Gboard Review: Google’s Keyboard Quietly Became the Best on Android

The keyboard is the app you use more than any other app on your phone, and most people never think about it. If you have a Pixel, or a Nokia, or a Motorola, or almost any modern Android phone, the keyboard is Gboard. This Gboard review is about the features hidden a long-press away, the ones that have made it quietly the best keyboard on Android, and the one privacy trade you’re making by using it.

Why Gboard is the default recommendation

The autocorrect is better than anything else on Android. This is a low bar for a Google app, but it’s the thing that matters. Gboard predicts the next word more accurately than SwiftKey or Samsung Keyboard, corrects typos without over-correcting your specific vocabulary, and adapts to how you actually type inside a week. On glide typing (swiping across letters instead of tapping), it’s a different league.

The rest is icing. Emoji search, sticker suggestions, one-handed mode, a proper number row above the letters, a floating keyboard for tablets, Google Translate built into the toolbar. Every one of these is a small feature you’ll use, and none of them require a separate app.

The features hidden behind a long-press

Long-press the comma to get the settings gear. Long-press the space bar to switch languages if you have multiple installed. Long-press any letter to get its symbols and accented variants. Long-press the microphone to send raw voice audio without converting it to text. Most people know one of these and are surprised by the others.

The best hidden feature is the toolbar above the letters — the row with the little icons. Tap the four-dot menu to open the full toolbar, and you’ll find clipboard history (the last few things you copied, ready to paste), a translation tool that translates your typing on the fly, a text editor mode with proper cursor controls, and a search box that lets you look up a GIF or a fact without leaving the app you’re typing in.

Clipboard history — the feature most people miss

Turn it on once. Gboard remembers every text you’ve copied in the last hour, and you can pin ones you want to keep permanently. Copy an address, a password (from your manager), an order number, a Zoom link — they all sit in the clipboard menu waiting to be tapped back in. This alone justifies switching to Gboard from any other keyboard.

Voice typing that has caught up

Voice input used to be a joke on Android. On Pixel phones running the on-device Assistant model, Gboard’s voice typing now transcribes at close to conversational speed with proper punctuation and no cloud round-trip. On non-Pixel phones it still uses the cloud model, which is slower but still very accurate. Either way it’s usable now for real messages, which was not true five years ago.

The privacy trade you should know about

Gboard sends anonymized usage data to Google to improve autocorrect. It does not send everything you type — that’s a common misconception — but it does send some interaction data, and if you’re logged into a Google account it links that to your account. You can disable “Share usage statistics” in Gboard settings, and you can disable personalization entirely, but you can’t run the app fully offline while getting the smart features.

If keyboard privacy is a hard requirement — and it is for some people — the alternative is HeliBoard (open source, no network access) or OpenBoard. Neither predicts as well as Gboard, and both are noticeably less pleasant to type on. But if you don’t want any keyboard app talking to any server, that’s the trade.

Themes, layouts, and the small stuff

You can pick from Google’s default themes, use your Material You wallpaper colors as the theme (Android 12+), or set a photo from your gallery as the keyboard background. Row and key height are adjustable in three steps. The number row above letters is off by default; turn it on and typing anything with digits gets much faster. Handwriting input for Asian scripts works well.

Should you use Gboard?

Almost certainly yes. It’s already installed on most Android phones, it’s free with no ads, and the features that matter are better than any alternative. Turn on the number row and the clipboard, spend a minute picking a theme, and stop thinking about your keyboard again. If you have a strict privacy stance and want zero telemetry from your keyboard, HeliBoard is the honest alternative — but for everyone else, Gboard is the right answer and has been for years.