@rrhoover hey, actually it has been really challenging... Building the emoji part was ok but trying to build a keyboard like Apple's native keyboard was incredibly hard (not sure I would try to do that again :)
I think the thing that apple does really well, and is generally unnoticeable until you try to make it yourself, is that they have this constant and very intelligent autocorrection that they apply to characters and words that you mistype.
On mobile the keys are so close together, so mistyping is really common, and apple have managed to find a way to be really smart about how they determine if they keys you tap actually make sense in terms of real words.
I think the 3rd party keyboards that can do that really well will be the ones that win, but that's a job for a proper team. It's super tricky to get right. Happy to chat keyboard dev with anyone else who is making keyboards!
@rrhoover@davidkmckinney we've just submitted an iOS 8 keyboard - couldn't agree more!
I was very surprised to find that Apple didn't give developers access to a decent autocorrect API... almost all of our time was spent trying to figure this out, and not on the unique aspects of our keyboard.
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