The Issue

In iOS 26.4 beta, the hostApplicationBundleId becomes empty. This affects the keyboard’s ability to identify which app is currently using the keyboard.

When the host application bundle ID becomes empty, keyboards may not be able to:

• Provide app-specific customizations or behaviors.
• Implement context-aware features that depend on knowing the host app.
• Navigate back to the keyboard from the main application, for instance when starting dictation.

Multiple keyboard developers, including those not using KeyboardKit, have reported encountering this same behavior, which means that something has changed at the iOS system level.

What We Know

The issue has been documented and is being tracked in the KeyboardKit GitHub repository. For detailed information, technical discussion, and updates on this issue, please visit this bug report.

KeyboardKit Implications

This iOS 26.4 change will affect KeyboardKit in different ways, based on which version you’re using.

KeyboardKit 10.2.1 and earlier are using Objective-C to parse the host application information. This approach may crash when the bundle information is missing.

KeyboardKit 10.2.2 and later are using Swift to parse the host application information. This is more robust and will not crash, but the bundle identifier will still be empty.

Workarounds and Next Steps

While we look at alternatives, or until Apple issues a fix, developers experiencing this issue should:

• Upgrade to KeyboardKit 10.2.2 or later.
• Implement graceful fallbacks when the bundle ID is empty.
• Avoid relying solely on the host application bundle ID for critical functionality.
• Monitor the GitHub issue for community-discovered workarounds and updates.

We’ll continue monitoring the situation and will update you as more information becomes available or when Apple releases a fix.

If you’re experiencing this issue in your app, please share your findings in the GitHub issue to help the community better understand and work around this problem.

Keyboard Essentials

The KeyboardInputViewController gains a new viewWillSetupKeyboardKit() function, providing you with better control over the keyboard setup lifecycle.

This new function allows for more precise timing when configuring the keyboard, and avoids any side-effects of overriding viewDidLoad and failing to call super.viewDidLoad().

On-Device Next Word Prediction

KeyboardKit 10.3 brings support for local, on-device next word prediction using Apple’s Foundation Models. This is available on iPhone 15 Pro and later devices running iOS 26.1 or higher.

The new Autocomplete.NextWordPredictionMethod.local method has been added to make it easy to enable this functionality with code or from the settings screen. This method is enabled by default.

The next word prediction in Autocomplete.SettingsScreen has been redesigned to better showcase this new option, making it easier for developers to configure and for users pick it manually.

Faster License Validation

KeyboardKit Pro license validation has been significantly optimized in this release. KeyboardKit now validates licenses much faster, dramatically reducing the flickering that could occur during keyboard initialization. This improvement creates a smoother experience when your keyboard first appears.

Additionally, the Keyboard.ToggleToolbar now displays the base toolbar view even when no license is registered, to provide a nice fallback in case of license expiration.

Layout Improvements

This release brings enhancements to keyboard layout rendering. The standardPhone configuration has been updated to use a 51-point row height in iOS 26, to match Apple’s updated designs.

Layout caching is now enabled by default, and has been converted from an experiment to a setting. This caching mechanism improves rendering performance by storing computed layouts, resulting in faster keyboard display and reduced computational overhead during layout calculations.

Settings and Developer Tools

A new isPredictiveTextVisualizationActive setting has been added to help developers verify that predictive text features are working correctly. This developer-focused setting provides visibility into the prediction system, making debugging and validation easier during development.

Experimental Features

The experiment engine has been refactored for easier use. The Experiment type now provides all you need to get and toggle experiments, and Experiments has been reduced to a plain namespace.

Bug Fixes

This version includes some bug fixes. For instance, the Keyboard.LocaleSettingsScreen now handles locale changes more reliably, preventing edge cases where changes could behave unexpectedly.

Additionally, the keyboard now performs autocomplete more reliably on launch, ensuring users see suggestions immediately when they begin typing.

Conclusion

KeyboardKit 10.3 brings powerful new capabilities with on-device next word prediction, significant performance improvements with faster license validation and layout caching, and more settings and customization options. These improvements make KeyboardKit more capable and performant.

For complete details about all changes, see the KeyboardKit 10.3.0 release notes. Upgrade today to take advantage of these new features and improvements!

🎤 Dictation

KeyboardKit 10.2 has a new .keyboard dictation method that makes it possible to perform dictation directly within the keyboard, with an automated app-sync only when needed.

In-keyboard dictation method will only open the main app to start dictation if needed, then navigate back to the keyboard to perform dictation, keeping an open connection to the dictation engine.

In-keyboard dictation is currently opt-in. Follow the dictation developer guide to set up dictation, then enable keyboard dictation with the dictation settings or the .keyboardDictation experiment.

In-keyboard dictation is the recommended dictation method moving forward. It has new views that provide a great user experience, like Dictation.ProgressView and Dictation.VolumeVisualizer.

The Dictation feature also has new tools like the new Dictation.VolumeRecorder. KeyboardKit Pro unlocks all required tools to easily set up dictation.

The dictation engine supports the following locales, which means you can use it with languages that are not yet supported by the keyboard engine:

Arabic (ar-SA), Cantonese (yue-CN), Catalan (ca-ES), Chinese (zh-CN), Chinese (zh-HK), Chinese (zh-TW), Croatian (hr-HR), Czech (cs-CZ), Danish (da-DK), Dutch (nl-BE), Dutch (nl-NL), English (en-AE), English (en-AU), English (en-CA), English (en-GB), English (en-ID), English (en-IE), English (en-IN), English (en-NZ), English (en-PH), English (en-SA), English (en-SG), English (en-US), English (en-ZA), Finnish (fi-FI), French (fr-BE), French (fr-CA), French (fr-CH), French (fr-FR), German (de-AT), German (de-CH), German (de-DE), Greek (el-GR), Hebrew (he-IL), Hindi (hi-IN), Hindi (hi-IN-translit), Hindi (hi-Latn), Hungarian (hu-HU), Indonesian (id-ID), Italian (it-CH), Italian (it-IT), Japanese (ja-JP), Korean (ko-KR), Malay (ms-MY), Norwegian Bokmål (nb-NO), Polish (pl-PL), Portuguese (pt-BR), Portuguese (pt-PT), Romanian (ro-RO), Russian (ru-RU), Shanghainese (wuu-CN), Slovak (sk-SK), Spanish (es-419), Spanish (es-CL), Spanish (es-CO), Spanish (es-ES), Spanish (es-MX), Spanish (es-US), Swedish (sv-SE), Thai (th-TH), Turkish (tr-TR), Ukrainian (uk-UA), Vietnamese (vi-VN)

⌨️ Keyboard

KeyboardKit 10.2 adds a new .keyboardReplacementOverlay(...) modifier that can be used to easily replace the keyboard view with an equally sized replacement whenever a boolean condition is met.

🧪 Experiments

Experiment has a new .keyboardDictation experiment that affects the .keyboardMethod dictation setting. You can use this to easily toggle keyboard dictation on and off.

Experiments also has a new Experiments.SettingsScreen that can be used to enable experiments. The KeyboardApp.HomeScreen has a link to this screen, that is hidden by default.

🔉 Feedback

The FeedbackContext class has a new isHapticFeedbackAvailable property, which is only true for devices with haptic feedback.

🎛️ Settings

There are many new settings, like the new isCharacterPreviewEnabled and isPredictiveTextEnabled keyboard settings, and isNextCharacterPredictionEnabled autocomplete setting.

The various settings screens have new toggles and structures, to make them provide more options.

Conclusion

KeyboardKit 10.2 adds many new features and improvements. There are also a bunch of bug fixes and general improvements. For more info, please see the KeyboardKit 10.2 release notes.

The current dictation method

As you may know, iOS keyboard extensions are strictly limited by Apple and can’t do as much as you may need. For instance, dictation is hard since a keyboard can’t access the device microphone.

KeyboardKit currently works around this strict limitation by letting the keyboard open the main app to start and perform dictation, then navigate back to the keyboard to apply the result.

While this works fairly well, it’s a lackluster experience for keyboards that rely heavily on dictation. This is why we are happy to announce a brand new dictation method: in-keyboard dictation.

The new dictation method

In-keyboard dictation method will only open the main app to start dictation if needed, then navigate back to the keyboard to perform dictation, keeping an open connection to the dictation engine.

The dictation engine will stay open as long as the main app is alive. This lets the user perform many subsequent dictation operations without having to open the main app, which is a big improvement.

Together with this experience comes a new Dictation.ProgressView which is automatically added to the main KeyboardView while dictation is active, as well as a Dictation.Indicator.

When applying a dictation result, the keyboard will put dictation in idle mode instead of stopping it. This keeps the dictation going, while stopping it from writing to the observed result.

An improved user experience

The user experience will be greatly improved, since the keyboard will only open the main app one time, instead of each time the user wants to dictate.

The result is a seamless dictation experience where the user can start dictation many times without leaving the keyboard. This makes the dictation feature much more useful.

The new progress and indicator views gives you and the user full control. Users can stop dictation at any time, and you can add these views wherever you need them, and customize them freely.

When will this be available?

The new dictation experience will be available as a beta experiment in KeyboardKit 10.2, which will be released later in January.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to discuss how this can help you improve your keyboard-based product.

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💥 Secondary Swipe Actions

KeyboardKit 10.1 adds swipe down actions to iPad, when creating a layout with alphabetic, numeric, and symbolic input sets. These actions are applied for most supported locales.

Swipe down actions are currently disabled for locales where the final result was not good enough.

🧪 Experiments

KeyboardKit 10.1 adds a new way to handle experimental features, with the new Experiment enum.

The enum can be used to enable and disable active experiment. You can present these experiments to your users if you want to give them the choice to opt-in to an ongoing experiment.

Completed experiments remain as inactive, deprecated enum cases until the next major version, in which they are removed.

⚡️ Performance

KeyboardKit 10.1 improves the typing and view rendering performance through layout caching and view hierarchy cleanups. This results in less layout calculations and fewer views to render.

Layout caching

Layout caching is a new, experimental feature that aims to reduce expensive layout recalculations. It’s disabled by default and can be enabled with Experiment.layoutCaching.setEnabled(true).

View hierarchy cleanups

The keyboard button gesture view modifier has been optimized by removing a geometry proxy for each modifier. This results in a cleaner and lighter view hierarchy.

📱 App

The KeyboardApp.HomeScreen is no longer a Pro feature. This means that it can be used by everyone.

The screen will only render links to the features that are included in your license, but it will show the keyboard status, and let you customize it with the header and footer view builders.

🏠 Host Application

KeyboardKit 10.1 lets you create and pass in your own custom host application values. This lets you extend the host application logic with more apps than what is known by the SDK.

⌨️ External Keyboards

The ExternalKeyboardContext has a new isEnabledOnSimulator property. This is false by default, to avoid a bug where the keyboard could auto-collaps when running on a Simulator.

Conclusion

KeyboardKit 10.1 adds many new features, improves performance, and fixes many small bugs and inconsistencies. For more info, please see the KeyboardKit 10.1 release notes.

When we started working on KeyboardKit 10 years ago, we were intrigued by the complex challenge of replicating the native iOS keyboard. We have now had the luxury of working on it for many years, and have gotten to meet many amazing people and companies along the way.

One such person is Alex and her team at BiAffect, who created a custom keyboard to enable mental health research through the analysis of a person’s typing profile. The way in which a person types lets BiAffect detect if a person is entering or already in a bipolar episode. This makes it possible to get early help, and to get a deeper understanding on illness patterns and behaviors.

Mental health is one of many very exciting areas where a custom keyboard is a critical enabler, and BiAffect goes way beyond what we envisioned when we started working on KeyboardKit. Check out Alex’s talk for inspiration on how a custom keyboard could benefit you or your company.