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The freshest news in Android – land come from SwiftKey, one of the most successful Android – paid apps. The company announced that the former $3.99 app would be free from here on end.
If you don’t know what the app does, let us describe it to you briefly: it is a keyboard app that allows the user to type super fast due to the text prediction technology which offers the sender the option to choose among 3 different possible words displayed above the keyboard.
Apparently, the prediction feature made the app incredibly successful. It brought the company substantial revenues and funds, so it is quite puzzling the reason why they suddenly decided to cut out completely the price tag.
We have to look at things from a financial point of view. Despite the SwiftKey app’s success, given the latest news in the tech field, it seems the company had no other choice but bring the price down to zero for all its new customers:
It’s the kind of make-or-break decision that could help it scale up in fast-growing developing markets, and in SwiftKey’s case, also help it in going head-to-head with similar, free technology that Apple will soon offer to iPhone users.
However, the SwiftKey app is currently embracing new opportunities. Together with the price tag cut, also came a series of upgrades and new features that make the SwiftKey app even more compelling. It has the ability to offer prediction support for more than 800 emoji, sports 30 new free and paid themes, allows the user to choose from 66 languages and so on. The company published an extended list of new features and upgrades, together with a few good news that will certainly please older customers.
The SwiftKey app won’t see the end of its days too soon, no matter how big of a challenger Apple is. Moreover, according to specialists from Forbes who look deep into the matters,
Along with the app, SwiftKey also sells white-label technology to the likes of Samsung, which embeds SwiftKey’s algorithms in its Galaxy line of smartphones, and the BlackBerry 10 mobile OS that’s on several of the company’s recent smartphones. As a result it claims to be on more than 200 million devices worldwide. Now on the consumer side, the four-year-old company will make money solely from enhancements to the free app — ie. premium keyboard themes.
On the bright side, we now have the SwiftKey app for free, a pile of interesting features and enough interest to test them all and make the best out of them. Maybe the new iOS 8 and all of Apple’s blows will imbalance SwiftKey for a while, but the company still has the funds and the powerful partners to still make it on the market.
