Armenian Keyboard

Hayatar

Say hello to Hayatar - an Armenian keyboard built by Rotterdam-based developer Arshak Aghakaryan, which aims to improve the Armenian typing experience.

What is Hayatar?

Hayatar is a custom Armenian keyboard for iOS, that aims to improve the Armenian typing experience on iOS.

Hayatar provides you with Armenian alphabetic, numeric, and symbolic keyboard layouts, as well as features like autocomplete and secondary callout actions.

The Story Behind the App

According to Hayatar creator, Arshak Aghakaryan, the story of native Armenian typing on iOS is quite sad.

The Armenian keyboard that comes with iOS uses a layout that most who write in Armenian are not used to.

Although several 3rd party Armenian keyboards exists to solve these issues, none has a layout or UI that Arshak expected. As he later got an iPad, Arshak started experiencing even more issues with most existing keyboards.

I decided to try building a keyboard I’d love to use myself. I discovered KeyboardKit and fell into a rabbit hole of third-party keyboard development.

After some time in development, Hayatar was done and published to the App Store. It’s open-source, looks and feels native, is customizable and syncs its changes to iCloud.

Implementing the Keyboard

Implementing a custom keyboard is hard on its own, but even harder when you want to support as many special layouts and behaviors as the Armenian one has. KeyboardKit provided the core features that Arshak needed to be able to focus on the Armenian-specific challenges.

KeyboardKit is definitely one of my favorite packages now!

It’s amazing to hear that Arshak loved using KeyboardKit, and that it helped him bring this keyboard to life.

Download

You can download Hayatar from the App Store to give it a try, and improve your Armenian typing experience.