Keyboard for iPhone
WianTribe Keyboard
A keyboard with useful extras that keeps your typing on your iPhone.
A keyboard sees almost everything a person types, so it has to be fast, helpful and careful at the same time. WianTribe Keyboard keeps the typing on the iPhone.
Keyboard support- Ownership
- A WianTribe product
- Year
- 2026
- Platform
- iPhone · iPad
- Status
- In development
Overview
- Our role
- Product strategy
- UI/UX design
- iOS engineering
- Language data
- Disciplines
- Application Development
- Product Design
- UI/UX
- Privacy & Security
WianTribe Keyboard is a keyboard extension and companion app for iPhone and iPad. It supports 28 languages, mixes languages that share an alphabet in one message, and adds emoji, text editing, handwriting and writing tools in a toolbar above the keys.
It is a WianTribe product in active development. We designed and built the keyboard, the companion app, the language and emoji data and the optional writing service behind it.
The problem
iOS keyboards work inside tight limits.
Apple keeps third-party keyboards on a short leash. They cannot use the microphone, watch the clipboard in the background, insert images directly or type in password fields, and many features need the person to turn on Full Access.
People also bring years of habits from other keyboards. The challenge was to bring the useful parts of those keyboards to iPhone without asking for more access than each feature needs.
How we handled it
Basic typing never needs Full Access.
Typing, swipe, suggestions, emoji search and handwriting all work without Full Access. Full Access is only checked when someone uses a feature that needs it, such as clipboard history or the online writing service.
Off until you turn it on
Learning your words and clipboard history are both opt-in. The clipboard keeps up to 40 recent copies, expires them after 1, 7 or 30 days, and skips password-manager copies.
Use the iPhone's own intelligence first
Handwriting uses Apple's on-device Vision. On iOS 26, translation and rewriting use Apple's on-device models, with the WianTribe writing service only as a fallback.
Send only what you chose
Writing requests send only the text someone selected or entered, over HTTPS, and the access token is kept in the Keychain.
WianTribe Keyboard in pictures
Key capabilities
What the keyboard can do.
- 01
Type in 28 languages
Layouts include QWERTY, AZERTY, QWERTZ, Nordic, Turkish, Cyrillic, Arabic and Hebrew, with long-press accents and languages including Yorùbá and Naija Pidgin.
- 02
Swipe and suggestions
Dictionaries of up to 30,000 words per language power offline completion, autocorrect with one-tap undo and swipe typing.
- 03
Emoji
The full emoji set with search in 16 languages, skin tones and recents.
- 04
Clipboard history
An optional history of recent copies with pinning, a “just copied” chip and automatic expiry.
- 05
Handwriting and text editing
Write with a finger, or use arrows, word and line jumps, cut, copy, paste and delete word from the editing panel.
- 06
Make it yours
Eight themes, seven accent colours, five keyboard heights, one-handed layouts and larger key labels with Dynamic Type.
Engineering
Built around what iOS allows.
A keyboard extension runs with little memory and strict rules, so most of the engineering is about doing more with less.
- 01
Language data built from open sources
Word lists, emoji data and translations are generated by scripts from open datasets and committed, so normal builds need no extra tools.
- 02
Works with or without shared storage
The default build needs no App Group, which keeps signing simple. With one, settings are shared between the app and the keyboard, and it falls back to its own storage when the group is absent.
- 03
A careful writing service
Requests use an ephemeral connection, reject redirects and send only the selected text. The service template keeps no request logs or stored text history.
- 04
Built and tested on every change
GitHub Actions builds the app and keyboard, runs the typing and backend tests and launches the companion app in a simulator.
Technology
Built with
- Swift
- UIKit
- SwiftUI
- iOS keyboard extension
- Apple Vision
- Apple Translation
- Apple Intelligence
- Cloudflare Workers
- GitHub Actions
Need help with something similar?
These are the WianTribe services most closely connected to the work shown in WianTribe Keyboard.
- Mobile App Development
Mobile apps built around how people actually use a phone: quickly, one-handed and often while doing something else.
- Product Design
Working out how the product should behave before development turns every change into an expensive one.
Let’s talk
Got something you're trying to build?
You do not need a finished brief. Tell us what you are working on, what is not working yet and what you would like the product to do. We can take it from there.