With all of the different keyboard options out there for Android, it’s not that easy to stand head and shoulders above most of the competition, but that’s exactly what SwiftKey has been doing. SwiftKey Beta, where all of the newest features go to be tested by willing users before hitting the regular version of the app, has over 18,000 five-star ratings on the Play Store, giving a good idea of just how hard the team has worked on the app over the years, fine-tuning everything from top to bottom and, of course, putting in new features. Today’s update brings a new feature that many VIP users and people on social media have apparently been requesting for some time; a custom clipboard.
While Android does have a built-in clipboard, it’s rather limited, mostly just allowing for copying and pasting of a single item. Viewing your clipboard history is unavailable without the help of a third-party app, making Android’s own clipboard solution a bit lacking. SwiftKey’s clipboard, live in today’s beta update, has a number of features aimed at improving that experience. For starters, anything a user copies is remembered for one hour, and can even be pinned for longer use. Users can add custom snippets, keep them as long as they like, and paste them just about anywhere. Accessing the clipboard history and adding new clips happens through the app settings or the SwiftKey Hub, while accessing the keyboard in the middle of typing something up is done from the same sidebar that you would use to get into the settings. The clipboard entries can be copied and pinned from this menu, but cannot be manually added without going into the settings.
The app update is already live in the Play Store for all users, so if you’re a current user and not seeing the update, a reboot should do the trick for you. For those using another keyboard or the steady version of SwiftKey, this new feature is a very good reason to give SwiftKey Beta a try if you haven’t before. The keyboard was good enough for Microsoft to buy up, after all.