Keyman Update for 8 December 2023

This blog reports on significant Keyman product and keyboard development updates over the two weeks from 25 November — 8 December 2023.

As always, you can follow all of our development online at github.com/keymanapp/keyman, and you may find the Keyman Development Status Site at status.keyman.com both interesting and slightly overwhelming!

Keyman minor releases

Keyman 16.0.144 (stable) was released in this cycle.

The primary update in this version is to disable the built-in browser for Android. This feature made it impossible for us to publish on the Play Store with our current privacy policy and data safety settings for Keyman. Rather than shift our data safety settings, we have opted to split this into a separate app which is currently under development.

What is the built-in browser? It is a feature that lets you use your writing system on any webpage, even if the phone itself doesn’t support your writing system fully, or if the webpage does not specify fonts for your writing system. It’s somewhat of a ‘hacky’ feature that is intended as a stop-gap for users on older devices. We don’t actually have good data on how useful this functionality has been for end users, so if you have been using this, let us know!

Please let us know if this is a breaking change for you.

Keyman 17.0.218-alpha through 17.0.227-alpha were also released in this cycle.

Significant updates in the last two weeks include:

• Improvements in the usability and stability of Keyman for Android (e.g. #10061, #10022, #10017)
• Stability improvements for Keyman for Windows (#10065)
• For Keyman Developer alpha, important updates include a fix for broken kmc npm package (#10118), and a reworking of Keyman Developer’s project management (#10114)

The full list of updates can be viewed in the version history.

Keyboard updates

• Many keyboards were updated to share font resources or replace with fonts with clearer licenses (#2469, #2471, #2472, #2474, #2476, #2478, #2479, #2491, #2488)
• The SIL Cameroon AZERTY and SIL Cameroon QWERTY keyboards were updated to version 6.1.0, improving the styling of the touch keyboards and adjusting the characters available, treating Ɑ as a word letter. (#2481)
• A new experimental keyboard, GFF Sheek Bakrii Saphaloo Qubee v1.0 was released for the Sheek Bakrii Saphalo script. Qubee rules for typing Oromo language sounds are followed to the maximum extent possible, The keyboard requires a companion font (included) which encodes the script in the Unicode Private Use Area. (#2480, #2483, #2492).
• The Baybayin keyboard was updated to version 1.2, fixing the r key. (#2485)