Thumb-Key

Dessalines

About this app

Thumb-Key is a privacy-conscious smart keyboard, made specifically for your thumbs.

It features a 3x3 grid layout, and uses swipes for the less common letters. Its easy to learn, and designed for fast typing speeds.

Instead of relying on profit-driven, privacy-offending word and sentence prediction for accuracy, as do most popular phone keyboards like Gboard and Swiftkey, Thumb-Key uses large keys with predictable positions, to prevent your eyes from hunting and pecking for letters.

As the key positions get ingrained into your muscle memory, eventually you'll be able to approximate the fast speeds of touch-typing, your eyes never having to leave the text edit area.

This project is a follow-up to the now unmaintained (and closed-source) Message Ease Keyboard, which is its main inspiration.

Ratings and reviews

I've used Messagease for 16+ years now. But now that it's gone to a subscription model, I abandoned it completely. I tried a variety of other keyboards... but nothing could compare. After googling for a while, I found thumb-key. It has the same key configuration, but the letter, are arranged differently. I was so pleased to see that I could arrange the keys to be the same as messageease, in the settings. So... I didn't need to have a learning curve. There are minor differences, most good

While not a perfect replacement for Messagease, Thumbkey's commitment to privacy and open-source is greatly appreciated in light of Messagease's move towards requiring network permissions, an absolute dealbreaker for any input method. The core layout is all in place; and while certain gestures like circle or back-and-forth for caps or numbers don't seem to be supported, I look forward to seeing how the app grows as Messagease refugees flock to it.

Former messegease user here because of the forced sub. I have to say though I am glad that happened because a lot of the things I disliked about messagease have been fixed with this keyboard. The settings page is very simple which makes it easy to customize the keyboard anyway you want. I set this to the same layout as messagease so I dont have to relearn the whole keyboard again.

What’s new

Added a few keyboards.