One popular feature of software keyboards is that you can theme to fit your tastes. Google Keyboard on Android has long offered basic themeing with Material Light and Material Dark options, but a new update that’s rolling out greatly expands the app’s customization options.
The new Google Keyboard version 5.1.23 is now rolling out, and it brings with it is a much wider variety of theme options. Included are red, blue, purple, pink, and brown keyboard themes as well as a few different black options. There’s also an option to use one of your own photos as the background of your keyboard. If you choose to use one of your photos, you’ll be able to zoom in and out of the photo and adjust the brightness of the image.
This update to Google Keyboard adds a few other tweaks, too. For example, your recent emoji will now show up in the suggestion strip, and there are some bug fixes for issues with missing key labels. Here’s the full changelog provided by Google:
- Themes: Customize keyboard with favorite photos or colors
- Gesture typing & suggestions in: Albanian, Arabic, Basque, Bosnian, English (Australia), English (India), Esperanto, Irish, Javanese, Mongolian, Montenegrin (Cyrillic, Latin), Nepali, Portuguese (Africa), Sudanese, Tajik, Tatar, Zulu
- Layout support: Burmese, Southern Sotho, Turkmen, Urdu, Welsh, Xhosa
- Add recent emoji to suggestion strip
- Bug fixes, including passwords with Talkback and missing key labels
- Support Android N
This update was previously available to folks using the Android N Developer Preview, but now everyone using Google Keyboard can get it, too.
Google Keyboard is one of the better keyboard options on Android, but for folks that love to really personalize their phone, its themeing options have been lacking. Today’s update makes Google Keyboard’s theming support much closer to competing apps, and if you’ve previously been turned off by Google Keyboard because of its lack of theme options, you may want to give it another look.