WinBoard

The Windows Phone 8.1 keyboard, as a keyboard — with Windows 98, XP and Vista for company.

WinBoard is an Android input method that types like the phone Microsoft stopped making. Ten keys across, the digits and the symbols tucked into the corners where a hold produces them, the space bar quietly naming the language you are typing in. Tap only — Windows Phone had no glide typing and neither does this.

It began life inside a Windows Phone launcher, where it read that launcher's accent colour across a process boundary and could not be installed on its own. This is the same keyboard with all of that taken out: its own app, its own settings, no knowledge that any launcher exists. Install it, turn it on, and it types into everything on the phone.

Themes

Five keyboards, each drawn out of its own shell's push button — not one keyboard recoloured, but that shell's actual button, with its own shape, its own font and its own idea of what a key should do when you press it.

Windows Phone 8.1 Flat keys in an accent of your choosing, dark or light. A pressed key lights up. This is the keyboard the phone had.	Windows 98 Beige keys with a raised bevel, in Tahoma. A pressed key goes into the screen instead of lighting up, and the symbols key wears the flag.
Windows XP Luna's push button: rounded, outlined in navy, white, dipping into the blue when pressed — on the pale blue XP put behind the panels in every Explorer window.	Windows XP, taskbar The same keys on the blue of the taskbar itself. Louder, and the one XP surface everybody can picture without being reminded of it.
Windows Vista Aero's button: the same shape in cool grey with the gloss line across the middle, answering a press by going blue rather than by lighting up. Set in Segoe UI, the face Vista introduced.	Picked from a live preview Every theme on the settings page draws itself from the same code that draws the keyboard, so a preview can never go stale — and the Windows Phone one shows your accent, because it has no fixed appearance to photograph.

Features

• Prediction and correction, written in Kotlin with no native code — a packed trie, a bigram table and a proximity model that knows what sits next to what on the layout you are actually using. Correction is off unless you ask for it: suggestions are always offered and never imposed.
• Twenty-two languages across Latin, Greek and Cyrillic. English is the only one on to begin with; the rest are switches, and the globe in the navigation bar moves between whichever you turn on.
• Emoji and GIFs behind a hold on the comma, searchable, with recents.
• The clipboard on the suggestion bar — the last two hours of it, with anything the copying app marked sensitive kept in memory and never written to disk.
• Dictation that runs on the phone through Vosk, falling back to the platform recogniser for the languages Vosk publishes no model for.
• A caret joystick, a number row, adjustable key height, hold delay, haptics and keypress sounds — all optional, and all off unless they earn their place.

Privacy

The words you type do not leave the phone. The word lists, the bigram tables, the emoji names and every layout are compiled into the APK, and the dictionary of words WinBoard learns from you lives in noBackupFilesDir, which Android's cloud backup does not touch. The backup rules permit exactly one file: your settings.

Two things use the network, both only when you ask for them — downloading a Vosk model for offline dictation, and searching GIPHY from the GIF panel. There are no analytics, no crash reporting and no third-party SDKs of any kind.

GIPHY issues API keys per person, so none is built in. Paste your own into the gifs row of the settings page; until you do, the panel says so rather than looking broken.

Install

Grab the APK from Releases, or build it yourself:

git clone https://github.com/jovanovski/winboard.git
cd winboard
./gradlew :app:assembleDebug

minSdk 29 (Android 10), compileSdk 36. The only dependencies are AndroidX Core, android-gif-drawable for the GIF grid, and Vosk with JNA for offline dictation.

Turning it on

A keyboard cannot turn itself on. Open WinBoard and the top of the page tells you which of the two steps is outstanding:

1. Turn it on — Android keeps a list of the keyboards a text box is allowed to use, and a freshly installed one is not on it.
2. Choose it — being allowed is not the same as being used.

Both open the system's own screens. Once both are done, the section disappears.

How it is put together

keyboard/	the input method: the grid, the keys, the panels, the popups, the service
keyboard/text/	prediction — dictionary, bigrams, proximity, composer, suggester
keyboard/KeyboardTheme.kt	the five themes, and the chrome each one draws a key with
KeyboardSettings.kt	everything the app remembers, in one preferences file
KeyboardPalette.kt	the accent and the light-or-dark, resolved
Metro*.kt, TiltEffect.kt, SvgIcon.kt	the Windows Phone furniture the settings page is built from
tools/	the scripts that build the word lists, the bigram tables and the emoji index

Nothing here is laid out in XML. Every view is written in Kotlin and painted by hand, which is how a key can be a Windows 98 bevel one moment and an Aero button the next without a single resource being swapped.

Credits

Word lists built from the OpenSubtitles frequency lists (CC BY-SA 3.0) via hermitdave/FrequencyWords, filtered against dwyl/english-words. Next-word predictions counted from the OpenSubtitles corpus through OPUS. Emoji names from Unicode CLDR. Offline speech recognition by Vosk.

Windows, the Windows logo, Segoe UI and Tahoma are Microsoft's. This is a nostalgia project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft in any way.

Licence

GPL-3.0 — see LICENSE, and NOTICE for what the licence does and does not cover. The artwork and the fonts are not mine to relicense.