Are third-party keyboards safe on iPhone?
Yes, and the condition is one you hold: Full Access. Leave it off and iOS gives a keyboard no way to reach the network, whatever the keyboard would like to do.
The rest of this page is what that sentence rests on.
What the warning is telling you.
iOS shows the same warning for every keyboard, including the careful ones. It describes what a keyboard could do once you grant Full Access, not what the one in front of you does. It is a capability notice, not an accusation.
Read it that way and it becomes useful: it is Apple telling you which switch matters.
What iOS enforces anyway.
Three things hold no matter who wrote the keyboard. In a password field and other secure fields iOS loads its own keyboard, so yours is never there to see anything. A keyboard extension runs sandboxed with no network until Full Access lifts that. And the app went through App Review with a privacy card the developer had to sign.
None of that makes a bad keyboard good. It does mean the worst case needs your permission first, and permission is a switch you can leave alone.
How to try one carefully.
Five steps. The second one is the whole safety margin.
- Read the App Privacy card on the App Store listing before you install anything.
- Add the keyboard in Settings, General, Keyboard, and leave Full Access off.
- Use it for a week on ordinary messages, not on a test sentence.
- If typing, correction and prediction all worked, those parts were never reaching the network. You have now checked the claim instead of believing it.
- Turn Full Access on only for something you want from it, which is usually haptics or clipboard history.
Where EFKey fits.
Everything you type with works with Full Access off: correction, prediction, swipe, the number row and all 74 languages. There is no EFKey server for any of it to reach, so the switch changes what the keyboard can do and not what it would do.
The one place the keyboard opens a connection at all is GIF search, because a GIF search has to ask somebody.
Where it does not.
Haptics and clipboard history do need Full Access, and no amount of engineering gets around that. Leave it off and you do not get them.
And no ordinary person can audit a keyboard from the outside. What you can do is read the privacy card, watch what stops working without Full Access, and prefer a keyboard that keeps working without it. That is checking, not proof, and the difference is worth keeping in mind.
Quick answers.
Can a keyboard see my passwords?
No. iOS loads its own keyboard in password and other secure fields, so a third-party one is never on screen there.
What does Full Access actually turn on?
The network, the shared container and the clipboard. Without it a keyboard has no route out of the phone, so it cannot send anything anywhere.
Is EFKey usable without Full Access?
Yes. Typing, autocorrect, prediction, swipe and all 74 languages work without it. Haptics and clipboard history are what granting it buys.
Keep reading.
Ready when you are.
One conversation is enough to tell.
