Akshar - KeyboardKit Case Study
Akshar - KeyboardKit Case Study
Practical details
- Developer: Krishna Permi (solo, independent)
- Website: https://akshar.site
- App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6759032352
- App icon: 1024x1024 PNG, included in this archive (
app-icon.png) - Screenshots: four iPhone shots included (
screenshots/)
The story
What does Akshar do?
Akshar is an Indic transliteration keyboard for iPhone and iPad. It supports 21 Indian languages across 12 scripts built directly into the keyboard, the highest of any app on the App Store. Apple currently supports 11 Indic languages for transliteration, and most third-party options require configuring one language at a time within the app. With Akshar, all the languages you have enabled are accessible right from the keyboard, with a script selector row above the keys for instant switching. Beyond the keyboard, the app has a Notes tab for longer writing with live transliteration, a Convert tab that goes both ways (English to Indic and Indic to readable Roman), a Share-as-Artwork feature that turns any line into a poster-style image with native typography, widgets for Lock Screen and Home Screen, three Control Centre tiles, and Siri and Shortcuts integration through App Intents. The app is fully native, has no ads, and is designed to align with Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, something many existing options on the App Store don’t prioritise, often shipping with intrusive ads, inconsistent colour choices, and limited privacy considerations.
Background: how did I come up with the idea / why did I build it?
My son is learning Kannada, a language from the southern Indian state of Karnataka, at school, and I’ve been helping him practise. When I needed to type something in Kannada on my iPhone or iPad for him to read and work through, I realised I couldn’t do it easily. I’m used to writing by hand the old school way, as I did in school, and there were no dedicated mobile apps that made transliteration feel natural. So I built one.
Once I had it working, I thought, why not make it a keyboard? That way, I could write longer texts in apps like Notes, message friends and family in my native language, and have them available everywhere on the device, not just in a single app.
Looking at what was already available, Gboard tends to bury Indic transliteration deep in its settings, switching between languages feels clunky, and it hasn’t been meaningfully updated in four years. Most other third-party keyboards feel outdated. I wanted to build something that felt like it belonged on iOS.
Implementation: How did I implement it?
The transliteration runs entirely on-device. The current version uses AI4Bharat’s IndicXlit, an open-source neural model from IIT Madras, packaged as a Core ML model and run on the Neural Engine. Latency stays under 30 milliseconds per suggestion, and nothing leaves the phone. There is no Akshar server, no analytics, no accounts.
The keyboard itself is built with KeyboardKit, which provides the foundation I need to create a custom keyboard extension that still feels native to iOS. I have built custom features like keyboard settings, the script selector row, the language switching, and the Indic transliteration suggestions around KeyboardKit’s package dependency for basic keyboard functionality and UI.
Outside the keyboard extension, the app uses WidgetKit for Lock Screen and Home Screen widgets, App Intents for Siri and Shortcuts, and Core Graphics for the Share-as-Artwork rendering. Settings, notes, and conversion history sync between iPhones and iPads through the user’s own iCloud account, encrypted in transit and at rest.
KeyboardKit: How did KeyboardKit help?
KeyboardKit was essential to the project. The polish and finish of Akshar wouldn’t have been possible without it. Building a custom keyboard extension from scratch on iOS is a significant undertaking, especially a native-looking one. There’s a lot of complexity around input handling, key layout, language switching, and making everything feel responsive and familiar to users. KeyboardKit gave me a solid, well-structured foundation to build on, so I could focus my time on what makes Akshar unique: the multi-language transliteration experience, the per-script typography, and the script selector, rather than reinventing the core keyboard mechanics. The library’s architecture made it straightforward to customise the layout and behaviour to fit my needs while keeping the keyboard feeling native and consistent with what iOS users expect.
A few specific places it earned its keep. The suggestion bar above the keys needed to render Indic glyphs at the right metrics, and KeyboardKit’s autocomplete toolbar let me customise the cell rendering for Indic typography without rewriting the toolbar. Language switching, where Akshar rotates through up to 11 enabled scripts via the globe key, was straightforward thanks to KeyboardKit’s locale-context handling. App-group sharing was the other big win - keeping the IndicXlit Core ML model loaded in the keyboard process while letting the app’s Notes and Convert tabs use the same model required plumbing that just worked. Settings sync between the main app and the keyboard extension, which is non-trivial in a sandboxed iOS keyboard, has been predictable thanks to the patterns KeyboardKit provides.
Skipping the layout-engine work let me ship v1 in months instead of years, and the v3 release - 21 languages, widgets, App Intents, Convert, Share as Artwork - would not have been feasible solo in any reasonable timeframe without it. Daniel has been responsive when I’ve hit edge cases, which makes it the kind of dependency I am comfortable building a flagship product on.
I look forward to reviewing the article. Thank you for considering.