Four Android keyboards shipped something real in 2026. FUTO Keyboard replaced its swipe engine in June, HeliBoard 4.0 added a floating keyboard and a touchpad mode in July, Unexpected Keyboard 2.0 finally gained autocorrect in May, and Acti launched an AI agent inside the space bar in June. Gboard's Rambler dictation was announced in May 2026, but we could not confirm it is live for anyone yet.
This is a check of what actually shipped, not a review. We did not install or run these keyboards. Every claim below is traced to a dated source: a GitHub release, an F-Droid build, a technical report or dated press coverage. We name the month and year for each change, and where the evidence is thin or second hand, we say so in the same sentence rather than burying it.
The largest single change we traced this year is FUTO Keyboard 0.1.29, published on 1 June 2026. It replaced the old swipe engine outright with FUTO Swipe, an on-device neural swipe decoder written from scratch. The stack is deliberately small: a layout-agnostic encoder of roughly 635K parameters, a ContextLM of about 1.5M parameters, and a layout decoder of about 304K parameters.
The training data is the unusual part. FUTO crowdsourced a corpus of one million swipes from around 12,000 donor sessions and released it under the MIT licence. The accompanying technical report, arXiv:2606.25247 from June 2026, reports a 7.38% top-1 error rate against 11.05% for Gboard, which FUTO frames as 26% fewer errors. Treat that figure carefully: it is FUTO's own benchmark on FUTO's own test set, and we found no independent replication of it.
The same release added Unicode 17 emoji, a three-alternative swipe suggestion bar, and configurable spacebar and backspace gestures. A patch, 0.1.29.1, followed on 22 June 2026, and the app had a Product Hunt launch on 24 June 2026. On 28 July 2026, version 0.1.30-rc1 added a web-based theme editor that exposes all 44 keyboard colours plus custom bitmap borders and key icons, along with KASROZ, a layout engineered specifically for swipe accuracy in English. Both of those sit in a release candidate, not a stable build.
Standing and caveats: it is free, carries no ads, is fully offline with no internet permission, and has an optional one-time paid licence rather than a subscription. The source is available under the FUTO Source First License 1.1, which is not OSI approved open source. On Google Play it is still labelled open testing, and the store description is stale enough that it continues to tell users swipe typing and autocorrect are unfinished. For the broader field, see our best keyboard apps for Android roundup.
HeliBoard v4.0 was published on 10 July 2026, with the F-Droid build (version code 4005) following on 12 July 2026. It is the first major version bump for this OpenBoard fork since the 3.x line, and 2026 had already been busy: 3.8 on 10 March 2026, 3.9 on 29 March 2026, and 4.0-beta1 on 24 June 2026.
What 4.0 adds, according to the release notes: a floating keyboard mode, a touchpad mode triggered by sliding along the space bar, clipboard history that now holds images and files rather than text alone, an autocorrect confidence slider, Unicode 17.0 emoji, separate scale settings for foldables, and vibration feedback on key repeat. There is also a security fix that validates backup files on restore, plus device-lock detection controlling toolbar visibility.
Standing: free, open source, no ads, and no internet permission, so it cannot phone home. It is on F-Droid, IzzyOnDroid and Google Play. The caveats are real. There is no AI and no cloud anything, which is the whole point of the project but will disappoint anyone arriving from Gboard. Glide typing still depends on a separately supplied closed-source gesture library instead of shipping inside the app. And 4.0 landed only weeks ago on the back of a large internal refactor, so point-release churn is likely.
Unexpected Keyboard 2.0.0 was published on 2 May 2026, the first major version in the project's history. The headline is simple: spell checking and autocorrect arrived, in a keyboard that had never had either. The release also brought support for more languages, new themes, and contributions from 16 first-time contributors.
Point releases moved quickly after that. Version 2.0.4 was published on 24 May 2026, twenty-two days after 2.0.0. That pace suggests the autocorrect landed rough and needed follow-up work, so it is worth reading the fix list before you rely on it. F-Droid picked up 2.0.4 (build 55) on 1 July 2026, its first build of this app since 1.32.1 back on 15 July 2025.
Standing: free, open source, no ads, no internet permission, available on F-Droid and Google Play. The important caveat is the interaction model itself. You swipe each key toward its corners to reach extra characters, a design aimed originally at Termux users and programmers. It has a genuine learning curve, there is no glide typing, and it is not a drop-in replacement for Gboard however good the autocorrect turns out to be.
Acti launched on 30 June 2026 on both iOS and Android, billed as an agentic keyboard, according to TechCrunch's launch coverage dated that day. Digital Trends covered it on 1 July 2026. The concept: the space bar is replaced by an Acti Bar, where you press to type and hold to act. You write your intent in any text field, hold the bar, and a Gemini-backed agent returns a result, a link or a completed action inline, such as a drafted reply, a generated meeting link, a translation, live sports data or a Notion document, without leaving the app you are in.
Users can write multi-step Skills in plain language, composed from a claimed 150 or more built-in tools and 100 or more APIs including Gmail, Notion, Google Calendar, Calendly and X. The company is a Singapore startup with a reported $5.3M seed round led by BITKRAFT Ventures. Its chief executive, Young Wang, previously grew Baidu's Facemoji Keyboard to 300M daily active users.
Two problems we will not paper over. First, this is not a clean-sheet listing. The Android package is ltd.xyzer.app.bongocat, the Play entry still surfaces under an older keyboard's name in search results, and APKPure lists that same package as Acti: Agentic Keyboard v1.3.0.4. Acti is a rebrand layered onto an existing keyboard package. Second, an agentic keyboard sees every keystroke and routes intent to a cloud model, which is the opposite of what most readers want from this category. The company says it is local-first and that personal context stays on device unless a feature explicitly needs the cloud, but we cannot verify that. It is free to start; subscription tiers for advanced models, higher daily limits and premium features are planned but not shipped, and pricing is unannounced. The Skills marketplace does not exist yet. Digital Trends' own conclusion was that Acti does nothing other agents cannot, it simply lives in the keyboard.
Google announced Rambler on 12 May 2026 at Android Show: I/O Edition, as part of Gemini Intelligence. It is a Gemini-powered dictation mode that transcribes conversationally rather than word for word. Per the announcement, it strips filler words, applies spoken mid-sentence corrections, so saying "actually, drop the apples" removes the apples from your list, and handles code-switching between languages inside a single sentence, with a keyboard-width waveform interface. Google also announced Gemini-backed autofill appearing with a spark badge in the suggestion strip, and said Rambler audio and text are not stored.
Here is the honest status. The last dated report we found is Android Authority, 4 June 2026, which located a hidden Rambler toggle in Gboard beta 17.5.6.917159154-beta-arm64-v8a and reported that it was not available by default and had not rolled out. We could not verify that Rambler is live for anyone today. Rollout is also reported to be gated to recent Pixel and Samsung Galaxy flagships first, so even after it ships, most readers will not be able to try it. Treat this as announced and imminent, not shipped.
We include this one with a warning attached. FlorisBoard v0.6.0-alpha01 was published on 13 January 2026 and added floating window support: a windowmode attribute with fixed and floating values, move handles, resize overlays and resize handles, plus shadow-color, shadow-elevation and shape styling options. It also brought stylus and S Pen fixes for text keys and a CLDR 48 with Emoji 17 upgrade. Alpha02 arrived on 23 January 2026 with key-spacing and numeric-input fixes and a migration from LiveData to Flows.
Since then, nothing. IzzyOnDroid still lists 0.6.0-alpha02, version code 119, last updated 23 January 2026, which is roughly six months of quiet. This is alpha software on a beta channel, the changelog itself warns that custom themes will look broken against the new floating-window elements, and there is still no glide typing. It is free, open source, ad-free and offline. For context on how far behind that leaves it: HeliBoard shipped a floating keyboard in a stable release six months later.
A "what is new" piece is only trustworthy if it also says what turned out to be quiet, so here is what we looked at and could not date any 2026 feature for.
If you want the standing picks rather than this year's changes, our best keyboard apps for Android roundup covers the field as it stands. We will update this page when Rambler actually rolls out and when FUTO's 0.1.30 leaves release candidate status.
FUTO Keyboard 0.1.29, published on 1 June 2026, replaced its old swipe engine with FUTO Swipe, an on-device neural swipe decoder built from scratch and trained on a crowdsourced corpus of one million swipes. FUTO's own technical report claims a 7.38% top-1 error rate against 11.05% for Gboard, but that benchmark is FUTO's own, run on its own test set, and we found no independent replication.
Probably not, and we could not confirm it is live for anyone. Google announced Rambler on 12 May 2026 as part of Gemini Intelligence. The last dated report we found, from Android Authority on 4 June 2026, described it as a hidden toggle in a Gboard beta build that was off by default and had not rolled out. Rollout is also reported to be gated to recent Pixel and Samsung Galaxy flagships first.
It is a rebrand layered onto an existing keyboard package. Acti launched on 30 June 2026 as an agentic keyboard, but its Android package is ltd.xyzer.app.bongocat, the Play entry still surfaces under an older keyboard's name in search results, and APKPure lists the same package as Acti: Agentic Keyboard v1.3.0.4. It is free to start, closed source and cloud based on Google Gemini, with subscription tiers planned but not yet shipped and no announced pricing.
Yes. Version 2.0.0, published on 2 May 2026, was the first major release in the project's history and added spell checking and autocorrect, which the keyboard had never had. Four point releases followed within 22 days, ending with 2.0.4 on 24 May 2026, which suggests the feature needed rapid fixing. F-Droid picked up 2.0.4 on 1 July 2026.
Not that we could date. Typewise shipped only point releases in 2026 with no documented new feature in any dated source we found. For SwiftKey, the only dated 2026 change we found is a restriction rather than a feature: from 31 May 2026, account sign-in becomes Microsoft account only, with Google and Apple sign-in discontinued and typing data migrated to the associated OneDrive.