Technolgy Rules: SwiftKey gets stickers

Thursday, March 15, 2018

SwiftKey gets stickers

Back in 2016, Microsoft bought the popular SwiftKey keyboard for Android and iOS for $250 million. It’s still one of the most popular third-party keyboard on both platforms and today, the company is launching one of its biggest updates since the acquisition. With SwiftKey 7.0, which is out now, the company is adding stickers — because who doesn’t like stickers?

Going forward, the service will offer a number of sticker packs, including some that can be edited and some that are exclusive to Microsoft, too.

That by itself wouldn’t be all that interesting, of course (and I can already see you rolling your eyes) but the real change here is under the hood and sets SwiftKey up for adding more interesting features soon. That’s because the stickers will live in the new SwiftKey toolbar, which will replace the current ‘hub,’ the menu where you can change your keyboard’s layout, size, etc. Right now, what you can find there are stickers and collections, that is, a library of stickers, images and other media you like to torture your friends with.

In the near future, SwiftKey will use this toolbar to enable a number of other new features like location sharing (though only in the U.S. and India for now) and calendar sharing.

“We remain committed to making regular typing as fast and easy as possible,” writes Chris Wolfe, Principal Product Manager at SwiftKey in today’s announcement. “Today’s release of Toolbar, Stickers and Collections, as well as the announcement of Location and Calendar, also shows our ambition to improve users’ experience of rich media. With the support of Microsoft, you can expect to see more innovations in both regular and rich media typing coming soon”