If you've been a long time user of Microsoft's SwiftKey keyboard on Android, you may have noticed some significant performance improvements over the past year. If you didn't, Microsoft is making it known with a new post on the SwiftKey blog, which touts the keyboard as being faster than most of the competition.
According to the post, SwiftKey was compared to Google's Gboard, Baidu, and TouchPal for the load speed tests, and it came away with a 20% advantage over its closest competitor. The tests were conducted 100 times on a range of phones from the low-end Nokia 1 to the Huawei Mate 20 Pro and averaged across devices. The team also says that SwiftKey has the smallest app install size compared to the competition.
As for SwiftKey's own evolution, Microsoft says that its performance has increased significantly over the past year, reducing lag by as much as 50%, even on older hardware.
To achieve all of this, the team tests the performance of every code change made to the app to ensure that it stays as fast as possible. Each individual release is also tested for performance to ensure that it's only improving, especially during the beta period. Lastly, comparisons to competing keyboards are also frequent.
As Microsoft points out, what's especially good about this is that Microsoft managed to deliver all this added performance despite releasing a few feature updates throughout 2018. During the year, SwiftKey received Translator integration and the ability to search and share web content. If you haven't tried SwiftKey in a while, now might be a good time to do so and check out the improvements. You can get the app from the Play Store.
Do you use SwiftKey on your Android phone? Have you noticed any improvements in the experience? Let us know in the comments!
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