Give your phone a huge (and free) upgrade by switching to another keyboard

When you have multiple keyboards installed, you can manage them on iOS by opening Settings, then selecting General > Keyboard > Keyboards. To switch between the keyboards you have installed, tap and hold the globe icon that appears in the lower-right corner of all your keyboards.

On Android, you can find your keyboards via System > Keyboard > On-screen keyboard From settings. To switch between them, tap and hold the globe icon that appears in the lower right corner when the keyboard is on the screen.

The best phone keyboards you can try

Gboard (Android, iOS) is a good option to start with here. It comes pre-installed by default on Pixel phones, but it’s also an excellent choice of keyboard for iPhones and Android phones not made by Google. It’s fast and clean, works well with GIFs, emojis, and stickers, and supports swipe typing (where you can hover over letters to form words instead of tapping on each letter individually).

Then there’s SwiftKey (Android and iOS), developed by Microsoft. As you might expect, there’s Copilot AI integration built in, so if you’re stuck for something to say, you can use generative AI to do the typing for you. SwiftKey will also learn your writing style as you go, meaning auto-corrections and suggestions become more accurate over time.

SwiftKey comes with a bunch of settings you can play with.

Photography: David Nield

Typewise (Android, iOS) shows how third-party keyboards can be a little out of the ordinary. It offers an unusual layout that uses letterboxes and hexadecimal characters, which Typewise says can dramatically increase your typing speed. There’s also support for multiple languages, AI integrations, and custom gestures.

You may be familiar with Grammarly from the web and desktop (and from recent news about its bugs), but the grammar and spell-checking service is also available as a keyboard on iOS and as a keyboard extension on Android. In addition to checking your writing, Grammarly puts AI front and center: You can get writing suggestions through a prompt, for example, or change the tone of an existing message with a few taps.

If you care about customization options above all else, consider Mister Keyboard for iOS. It’s packed with ways to tweak the look and layout of your iPhone’s keyboard, and access features like emoji and the clipboard. Either choose one of the preset themes, or control the keyboard pixel by pixel.

Mister Keyboard is not available for Android, but there is theme support in Futo Keyboard for Android. It also includes intelligent auto-correction and text-editing tools, and prides itself on its privacy. The keyboard app doesn’t ask for permission to connect to the Internet, so you know your keystrokes aren’t being sent anywhere.