For the majority of people, the above is just what the Google Keyboard looks like, but for those in other parts of the World, the Google Keyboard looks very, very different. Due to different characters and alphabets, it’s pretty impossible for someone, even Google, to make one keyboard to rule them all. Instead, they simply offer more than one for the myriad of different languages out there that didn’t start off life with the Latin alphabet. Now, Google is updating most of these with support for Android N, which – for better or worse – we now know to be Android Nougat. We even know that it’s going to be called Android 7.0, too.
Back to the keyboards, and Google is updating the following input methods in the Play Store; Cantonese, Indic, Korean, Pinyin and Zhuyin. The updates for each of them read pretty much the same and most include “Support for Android N” as well as different themes and one-handed input. These keyboards also include an option to input in English, and Google has updated these with gesture typing when using English as well as next-word prediction, too. This was added into the English Google Keyboard a while ago, and it’s understandable that it takes them a little longer to get these features into these other input methods. It appears as though this is an update laying the groundwork for the full release of Android Nougat later this Summer, but with some updates to the English side of things, they also get the best of both worlds as well.
As always, these updates will take a little while to get round to everyone, but they shouldn’t take too long. A couple of days at most is usually how long these app updates take, but there are ways to download them from elsewhere if you’re a little impatient. It doesn’t look like the Japanese input method has been updated in the Play Store just yet, and it’s unclear why that is. It’s possible that the update is coming in the next day or two, as it’s likely that the same time has worked on most, if not all, of these Asian input methods that use a different alphabet.