Quill Flow vs Gboard: What Google's Keyboard Stopped Shipping

Gboard for iPhone stopped in 2022

This is the fact that decides the whole comparison for iPhone users, and almost nobody says it out loud. Google has not shipped a Gboard update to the App Store since the spring of 2022. Not a feature, not a redesign, not iOS compatibility work. The listing is still there, it still installs, and it has been standing still through four iOS releases.

Look at the gap between February 2022 and December 2020. Gboard for iPhone was already coasting before it stopped entirely. The App Store rating has drifted with it, down to 4.1 stars across roughly 59,000 ratings.

The practical consequence is that every AI feature Google has built for keyboards since 2022 has landed on Android and nowhere else. Rambler, the Gemini dictation mode Google launched this year, is not coming to iPhone in any meaningful sense, because the app it would live inside is not being shipped.

Gboard for Android is fine, and deliberately conservative

Credit where it is due. Gboard on Android is actively maintained, it is free, it is preinstalled on most phones, and its swipe typing and multilingual support are good. If you have never thought about your keyboard, Gboard is the reason you have never had to.

What it is not is ambitious. The big AI leap of 2026, Rambler, is restricted to the Pixel 11 series, so the overwhelming majority of Gboard’s billions of Android installs get the same dictation they had two years ago. We wrote a full breakdown of Rambler and who can actually use it, because the availability story is more interesting than the feature.

Head to head

Typing: what four years of stagnation costs

Autocorrect is not a solved problem, and the gap shows up in exactly the places you would expect. Gboard decides which key you hit by asking which drawn rectangle your finger landed in. That is the right answer if your thumbs are accurate and centred. Most people’s are not.

Quill Flow measures where your taps actually land relative to where each key is drawn, builds a running model of your personal offset, and shifts the hit test toward the key you meant. Then ambiguous taps get arbitrated against a language model before the letter is drawn, which cuts pre-render errors by roughly a quarter for the sloppiest typists. You do not configure any of this. It just gets better at you.

The newest addition is bilingual typing: two keyboard languages live at the same time, sharing a single merged dictionary, so suggestions, autocorrect, and swipe all draw on both without a globe key in sight. That is covered in full here.

The rest of the typing stack is the same story of small accumulating wins: missing spaces repaired, so “seeyoutomorrow” comes back as three words; a held backspace that escalates from letters to whole words instead of crawling; an autocorrect that stops making a correction you have undone twice; a SHARK-squared swipe decoder rather than a nearest-key guess; flick typing and slide-to-cursor on the space bar for people who want them.

Auto-formatting and emoji

When you dictate, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar are applied as the text is written, filler words never reach the page, and Voice Activity Detection trims the dead air so your thinking pauses do not become sentences. The keyboard also reads which app it is in, so an email is formatted like an email and a chat message is not.

Emoji get the same treatment. There is an optional emoji row directly on the keyboard, so grabbing one does not mean leaving the letters and finding your way back, and the picker keeps your frequents up front. On iPhone, emoji search matches aliases, the localized keyword set, and names all at once, so searching “sad” returns the five faces you meant rather than one; skin tone is remembered per emoji with a global default; and typing a word offers its emoji in the suggestion bar so you can accept it exactly like a word. Those three land on Android next.

Accessibility

Quill Flow was rebuilt around VoiceOver after a blind user explained, in an App Store review, exactly where it slowed him down. Every key and control is labelled, focus jumps to the finish button when dictation starts, a two-finger double tap starts and stops dictation from anywhere, and screen reader speech is filtered out of transcripts so VoiceOver does not dictate itself into your message. Accessibility labels are localized in 34 languages. The whole story is on our accessibility page.

Who should stay on Gboard

You are on Android, you want a free keyboard, you do not dictate much, and Google’s search and GIF integrations are things you actually use. Gboard is good at this and there is no reason to pay for something you would not use. If you have a Pixel 11, Rambler is genuinely excellent and it is included.

Who should switch to Quill Flow

You are on iPhone, where Gboard has not moved since 2022. Or you are on Android without a Pixel 11 and you want AI dictation anyway. Or you write in two languages and are tired of the globe key. Or you rely on a screen reader. Or you just want a keyboard that is being worked on.