iPhone Swype keyboard gone for good :(
 

I've been using the Swype keyboard on my iphones for as long as I've had an iPhone (I think my first was an 8) and before that on Android. It's a fantastic keyboard. Many years ago a company bought "swype" and said that they were going to stop developing it. I upgraded from an iPhone 8 to an iPhone XS, and when I transferred everything from one to the other the keyboard transferred.

In 2018 the company that bought it, removed it from the Android and Apple App stores, but I've had it this whole time.

The other day, our son gave me his old phone. I factory defaulted it and transferred everything. It transferred all of the apps except the Swype keyboard.

I'm lamenting the loss of swype. Yes, there are at least 2-3 other keyboards with swype-like capabilities out there. But they are poor imitations. In swype, if you typed a new word, the keyboard would add the new word to your dictionary. Once the word was added to your dictionary, you could then swipe that word. Each key on the keyboard had a secondary symbol that you could access with a long press, but you could also hit the "123" and symbol buttons to bring up the alternate keyboards. None of the other keyboards available seem to allow you to swipe new words more than a few seconds after the last time you've swiped it.

It really was an excellent keyboard that was far and above any other keyboard out there, and at least on IOS, it was still working just fine on the latest version of IOS (16.6)

I'm grumpy about this.

I liked Swype too. It was better than the OEM iOS keyboard’s swipe-to-type. still, the latter is serviceable. One thing I should try using more is speech-to-text, which works very well but never seems to come to mind.

Never tried Swype.

I use voice to text quite a bit and sometimes I’m thinking I’m having a stroke, because what I say and what the text says are two different things.

One thing I’ve done is use the shortcuts for the iPhone. I consistently misspell certain words, and it auto corrects to the word I want.

I think my wife uses dictation a fair amount. I almost never use it.
The stock IOS keyboard is serviceable. Better than nothing for sure. I also tried Gboard which is Googles version. It may have one or two enhancements over the IOS, but I don't know that it's worth using over the stock keyboard.
Yes, the dictation is often great, but sometimes way off. I think there is a way via the settings menu to "train" the dictation. They give you several phrases/sentences to say, and I think there may be more that you can do to train in after that, but I haven't tried to go through it.