Offline Keyboard: FrankenKeys

Look at the keyboard you are using right now. Grey. Obedient. Reading

this sentence. It has read every sentence you have ever typed, and you have

never once seen it do that. I have concocted an alternative.

It bites. Touch a key and lightning jumps to the keys beside it. It screams

when you type, in a voice I grew myself. And it cannot reach the internet.

Not "does not". Cannot. Android will confirm this for you in about fifteen

seconds.

WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE

Thirty press effects: lightning, gravity wells, embers, lava, sonar, ink.

Stack two at once, because I did consider whether that was wise and did it

anyway. Fifteen swipe trails. Ten shaders. Thirty-one themes, or stitch your own

out of parts in Theme Studio, seven colour layers deep, with your own photo

and your own font behind it.

IT CANNOT GET OUT

Other keyboards hand you twelve pages of privacy policy. I hand you a

permission list with nothing on it.

Open Settings, Apps, FrankenKeys, Permissions. There is no network entry to

revoke, because it never asked for one. That is not a promise. It is an

absence, and you can go and confirm it right now.

No telemetry. No advertising identifier. No account, no sign up, no email. I

have no idea who you are and it is absolutely ruining my analytics.

Nothing is learned from password fields. Clipboard history lives in memory

only, on a timer you set. Release builds ship unobfuscated, which is

inconvenient because I would very much like to be mysterious. Take it apart

and read it. Please. Somebody read it.

IT SCREAMS WHEN YOU TYPE

Fifty key sounds, generated live in C++ on the inharmonic partials real

objects ring on, so wood sounds like wood and not like glass pitched down,

and no two presses match. Ten are the dark pack, coffin lid to music box;

ten are the lab, Tesla arc to Geiger tick. Trim any song into your own click.

Twenty haptic profiles under it, separated by rhythm rather than strength, so

they are twenty things, not one thing at twenty volumes.

TALK TO IT WITH THE AERIAL OFF

Dictate using your phone's own recogniser, bound to the on-device one on

Android 12 and up. Say "period", "comma", "new paragraph". It keeps

listening while you think, so a pause mid-sentence loses nothing. Tap any

word to fix it.

ON-DEVICE CLEAN-UP, NO SUBSCRIPTION

Fix grammar, change tone, tidy up what you just dictated. Gemini Nano

through Android's own AICore where the device supports it, my own engine

everywhere else. Nothing is uploaded, because there is nothing to upload

with.

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER A WEEK

You stop noticing it, which is the highest compliment a keyboard gets. Then

you pick up somebody else's phone to type one message and it feels dead

under your thumb. No arc off the key you hit. No sound you chose. And you

find yourself wondering, for the first time, what that one is doing with the

message you are typing on it.

That is the part I cannot put in a screenshot.

IT SPEAKS THIRTY LANGUAGES

Thirty dictionaries, every one living on your phone. Prediction, autocorrect

and swipe in all of them. No downloads, no packs, no account.

SEND SOMEBODY A WHOLE KEYBOARD

Build a board layer by layer, then post it to a friend as one file: theme,

effects, sounds, background picture and all. They cannot refuse it. There is

no decline button.

MORE, ONCE YOU ARE IN THERE

A macro row you design yourself. Per-app profiles. Key-by-key overrides. A

gesture mapper. Ten key shapes. Ambient particle backgrounds. Emoji search

across 843 glyphs. A private GIF library with no network search, by design.

Text shortcuts with date, time and clipboard macros. Typing stats that never

leave the device.

FRANKENKEYS PRO

One payment, once, forever. No subscription. It unlocks Theme Studio's photo

and font import, the Effect Forge, the Shader Forge, per-app profiles, the

macro row and the key editor. Everything else is free and stays free.

WHO IT IS FOR

Anyone whose words are their own, and anyone tired of taking a keyboard's

word for it.

I am not a monster. Well.