TechDomino
The Swype keyboard has long been available, on occasion, as a beta app from the Swype website, and through some partnerships with phone manufacturers, but it’s now finally available as an official app that anyone can get from the Google Play Store.
What Is Swype for Android?
Swype was the first Android keyboard of its kind to let your write single-handedly in a different way. Instead of typing the letters of the words one by one, like you normally do, you could “swipe” your finger across the letters, and when you were done, the whole word would appear on the screen.
But Swype has never been an official Google Play Store app, and instead you could only get the Swype apk from the Swype website, but it used to be available only for limited amounts of time, and only as a beta product. This was meant more of a means of promotion, and getting people used to it. Their real business was licensing the Swype keyboard out to phone manufacturers, such as Samsung, who would put it in their Galaxy devices.
The company built Swype for iPhone, too, but Apple never wanted any other keyboard than their own, and they never allowed 3rd party keyboards in their iTunes App Store, nor did they allow the keyboard to be changed at the OS level, although some jailbroken iPhones could do that. So the Swype iPhone app never went anywhere.
Swype on the Google Play Store
A while back, Nuance, the company behind most voice recognition apps, bought Swype, and it seems they are now releasing the Swype app for Android in the Google Play Store, too. The fact that Swiftkey has become so popular lately, and that they’ve also added a method of typing that is very similar to how Swype does it, plus having more accurate prediction, means that it’s a big threat to Swype, and it could make it obsolete. Swype not being available to all Android users so far didn’t help, which is why Swype and Nuance are adopting a different strategy now, and selling it for a much lower price than Swiftkey.
You can get the Swype keyboard app for Android from the Google Play Store right now, for only $0.99.
