Thumb-Key

4.8
33 reviews
100+
Downloads
Content rating
Everyone
Screenshot image
Screenshot image

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.
Updated on
Mar 18, 2025

Data safety

Safety starts with understanding how developers collect and share your data. Data privacy and security practices may vary based on your use, region, and age. The developer provided this information and may update it over time.
No data shared with third parties
Learn more about how developers declare sharing
No data collected
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Ratings and reviews

4.8
32 reviews
Doug S
December 19, 2024
Glad that MessageEase went to subscription. It forced to me to find Thumb-Key which I much prefer. It doesn't include some MessageEase features that I rarely used or turned off if I could so I'm very happy. I was having some issues with accuracy due to upgrades over the years that are not a problem in Thumb-Key
2 people found this review helpful
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Skyler Madison
February 25, 2024
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
22 people found this review helpful
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Andrew Long
February 14, 2024
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.
21 people found this review helpful
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What’s new

## What's Changed
* Adding DE_THUMBKEY_WORDS layout. by @dessalines in https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key/pull/1312
* A few code fixes. by @dessalines in https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key/pull/1313

**Full Changelog**: https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key/compare/4.0.24...4.0.25