How to choose the best iOS keyboard

It takes about ten minutes and you can run it on any keyboard, including the one you have.

Start from what breaks.

Open the last five messages you sent and find the moment you had to correct the keyboard rather than the other way round. Digits. A name. A word in the other language. Whatever it was, that is your criterion, and it beats any feature list.

What to look for.

• Where the typing goes. Ask whether a keystroke can reach the network at all, whether there is an account behind it, and whether prediction stops working with the phone in flight mode.
• The keys under your thumbs. Height, width, spacing, and whether digits get their own row. You meet these in every sentence. A theme you set once you never meet again.
• The language you write in. Correction and prediction in that language, and what happens to a sentence that changes language halfway through.
• What stops when you stop paying. Monthly, yearly and one-off belong on the same page, with a plain answer about what goes quiet afterwards.
• When the trial clock starts. At install, or the first time you open the paid part. On a seven-day trial that difference is most of the trial.

The ten-minute test.

Install the candidate, write one real message to one real person, and send it. Not a test sentence: a real one, with a name and a number in it. Then look at the keyboard rather than the message and ask whether your thumbs knew where to go.

Run the same message on a second keyboard the next day. Comparing two from memory a week apart tells you nothing.

Limits every keyboard shares.

Some limits are Apple's and every keyboard shares them. In a password field iOS shows its own keyboard and yours never appears. A keyboard extension cannot reach the network at all unless you grant Full Access, and it cannot start the microphone from the background, which is why dictation in any third-party keyboard needs the app to arm it first.

If a keyboard promises around one of these, that is the claim to check first.

Where EFKey fits.

EFKey is built for one kind of person: someone who likes how the iOS keyboard looks and is tired of what it leaves out. It draws the native look on purpose and then adds the number row, symbols on long-press, swipe typing and correction in two languages at the same time. That half is free and there is no account. The gestures on the keys, where holding C copies and holding P pastes, are the paid half.

The deeper pages are here: two languages at once, the number row, privacy and Full Access, paying once instead of monthly, moving off Gboard and moving off SwiftKey.

Where it does not.

If you want search inside the bar, it is not there, and a Gboard dictionary cannot come across because iOS gives Gboard no way to let one out. Colours have no ceiling but they do have a price: your own background, keys and Enter are part of Pro.

And on day one its prediction is behind the keyboards with years of your typing in them, because EFKey starts from public word lists. It takes about three days.

Quick answers.