Google’s Gboard keyboard is famous for being one of the best keyboards available on the app market currently. However, it was infamous for also not being available on the Android App Store, having been made available on the iOS App Store first, nearly six months ago.
The keyboard app made great leaps and bounds on the iOS market, garnering high ratings on iTunes and making Android users grumble about its availability. Well, they won’t have to grumble any longer as the Google Gboard keyboard app is now officially available on Android. Google Gboard introduces Google’s search capabilities into the keyboard app itself, letting you quickly search for something mid sentence and then insert the search result, without ever having to switch apps. For example, you can begin typing, “the weather today is great, it’s” and then tap the small Google logo and search for “Weather” to be instantly given the current weather according to your location.
The search capabilities don’t just stop there however, you can also search for GIFs and emoji, much like the iOS version. These emoji & GIF results can be accessed by tapping the emoji key next to the spacebar.
The predictive search results are also quite handy. For instance, if you’re talking to your friend about getting food, Gboard may offer you a result of “restaurants near me”.
A unique Android-only feature is an option to always show the number row on the screen. The app also added support for multiple languages, as well, which will help bilingual users with their searches and the app’s predictions. There’s a total of over 100 languages being supported by Gboard. Glide typing has also improved, along with predictions and auto corrections. Furthermore, you can also customise the theme of your Gboard keyboard with any of the presets or use your own image as a background and even change the layout to suit a one-handed approach to typing.
However, there are still some shortcomings. For instance, GIF search only works in three apps so far: Google Messenger, Allo and Hangouts, with more apps coming soon as developers add image keyboard support.
