Microsoft Word Flow Keyboard

» see microsoft.com/garage as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i missed word flow. wrong device, wrong year for me to install a microsoft keyboard on it. by 2016 i was on android with a default gboard, and the iphone-only word flow was effectively invisible from where i sat. the people who got it were the small but real cohort of windows phone refugees who had switched to iphone and wanted the typing experience back.

word flow was originally the system keyboard on windows phone 8.1 and windows 10 mobile, where it had earned a guinness world record for fastest typing on a touchscreen back in 2014. the team inside microsoft research turned that work into a microsoft garage experiment for iphone, which launched in the US app store on 5 april 2016. the headline feature was “arc mode,” which curved the keys into a fan around your right or left thumb for one-handed typing.

the app picked up favorable reviews in the launch week and slotted into the broader 2016 storyline about microsoft suddenly shipping the best microsoft apps on iphone rather than on windows phone. then nothing happened. word flow never reached android. it never expanded beyond the english-language US release in any meaningful way. on 31 july 2017 microsoft pulled it from the app store and pointed everyone at swiftkey, which microsoft had bought in february 2016 for around $250 million.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

microsoft garage was the internal program for staff side projects that shipped publicly. word flow on iphone came out of that program rather than out of a real product team, which is why it had a launch event but never had a roadmap. arc mode was the differentiator. you could pin the keyboard to whichever side of the screen your thumb was on, and the keys would fan outward in an arc that matched the natural sweep of a one-handed swipe. it actually worked.

~ the cracks ~

two months before word flow shipped on iphone, microsoft had closed its $250 million acquisition of swiftkey. swiftkey already had the entire android and iphone keyboard market that microsoft might have wanted. inside the company there was no future in shipping two competing predictive keyboards on the same operating system. the windows phone keyboard team and the swiftkey team were merged, the arc mode idea was put into the swiftkey roadmap (it never shipped there at the same quality), and word flow was placed on a quiet maintenance path.

the july 2017 sunset notice was short. existing installs would continue to work for an unspecified period; new downloads were blocked and users were directed to swiftkey. there was no farewell post.

~ what got buried with it ~

arc mode never came back. swiftkey eventually shipped a half-version called “one-handed mode” but it was just the standard keyboard squeezed to one side of the screen, without the radial layout. the world record paragraph from august 2014 remained the high-water mark for the original word flow engine. the windows phone keyboard team itself was effectively dissolved into the swiftkey org, which itself shrank steadily through 2018 and 2019 as the iphone and android default keyboards caught up on prediction quality.

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