Flick to type. Your typing never leaves your phone.
An Android keyboard with the letters where you know them, on a honeycomb of hexagon keys. Flick a letter up for its capital and down for a digit, type roughly and it fixes the word, and it all runs on your phone.
Free on Android 7.0 and later. Flikzi Pro is US$4.99 once, with 14 days free.
Type helo, then tap the space bar. Flikzi makes it Hello.
Keys you know. Fewer taps. Your typing stays on your phone.
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Keys you know
The letters sit in their QWERTY places, on hexagons with no gaps between them. Type roughly: Flikzi reads where each tap landed and fixes the word when you press space.
Why hexagons -
Fewer taps
A capital is one flick up on the letter. A digit or a question mark is one flick down. Deleting is one swipe on the space bar, and what you deleted comes back with another.
Taps saved -
Your typing stays on your phone
Autocorrect, suggestions, voice typing, pinyin and emoji all run on the phone. Flikzi has no account and no internet permission, so nothing you type can be sent anywhere.
How to check
Why hexagons: type roughly, get the right word.
- Letters where you know them. QWERTY in rows of 10, 9 and 7. Your thumbs already know the way.
- No gaps. Hexagons fit together like a honeycomb, so every touch lands on a key, and it goes to the key whose centre is nearest.
- Autocorrect that reads the touch. Flikzi knows where on the key you landed. A tap between two letters counts for both, and the words before it decide. A missed letter, an extra tap and two letters swapped are fixed the same way, and a missed space is put back.
- It learns your thumbs. If you always land a little low on one key, Flikzi learns that, on your phone, as a few numbers for each key and never any text.
- Your letters stay yours. What you typed stays in the text until you press space, and the strip shows first what space will use. Delete straight after a correction and your own letters are back.
- Room where shift and backspace were. A flick does their work, so ?123 and emoji sit at the ends of the middle row, the comma, full stop and enter keys beside the bottom letters, and the space bar gets a row to itself.
We haven’t published a typing study with real thumbs yet. In our own simulation of English typing, where 43% of the words had a slip as typed, 97% were right after space (65,000 words from sentences the dictionary was not built from). Real thumbs will differ. More on the design.
Five moves.
Fewer taps for everything.
Flikzi has no shift key and no backspace key. A flick on a letter or a swipe on the space bar does their work, so your thumbs stay on the letters.
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Tap the letters, roughly
The letters are in their QWERTY places. You don’t have to hit them exactly: Flikzi reads where each tap landed, and the strip above the keys leads with the word that space will use.
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Flick up for a capital
Put your thumb on a letter and flick it up. You get its capital, anywhere in a word. Sentences still start with a capital on their own.
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Flick down for a digit or a mark
Every letter has a digit or a mark drawn under it. Flick the key down to type it: q gives 1, a gives @, m gives a question mark. No layer to switch to.
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Swipe the space bar to delete
Swipe left on the space bar and a letter goes. Swipe right and it comes back. Keep your finger down and it keeps going, faster the longer you hold.
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Flick the space bar for case
Flick the right half of the space bar up to step a word to Capital, then ALL CAPS. Flick down to step back. Flick up and hold, and ALL CAPS stays on.
Taps saved
| To do this | A standard keyboard | Flikzi |
|---|---|---|
| A digit | ?123, the digit, then ABC: 3 taps | 1 flick down on its letter |
| A mark such as ? or @ | ?123, the mark, then ABC: 3 taps | 1 flick down on its letter |
| A rarer symbol such as % or € | ?123, a second symbols page, the symbol, then ABC | ?123, then 1 flick; a space takes you back to letters |
| An accent such as é | A long press, then pick from a menu | None in most words: the dictionary’s spelling brings it (in French, francais becomes français). Or 1 hold and slide |
| A capital at the start of a sentence | None: it comes on its own | None: it comes on its own |
| A capital elsewhere | Shift, then the letter: 2 taps | 1 flick up on the letter |
| Make a word you typed UPPERCASE | Delete it, caps lock, type it again | 2 flicks up on the right of the space bar |
| Delete a few letters | A backspace tap per letter, or hold it | 1 swipe on the space bar, and hold to keep going |
| Bring back what you deleted | Type it again | Swipe right on the space bar |
| Move the cursor | Tap in the text and drag the handle | Hold the space bar, then slide |
| Switch language | Find the globe key, tap it | 1 flick up on the left of the space bar |
| Hide the keyboard | The back gesture or button | 1 flick down on the left of the space bar |
“Standard” means a layout with a shift key, a backspace key and a ?123 symbols key. Many keyboards add long-press symbols, backspace swipes or a space-bar cursor of their own; on Flikzi the gestures are the whole design.
There is more: hold the space bar and slide to move the cursor, flick its left half up to switch language (hold for a picker of your languages) or down to hide the keyboard, hold a letter for its accents, flick Enter down for a new line, slide across a word’s letters to glide it, and tap the mic to speak. The full rulebook.
The real thing, in light and dark.
Flikzi follows your phone’s theme, or you pick light or dark keys and one of five accent colours. On the light phone, tomorow was typed with a letter missing: the strip leads with tomorrow, the word space will use. On the dark one, after a space, the strip offers an emoji and the next word. Every letter has its digit or mark drawn under it.
Screenshots from Flikzi 0.16 on Android 16.
What you type stays on your phone.
Flikzi’s autocorrect, suggestions, voice typing, pinyin and emoji all run on the phone in your hand. Your typing is never sent to a server, ours or anyone else’s. Flikzi goes further: it has no internet access at all. You can check:
- Open Settings, then Apps, then Flikzi.
- Tap Permissions. You see Contacts and Microphone, both off until you turn on the feature that uses them.
- Tap ⋮, then All permissions.
- Read the list. Network access isn’t on it.
Flikzi
Contacts
read your contacts
Microphone
record audio
Other app capabilities
Google Play billing service
What’s in the box
Everything a keyboard needs, counted. Autocorrect, suggestions and next-word predictions are in there too, all working offline.
- 0 words sent anywhere
- Everything you type stays on your phone.
- 26 letters where you know them
- QWERTY in rows of 10, 9 and 7, on hexagon keys with no gaps between them.
- 2 flicks on every letter
- Up for its capital. Down for the digit or mark drawn under it.
- 0 shift and backspace keys
- A flick up is the capital. A swipe on the space bar deletes, and a swipe back restores.
- 1 space bar
- It types spaces, deletes, restores, moves the cursor, switches language, changes case and hides the keyboard.
- 23 languages
- From Spanish to Japanese. One is free, all of them come with Pro.
- 1 mic
- Voice typing, turned into text on your phone, on Android 12 and later. Part of Pro.
- 1,898 emoji
- With a search, skin tones and suggestions as you type.
- 5 accent colours
- On light or dark keys, and a one-handed mode for either thumb.
- 6 Pro extras
- Every language, the split keyboard, voice typing, clipboard keys, clipboard history and text shortcuts.
Unfold it. It splits.
Open a foldable and Flikzi splits in two, one half for each thumb, with the words to choose from as hexagons in the middle. No reaching across a screen the size of a paperback.
- The split you know. q to t, a to g and z to b on the left, the rest on the right, as on any split QWERTY keyboard.
- Words between your thumbs. Six or nine hexagons show the choices for the word you’re typing, the one space will use outlined in the middle, and the next word before you start.
- One honeycomb. The word hexagons continue the rows of keys, so the two halves and the words fit together.
- It happens by itself on unfolded foldables, tablets and phones turned sideways. Settings can make it always or never split. The split keyboard is part of Flikzi Pro.
What Flikzi doesn’t do
- No cloud backup or sync. Your settings and learned words stay on the phone they’re on.
- No GIFs, stickers or translation. Emoji, yes, with a search.
- No picture themes. Light or dark keys and five accent colours.
- 23 languages, not hundreds. The list; no zhuyin or handwriting yet.
- Voice typing needs Android 12 and a phone that recognises speech on the device.
- No iPhone version. Flikzi is Android only, from Android 7.0.
Questions
Is Flikzi available now?
How much will Flikzi cost?
Is Flikzi available for iPhone?
Does Flikzi send what I type anywhere?
How do I delete without a delete key?
Which languages does Flikzi support?
Your turn to flick.
Flikzi is on Google Play for Android phones, foldables and tablets. It’s free to download, and every new install gets 14 days of Flikzi Pro.
Free on Android 7.0 and later. Flikzi Pro is US$4.99 once, with 14 days free.