not sure if there's a setting that I need to toggle somewhere to make this work.