A clone of the Light Phone 3's built-in keyboard, for any app.

On a stock Light Phone, the black-and-white keyboard lives inside Light's own tools. Other apps use the system keyboard, and there is no Light one to choose. This is a faithful recreation, packaged as a system keyboard you can set as the default, so every app on a modified Light Phone shares the same look.

Optional autocorrect and optional voice dictation, both fully on-device and private. Swipe down on the keyboard to hide it.

Install

With Obtainium, which keeps you up to date

1. Install Obtainium.
2. Add an app, and give it this repository: https://github.com/adam-weber/light-keyboard
3. It installs the latest release, and tells you when there is a new one.

Or by hand

Download the latest APK from Releases and open it.

Turn it on

Open Light Keyboard. The setup screen holds everything:

1. Enable Light Keyboard: opens Android's keyboard settings, where you switch it on.
2. Choose it as your keyboard: makes it the active one.

A few optional settings sit below:

• Autocorrect (on by default): fixes misspellings as you type, using your phone's built-in dictionary. Turn it off to type exactly what you tap.
• Auto-Capitalize (on by default): capitalizes the start of each sentence.
• Auto-Period (on by default): double-tap the space bar to insert a period.
• Return key / Emoji keyboard (both on by default): show or hide those keys.
• Voice dictation (off by default): turning it on downloads a ~40 MB offline speech-to-text model (Vosk) once, then a mic key lets you speak instead of type, entirely on-device. Once downloaded, a Delete model link appears beside the toggle to reclaim the space.
• Compact keyboard (off by default): shorter keys and tighter spacing, so the keyboard takes up less of the screen.
• Keyboard layout: choose QWERTY, AZERTY, or QWERTZ.

Layout / appearance changes take effect the next time the keyboard opens. That is the whole setup.

Build it yourself

./gradlew :app:assembleDebug      # debug build
./gradlew :app:assembleRelease    # release build (unsigned unless signing env vars are set)

Needs JDK 17 and the Android SDK (API 35). Tagged releases (v*) are built and signed by .github/workflows/release.yml. The typing model in app/src/main/res/raw/charmodel.bin is regenerated by tools/gen_charmodel.py.

A note

This is an independent, open-source project. It is made for the Light Phone, but it is not made by Light.

License

MIT. Do what you like with it.