On October 5, Microsoft will stop providing support for its SwiftKey iOS keyboard.

SwiftKey for Android will continue to exist, and Windows is still using the technology.

 

When asked about the product’s future, Microsoft told ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley that it would stop making its SwiftKey software keyboard for iOS and remove it from the App Store.

 

Director of product management at SwiftKey, Chris Wolfe, announced that SwiftKey iOS support would end on October 5 and that the app would be removed from the Apple App Store. Customers who have SwiftKey installed on iOS will still be able to use it until they explicitly uninstall it or obtain a new device, since Microsoft will continue to maintain both SwiftKey for Android and the technology that drives the Windows touch keyboard.

 

SwiftKey’s iOS app last received an update in August 2021. In the year before that, the majority of upgrades were of the unremarkable “bug fixes and performance improvements” sort. For an estimated $250 million, Microsoft acquired SwiftKey in 2016 in order to have access to both the underlying technology and software keyboards for iOS and Android.

 

In iOS, support for third-party keyboards was first included in iOS 8 in 2014. These keyboards are still not permitted on phones that have been locked down using mobile device management (MDM) software, nor are they allowed to be used to type passwords or passcodes, according to Apple. In recent years, Apple has updated the native iOS keyboard to include some of the most popular third-party keyboard features, such as searchable emoji and swiping to text.