Heads up, Google Keyboard users, because a noteworthy update is now rolling out.
The new Google Keyboard update is version 5.1.23, and it includes many more themes than previous versions. Before today’s update, Google Keyboard users could only choose between light and dark themes, but now there are several colorful options that include red, green, blue, and purple. Google Keyboard will also let you use one of your own photos as a keyboard background.
In addition to an expanded theme selection, this Google Keyboard update adds gesture typing and suggestions in several languages, support for recent emoji in the suggestion strip, and more. Below is Google’s full changelog for the update:
- Themes: Customize keyboard with favorite photos or colors
- Gesture typing & suggestions in: Albanian, Arabic, Basque, Bosnian, English (Australia), English (India), Esperanto, Irish, Javanese, Mongolian, Montenegrin (Cyrillic, Latin), Nepali, Portuguese (Africa), Sudanese, Tajik, Tatar, Zulu
- Layout support: Burmese, Southern Sotho, Turkmen, Urdu, Welsh, Xhosa
- Add recent emoji to suggestion strip
- Bug fixes, including passwords with Talkback and missing key labels
- Support Android N
These features have been available to folks on the Android N Developer Preview for a couple of months now, but today’s update makes themes available to all of us not brave enough to run beta software on our phones. If you haven’t yet gotten this Google Keyboard update, keep an eye out for it in the coming days.