After the Fairphone OS update to 1.8 the keyboard changed. It now had a microphone where the comma used to be. Very annoying as I never use the microphone, but use the comma quite often. Anyway, turned out it was the Google voise typing that was set to ‘on’ in the settings, so I turned it off. All was good again with my keyboard. But today there was this microphone again. So I checked the settings and, indeed, Google voice typing was turned on again.
Turns out that this setting is not remembered if you turn off your phone and ‘on’ is the default. Very annoying.
that is why I don’t install Google Apps from the start. Those things do not happen without Google!
Since it seems to annoy you a lot, you could try to install FP OS 1.8 manually and then install Google Apps again to see if the issue persists. Maybe there was just something going wrong through setup.
I think you are using either the Google Keyboard app or AOSP Keyboard app (which are related, same-same, but different).
There would be other options, with other layouts. A colleague is using a keyboard in the old “dumbphone“ number block layout, e.g., and it’s quite fast combined with word recognition and swiping. Others on the forum are using Swype or SwiftKey. Have a look at your app depository of choice, I would suggest. You might find a keyboard with exactly the layout you want.
