March 23, 2019

Indic Keyboard has been awarded Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) award

Indic Keyboard has been awarded Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) award

On the fifth anniversary of Indic keyboard’s stable release, we are happy to announce that Indic Keyoard has received the prestigious Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) awards.

Indic Keyboard

Indic Keyboard is a free and open source, privacy aware keyboard for android devices. It is the only free and open source keyboard for 23 Indic family of languages supporting 57 layouts.

Mozilla Open Source Support award.

The MOSS award under Global Mission Partners India track is a financial grant for the future developments. Previously it has been given to popular open source projects like Tor, Python Package Index, Harfbuzz, webpack, SecureDrop etc. Indic Keyboard will be using the funding for the development efforts and maintenance.

This award is granted to Jishnu Mohan, the creator-maintainer  of Indic Keyboard. He is a free software evangelist, developer and SMC volunteer.  He has been contributing to free software for more than 10 years now. He designs, develops and maintains Indic Keyboard.

Mozilla is following their mission to ensure Internet - a public resource, open and accessible to everyone. Mozilla awards individuals who leads free software projects that significantly furthers their mission.

Why Indic Keyboard.

  1. Indic keyboard is privacy aware. Software defined keyboards are primary source of input for mobile devices. Privacy aware keyboards won’t snoop into what is being typed. In short, Indic Keyboard won't spy on you.

  2. Supports all major Indic family of languages and 57 keyboard layouts. Languages Indic keyboard supports are:

    • Assamese Keyboard (অসমীয়া) - Inscript, Transliteration
    • Arabic Keyboard (العَرَبِيةُ‎‎)
    • Bengali Keyboard (বাংলা) - Probhat, Avro, Inscript, Compact
    • Burmese Keyboard (ဗမာ) - xkb
    • English
    • Gujarati Keyboard (ગુજરાતી) - Phonetic, Inscript, Transliteration
    • Hindi Keyboard (हिन्दी) - Inscript, Transliteration, Soni
    • Kannada Keyboard (ಕನ್ನಡ) - Phonetic, Inscript, Transliteration (Baraha), Compact, Anysoft
    • Kashmiri Keyboard (کأشُر) - Inscript, Transliteration
    • Malayalam Keyboard (മലയാളം) - Phonetic, Inscript, Transliteration (Mozhi), Swanalekha
    • Manipuri Keyboard / Methei Keyboard (মৈতৈলোন্) - Inscript
    • Maithili Keyboard (मैथिली) - Inscript
    • Marathi Keyboard (मराठी) - Transliteration
    • Mon Keyboard (ဘာသာ မန်;)
    • Nepali Keyboard (नेपाली) - Phonetic, Traditional, Transliteration, Inscript
    • Oriya Keyboard (ଓଡ଼ିଆ) - Inscript, Transliteration, Lekhani
    • Punjabi Keyboard (ਪੰਜਾਬੀ) - Phonetic, Inscript, Transliteration
    • Sanskrit Keyboard (संस्कृत) - Transliteration
    • Santali Keyboard (Devanagari script and Ol Chiki) (संताली / ᱥᱟᱱᱛᱟᱲᱤ) - Inscript, Ol Chiki, Ol Chiki Compact
    • Sinhala Keyboard / Sinhalese (සිංහල) - Transliteration
    • Tamil Keyboard (தமிழ்) - Tamil-99, Inscript, Phonetic, Compact, Transliteration
    • Telugu Keyboard (తెలుగు) - Phonetic, Inscript, Transliteration, KaChaTaThaPa, Compact
    • Urdu Keyboard (اردو) - Transliteration

  3. Indic keyboard supports 90 percentage of Android devices now in use.

  4. Small file size and works in even in the cheapest android device.

  5. Doesn't need Internet connection for it's operation.

Milestones scheduled.

Indic keyboard project is planning to achieve the following milestones within an year are

  1. Support for run time permissions.
  2. Emoji support
  3. 5 new languages
  4. 19 new keyboard layouts
  5. Multilingual dictionary
  6. Developer library for third party developers
  7. Documentation.
  8. Maintenance.

About Indic Keyboard.

Indic keyboard is a native input keyboard application for Android mobile devices. It extends Android’s default keyboard and adds support for 22+ languages with 57 input layouts in total. Indic Keyboard is now under an umbrella organization called Indic Project, which is an initiative of Swathanthra Malayalam Computing. Indic Project  is a community powered research and development project for free and open source Indian language information infrastructure for desktop, web and mobile.

Indic Keyboard project commenced two years before Google has official support for Indic languages. Our keyboard still supports 12 more languages in the family than competing keyboard app. Indic Keyboard have more than two million downloads from Play store

Open Source nature of Indic Keyboard also lead other developers to use and reference our code in their apps. Indic Keyboard has been the starting point of some of the popular keyboard apps like Azhagi and Chrooma

About Mozilla Open Source Support awards

The Mozilla Open Source Support Global Mission Partners: India is to support open source or free software project that is undertaking an activity which significantly furthers Mozilla’s mission, and for which the applicant(s) are based in India.