Keybuild 4+
Build your own keyboard
James Froggatt
Designed for iPad
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- $3.99
Screenshots
Description
Build your own keyboard!
Touchscreen keyboards don't need to be one-size-fits-all, so let's change that! With Keybuild, you choose the layout, the keys, everything.
Keys can be set up to type whatever you want! Letters, greek letters (ɑ, β, ɣ), maths symbols (π, ∫, ∑), arrows (↑→↓←), or even your favourite emoji can be added and organised depending on your needs.
Create multiple ‘panes’, each containing keys arranged using a stack-based layout, and switch between them with either an automatic menu, or direct links.
Add a small number row to your Qwerty keyboard, or have a try using Azerty or Colemak layouts. Build a keyboard that can keep up with your maths-heavy university course, or specialist profession. Or just make a dashboard for your favourite emoji. Or do all that and more, it's up to you!
This app does its best to supports VoiceOver, and accessibility APIs.
Technical note: This app is 99% SwiftUI, which is as close as you can get while we wait for the ‘SwiftUI Lifecycle’ to come to Custom Keyboard Extensions! SwiftUI powers this app's advanced functionality, as well as some of its more unusual bugs. :)
Disclaimer: This iPad app is available on Apple Silicon Macs, but macOS currently does not support keyboard extensions. Still waiting for that tablet Mac!
What’s New
Version 1.7.4
• Makes the Paste option always visible when adding a key, to aid discovery.
• Updated to use iOS 18 SDKs.
• Adds emoji jump option for the unicode picker. (Slow, but doesn’t crash!)
• Various optimisations.
Ratings and Reviews
Isn’t working
Finally able to make it work… took forever to figure out how to add the keyboard. Still figuring out the app now… trying to figure out how to remove the shift function all together
Saved my life
I can't BELIEVE I went so long not knowing this app exists. I'm a language nerd, and it's always driven me crazy that almost none of the iOS keyboards for various languages have dedicated keys for diacritic marks (the way the German keyboard has keys for umlauts), so I made a modified version of the Portuguese keyboard that has keys for the tilde, circumflex, and acute accents, using Unicode combination characters that I copied from Wikipedia. I was worried it would be a huge headache, or that the app wouldn't even support extended Unicode, but it only took me like 15 minutes.
The interface is so simple, and incredibly easy to use considering how flexible it is; my use for it has been pretty straightforward so far, but it really feels like it offers a staggering amount of customizability without having to navigate a labrynth of submenus. It did crash once the first time I converted a text stack into a key stack, but it autosaved my changes, and that was the only real glitch I encountered. I'm no app developer, but this seems like a masterpiece of GUI design compared to the loads of other apps that manage to overcomplicate simple tasks or overlook obvious use-cases. Just an amazing app, and absolutely worth the cup-of-coffee price.
Good for custom keyboard layouts
For a while now I've beed designing keyboard layouts with higher efficiency than QWERTY, like TEIOUM, TRHIEO, and more recently, Quartet. I've been trying to find an app that could actually let me use the layouts to test them, but the only apps I found weren't that great or made you pay to use the outside of the app, often with higher prices than the 3.99$USD this costed, so eventually I tried this, and not only was I able to use my keyboard layouts, I was even able to link between various keyboards, for symbols, etc, add things like emojis, and even add keys which would type multiple keys, which would have saved me thousands of keystrokes if I had been using them in the past, since I often do a lot of manual database management.
Overall, I'd recommend this to anyone who needs a truly custom keyboard in one way or another. 10/10.
- PF
App Privacy
The developer, James Froggatt, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy.
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- James Froggatt
- Size
- 2.5 MB
- Category
- Utilities
- Compatibility
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- iPhone
- Requires iOS 15.0 or later.
- iPad
- Requires iPadOS 15.0 or later.
- iPod touch
- Requires iOS 15.0 or later.
- Mac
- Requires macOS 12.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later.
- Apple Vision
- Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
- Languages
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English
- Age Rating
- 4+
- Copyright
- © James Froggatt
- Price
- $3.99
Supports
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Family Sharing
Up to six family members can use this app with Family Sharing enabled.