Ondrej Holzman In complete secrecy and already last September, Apple acquired the startup Dryft, which develops keyboards for mobile devices. Apple has not announced what its intentions are with Dryft.
For acquisition pointed out TechCrunchwhich on LinkedIn found out that Dryft's CTO (and co-founder of another keyboard, Swype) Randy Marsden had moved to Apple in September of last year as manager of iOS keyboards.
The California-based company confirmed the acquisition with the obligatory announcement that it "buys small technology companies from time to time, but generally does not talk about its intentions or plans." Therefore, it is not even certain whether she primarily acquired Marsden and his collaborators, or whether she was also interested in the product itself.
The Dryft keyboard is special in that it only appears on the display when the user places their fingers on it. It was ideal, for example, for larger surfaces of tablets, where it tracked the movement of fingers.
Until iOS 8, it was not possible to use similar third-party keyboards on iPhones and iPads. A year ago, however, Apple decided to introduce keyboards that are very popular on Android, such as Swype or SwiftKey and it is possible that thanks to the acquisition of Dryft, it is preparing its own improved keyboard for the next versions of the operating system.
If you want to learn more about the Dryft keyboard, you can watch the attached video below where Randy Marsden himself presents the project.
Why they didn't do this straight away is beyond me. They didn't have to come with support for third party keyboards at all (which just caused a lot of people to crash apps anyway) but they should have come with a fully tuned custom keyboard straight away... That would be more of a Jobsian approach... Relying on third parties (for system stuff) is android style and it usually doesn't lead to anything good… Anyway, I'm curious to see what he'll prepare :-)
The same could be said for all third-party applications in the Appstore. Jobs didn't really want that. Fortunately, it didn't end that way. Can you imagine if all applications were made only by apple? We shouldn't have anything together now. Apple couldn't (and didn't want to) make all the keyboards that have been on the market for a long time now.