Third-party keyboards have been a favorite app choice by millions of users for quite some time on Android, as they often serve up more than just smart predictive text options. They also usually have plenty of customization features too, and the best ones have loads of functionality. Fleksy, one of the most popular choices, has just announced in a blog post today that they have been acquired by Pinterest and that the team behind the keyboard development will be joining on with the company. The good news, is that Fleksy states the keyboard will stay available in the Play Store for the “foreseeable future,” so the app isn’t going anywhere. At least for now.
What does this mean for Fleksy’s future? At the moment there doesn’t seem to be much to tell as Fleksy hasn’t given a lot of detail on that particular situation just yet, but it’s quite likely that Fleksy’s expertise is going to be wrapped up into Pinterest’s offering somehow. Fleksy does mention, however, that continued updates to Fleksy will be limited, so the amount of updates that users may be accustomed to seeing will certainly be dropping in number as they already have.
While Fleksy and Pinterest are quiet one what they have planned specifically, Pinterest states that they “look forward to having Fleksy’s full stack expertise on hand for creating innovative and beautifully designed mobile products.” This suggests that Fleksy may be helping Pinterest build new services or apps, although nothing was mentioned in detail. Fleksy was made up of a team of around ten people, and half of the company will be joining Pinterest’s mobile and mobile platform engineering teams to help with future projects. Although part of the Fleksy team is joining Pinterest, the technology behind the keyboard app is not being acquired by the company, and part of it will be made open source for people to work with. If you’re a Fleksy user, things will be staying mostly the same, although it’s entirely possible that the app may not be available in the future at some point. Does this mean that users will end up having to find a new keyboard to serve their needs? Down the line, maybe, but for now, Fleksy runs great and is still available for download. Fleksy also states that they will have more to share on the acquisition and changes later on.