Swype

» see swype.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

if you had an android phone in the 2010 window there was a real chance swype was the keyboard it booted with, and mine was one of them for a while. you slid your finger across the letters without lifting it, and the software guessed the word. for a stretch that felt like the future of typing on glass. a lot of people used it without knowing the name, because it shipped preloaded and most people never change the keyboard their phone came with.

swype started well before the android wave. swype inc. was founded in 2002 by cliff kushler, who had already co-invented t9, the predictive text system that let you write sms on a nine-key phone pad. the idea took years to ship. the first commercial version arrived on december 2 2009, preloaded on the samsung omnia II, a windows mobile phone. by then the touchscreen was winning, and swype had a real answer to the biggest complaint about it, that typing on flat glass was slow and full of errors.

nuance communications bought swype in october 2011. nuance was the speech-recognition company behind dragon, and it wanted swype's input engine to sit next to its voice products. for a few years the app kept getting updates and kept shipping on flagship android devices. then the market moved.

~ the case file ~

~ how it worked ~

the trick was the path, not the taps. you rested your finger on the first letter of a word and dragged it through every letter in order, lifting only at the end. the software matched the shape of that path against its dictionary and picked the most likely word. it was faster than pecking at individual keys once your hand learned the motion, and it tolerated a sloppy path because the language model did the correcting.

~ the climb ~

swype's real spread came from being preloaded. handset makers licensed it and shipped it as the default keyboard, so millions of people used gesture typing without ever downloading anything or learning the brand. that was the strength and the weakness at once. the technique became normal, but it became normal as a property of the phone rather than as a product people were loyal to.

~ the inheritance ~

by february 2018 nuance had decided swype did not fit its future. the company was refocusing on selling ai and speech tools to enterprise and healthcare buyers, and a consumer keyboard app was not part of that. on february 20 2018 nuance announced it had stopped development, and the apps came out of the play store and the app store. the odd part is that swype won even as it died. gesture typing is standard now. every major keyboard, from gboard to samsung's own, does what swype did. the motion outlived the product that introduced it, which is the same story as a lot of good early software.

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