Quite a few friends and family members of mine are loving Google’s new GBoard third party keyboard for iOS. I am currently on Android and Google has not released GBoard for Android. So unlike most feature fridays, I am not going to be able to explain why I like this feature so much. I expect there are plenty of AVC community members who can do that in the comments.
At USV, we have looked closely at the third party keyboard market. It’s a big opportunity to get in between a user and the two dominant mobile operating systems. There could be a lot of value in doing that. But we ultimately determined that the mobile keyboard market was likely to be dominated by Apple and Google for a bunch of reasons. The emergence of GBoard only reinforces that view in our office.
But you can understand the strategic importance of Google gaining market share in the iOS keyboard market. Every key that is typed on a mobile phone is information for Google’s machine learning algorithms. So getting prime real estate on iOS is super strategic. It is also a smart way to defend their search franchise on mobile.
It sounds to me that Google has delivered a fantastic third party keyboard for iOS. If you have used or are using GBoard, I’m interested in your thoughts on it in the comments.
