How To Get Gesture Typing From Android 4.2 Jelly Bean

How To Get Gesture Typing From Android 4.2 Jelly

Android 4.2 Jelly Bean was announced yesterday and with all of the great new features, one such feature was with the keyboard. Typically, the stock keyboard hasn’t changed much over the years, but now users with 4.2 can use gestures when typing.

If you’re familiar with Swype, it’s basically the same thing. You swipe your finger from character to character instead of touching each one. Even though pre-installed gesture typing is supposed to only be available in 4.2, some awesome developer or developrs have managed to bring it over to devices running Ice Cream Sandwich and up.

The good news is your phone doesn’t have to be rooted (unless you have a Nexus). The potentially bad news is it won’t work on all stock Android custom ROMS, won’t work at all on stock Android builds distributed by Google, and works best on phones with a UI overlay with the stock keyboard disabled.

All you have to do is download an APK and simply install it. You can get the APK from either this mirror or this mirror. If you have a Nexus device, your phone will have to be rooted and you’ll have to flash a ZIP file via recovery. You can grab the flashable zip here or here.

If the APK doesn’t seem to work, well, you’ll know that it’s simply not meant to be. We’re not responsible for any potential issues caused by installing the APK. If you missed the new gesture feature in Android 4.2, below is a quick video showing it off: