Gboard – the Google Keyboard

Gboard Review: Your Words Stay Local, the iPhone Version Stayed in 2022

Free on Every Phone, but Pixel 6, 8 and 9 Owners Get More

There is no paid tier: neither store lists ads or in-app purchases, so the limits come from hardware. Advanced voice typing, which keeps spoken text on the device, needs a Pixel 6 or newer. The "Fix it" correction command needs a Pixel 8, and spoken writing commands such as "Rephrase the message" need a Pixel 9, excluding the 9a. The current release notes add custom stickers made with Pixel Studio, again for Pixel 9 and later and only in English, Japanese and German. At the low end, Android Go phones lose handwriting, emoji search and GIFs. On a Galaxy phone it replaces Samsung Keyboard through Settings > General management > Keyboard list and default.

Federated Learning: What Leaves the Phone, and When

Predictions improve through federated learning, which Google switches on by default. Training runs only while the phone is charging, on Wi-Fi and idle; the phone uploads what the model learned rather than the words behind it, and Google combines that with updates from other users. A 2022 Google Research post on a Spanish next-word model gives the scale: 6,500 devices per round, each joining at most once every 24 hours, under a formal differential-privacy guarantee of ρ=0.81 zCDP. By 2023 more than fifteen of the keyboard's language models had been trained this way. The switch sits in Privacy settings beside Audio donations, which sends speech clips of up to 15 seconds, kept up to 18 months and open to human reviewers.

"Share Usage Statistics" Was On by Default, and Deletion Isn't Offered

Typed text stays local; metadata does not. A 2022 Trinity College Dublin master's study of version 11.1 on a Pixel 2 found logs recording each word's length, the language, the app in use and a timestamp, tied to the phone's Android ID, but never the typed content. Those logs depended on "Share usage statistics", which was on by default; turning it off cut the log to one entry with a timestamp, version and layout. Microsoft SwiftKey sent similar telemetry with no opt-out at all. Google Play's Data safety card lists device IDs, installed apps and voice recordings among collected data, declares no third-party sharing and offers no deletion request. In the tested build, camera, contacts and microphone permissions were denied by default.

The iPhone Version Has Not Changed Since May 2022

The App Store still serves version 2.3.19, released on 2 May 2022 and requiring iOS 12. Its listing names 58 keyboard languages against more than 900 language varieties on Android, and September 2026 App Store reviews ask for a number row, a working clipboard and talk-to-text that responds. Microsoft SwiftKey, by contrast, shipped an iOS update on 11 September 2026. Apple's rules shape the rest: a third-party keyboard has no network access until you grant Full Access, which Google Search here requires, and iOS swaps in Apple's keyboard for password and phone-number fields. So on an iPhone, password fields never reach Google's keyboard; on Android, the assurance is Google's statement that passwords are not sent.