Urik, the fully open-source Android keyboard with zero tracking, has just pushed version 0.17.0 beta with a few welcome improvements.

The headline addition is French language support, joining the growing list of available languages (Italian arrived a few months back). German translations have also been updated.

Better typing all around

The dev team focused on refining swipe detection and peck typing accuracy, along with smarter auto-capitalization and case-sensitive word suggestions. The spacebar, which occasionally misbehaved during consecutive swipe gestures, should now be more reliable. A couple of bugs related to terminal input and clipboard visibility have been squashed too.

If you haven’t tried it yet, Urik is one of the more compelling Gboard alternatives for privacy-conscious users: everything runs on-device, there’s no internet permission whatsoever, and all data is stored in an encrypted local database. You can grab it on Google Play, F-Droid, or straight from GitHub.