Google locally launches Gboard: a keyboard for the iPhone

Google has taken on Apple with a keyboard for the iPhone called Gboard

Gboard is an iOS app keyboard that lets you launch Google search from an iPhone

Google today locally launched a keyboard app for the iPhone that lets users access Google search in one keystroke.

Known as Gboard, it is the latest in trojan horse software that’s designed to make it easier to access products in a competitor’s system. Apple for its part offers Apple Music, a Beats Pill+ app and an app that helps users switch from Android to Apple called Move to ioS. It also is rumoured to be bringing its Messages app to Android.

Google says it works with the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

You can also add emojis and search for GIFs from the keyboard

Gboard offers more than an ability to hit a key and search and send. You can find GIFs for text messages, incorporate emojis and you can swipe-type from key to key as you do with third-party apps such as Swype and Swiftkey.

For example, in the Messages app, users can search for a restaurant in Google, and copy the information back into the message. So it becomes a tool for ubiquitous Google search access from within whatever you’re doing in iOS.

Swipe-style typing with Gboard

Gboard comes as Apple prepares to update its Messages app with a more powerful implementation of emojis, bubble effects, animations, and an ability to display links as images and click through to the site. There’s no need for long URLs. It will be available with iOS10 in the third quarter.

One downside of Gboard is that you won’t be able to access Siri directly from the keyboard which is a feature on the upcoming iOS10, on the native Apple keyboard.

But Apple lets you add more than one third party keyboard to iOS so you can install several keyboards and swap between them.

Gboard too lets you tap a card from a Google search and incorporate it into your message. Turn on “contacts search”, and you can search and share contacts without opening the contacts app. And you can move the cursor across the keyboard by sliding your finger along the search bar.

You can paste the result of a Google search into a message

The Gboard keyboard also will appear when you run other apps. Google says it will work in any app, whether it be messaging, email or YouTube. But it says that sometimes you’ll be switched back to the regular iOS keyboard, a bug that’s being worked on.

GBoard is available from the iTunes store but you’ll need to check the source is Google as there are similarly named apps from other sources.

You need iOS9 installed on your device to run Gboard.