Monday, September 15, 2025

Android Signal Keyboard Privacy

Android keyboards can be quite sophisticated, including learning of commonly used words or languages. Some of these result in uploading what you enter to a service you may not know about. The Signal app on Android includes a setting to say that its keyboard input should not be uploaded.

Privacy settings for Android Signal app with Incognito Keyboard enabled

Malicious keyboard apps can ignore this, but if a malicious keyboard has made its way onto your device I think you have bigger problems.

Android keyboard with overlaid dialog: This app doesn't support voice input

The tradeoff: if you use speech-to-text on the Android keyboard, it will no longer work. The microphone will be greyed out and will bring up a small message saying "This app doesn't support voice input." The stock Android keyboard apparently has no on-device voice processing.

I learned of this from Liz Fong-Jones' Bluesky feed.