Keybuild

Name: Keybuild
Price: 3.99 USD
Rating: 4.2 (43 reviews)
Author: Jamie Froggatt

Build your own keyboard

$3.99 · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.

43 Ratings
Age Rating

4+
Years
Category

Utilities
Developer

Jamie Froggatt
Language

EN
English
Size

2.5
MB

Build your own keyboard! Touchscreen keyboards don't need to be one-size-fits-all, so let's change that! With Keybuild, you choose the layout, the keys, everything. Keys can be set up to type whatever you want! Letters, greek letters (ɑ, β, ɣ), maths symbols (π, ∫, ∑), arrows (↑→↓←), or even your favourite emoji can be added and organised depending on your needs. Create multiple ‘panes’, each containing keys arranged using a stack-based layout, and switch between them with either an automatic menu, or direct links. Add a small number row to your Qwerty keyboard, or have a try using Azerty or Colemak layouts. Build a keyboard that can keep up with your maths-heavy university course, or specialist profession. Or just make a dashboard for your favourite emoji. Or do all that and more, it's up to you! This app does its best to supports VoiceOver, and accessibility APIs. Technical note: This app is 99% SwiftUI, which is as close as you can get while we wait for the ‘SwiftUI Lifecycle’ to come to Custom Keyboard Extensions! SwiftUI powers this app's advanced functionality, as well as some of its more unusual bugs. :) Disclaimer: This iPad app is available on Apple Silicon Macs, but macOS currently does not support keyboard extensions. Still waiting for that tablet Mac!

Ratings & Reviews

4.2

out of 5

43 Ratings

Saved my life
07/15/2023

djdkdkkddk
I can't BELIEVE I went so long not knowing this app exists. I'm a language nerd, and it's always driven me crazy that almost none of the iOS keyboards for various languages have dedicated keys for diacritic marks (the way the German keyboard has keys for umlauts), so I made a modified version of the Portuguese keyboard that has keys for the tilde, circumflex, and acute accents, using Unicode combination characters that I copied from Wikipedia. I was worried it would be a huge headache, or that the app wouldn't even support extended Unicode, but it only took me like 15 minutes. The interface is so simple, and incredibly easy to use considering how flexible it is; my use for it has been pretty straightforward so far, but it really feels like it offers a staggering amount of customizability without having to navigate a labrynth of submenus. It did crash once the first time I converted a text stack into a key stack, but it autosaved my changes, and that was the only real glitch I encountered. I'm no app developer, but this seems like a masterpiece of GUI design compared to the loads of other apps that manage to overcomplicate simple tasks or overlook obvious use-cases. Just an amazing app, and absolutely worth the cup-of-coffee price.
Saved my life
07/15/2023

djdkdkkddk

I can't BELIEVE I went so long not knowing this app exists. I'm a language nerd, and it's always driven me crazy that almost none of the iOS keyboards for various languages have dedicated keys for diacritic marks (the way the German keyboard has keys for umlauts), so I made a modified version of the Portuguese keyboard that has keys for the tilde, circumflex, and acute accents, using Unicode combination characters that I copied from Wikipedia. I was worried it would be a huge headache, or that the app wouldn't even support extended Unicode, but it only took me like 15 minutes. The interface is so simple, and incredibly easy to use considering how flexible it is; my use for it has been pretty straightforward so far, but it really feels like it offers a staggering amount of customizability without having to navigate a labrynth of submenus. It did crash once the first time I converted a text stack into a key stack, but it autosaved my changes, and that was the only real glitch I encountered. I'm no app developer, but this seems like a masterpiece of GUI design compared to the loads of other apps that manage to overcomplicate simple tasks or overlook obvious use-cases. Just an amazing app, and absolutely worth the cup-of-coffee price.
Good for custom keyboard layouts
09/04/2023

fayfoxxhearts
For a while now I've beed designing keyboard layouts with higher efficiency than QWERTY, like TEIOUM, TRHIEO, and more recently, Quartet. I've been trying to find an app that could actually let me use the layouts to test them, but the only apps I found weren't that great or made you pay to use the outside of the app, often with higher prices than the 3.99$USD this costed, so eventually I tried this, and not only was I able to use my keyboard layouts, I was even able to link between various keyboards, for symbols, etc, add things like emojis, and even add keys which would type multiple keys, which would have saved me thousands of keystrokes if I had been using them in the past, since I often do a lot of manual database management.Overall, I'd recommend this to anyone who needs a truly custom keyboard in one way or another. 10/10.- PF
Good for custom keyboard layouts
09/04/2023

fayfoxxhearts

For a while now I've beed designing keyboard layouts with higher efficiency than QWERTY, like TEIOUM, TRHIEO, and more recently, Quartet. I've been trying to find an app that could actually let me use the layouts to test them, but the only apps I found weren't that great or made you pay to use the outside of the app, often with higher prices than the 3.99$USD this costed, so eventually I tried this, and not only was I able to use my keyboard layouts, I was even able to link between various keyboards, for symbols, etc, add things like emojis, and even add keys which would type multiple keys, which would have saved me thousands of keystrokes if I had been using them in the past, since I often do a lot of manual database management.Overall, I'd recommend this to anyone who needs a truly custom keyboard in one way or another. 10/10.- PF
Exactly the keyboard maker I’ve been looking for! One small feature request.
04/01/2025

TheProudLutheran
So, I’m a dead language enthusiast. I love me a good dead language. Old English, Old Norse, Latin, Phoenician, Gothic… if it’s dead and sounds cool, it’s a language I want to learn.Unfortunately, this manages to come back on me sometimes. You see, I’m a Christian. I’m trying to learn Biblical Hebrew, Biblical Aramaic, and Koine Greek to read the Bible in its original languages. It’s Greek that’s causing me issues.See, iOS doesn’t have a native polytonic Greek keyboard. So I figured that I’d build my own using Keybuild. I used Unicode combining characters for diacritical marks. Unfortunately, rather than stacking the characters, it simply placed them next to each other. Here’s an example:Desired outcome: A diaereses stacked on top of an alpha.What happens: ά̈This isn’t how the character is supposed to look. I did, however, discover that Unicode actually has built in Greek characters (like “ἆ”), but including all of those as separate characters would clutter up the keyboard. So, I’d like to request one of two features (or both, if you’ve got the time, but please don’t feel pressured to implement them):1. Better rendering support for combining Unicode characters so they stack rather than get squished next to each other (not sure if this is possible, but it’d be cool if it did.)2. A hold-down feature in which you can select from multiple different version of the same character, like how holding down “a” on the default iOS English keyboard gets you options such as æ, ã, and å. You already kind of have this with the long-press feature, but as far as I know, that only allows one character rather than multiple.All that said, this is a really good app, and I look forward to seeing what else you do with it! God bless!
Exactly the keyboard maker I’ve been looking for! One small feature request.
04/01/2025

TheProudLutheran

So, I’m a dead language enthusiast. I love me a good dead language. Old English, Old Norse, Latin, Phoenician, Gothic… if it’s dead and sounds cool, it’s a language I want to learn.Unfortunately, this manages to come back on me sometimes. You see, I’m a Christian. I’m trying to learn Biblical Hebrew, Biblical Aramaic, and Koine Greek to read the Bible in its original languages. It’s Greek that’s causing me issues.See, iOS doesn’t have a native polytonic Greek keyboard. So I figured that I’d build my own using Keybuild. I used Unicode combining characters for diacritical marks. Unfortunately, rather than stacking the characters, it simply placed them next to each other. Here’s an example:Desired outcome: A diaereses stacked on top of an alpha.What happens: ά̈This isn’t how the character is supposed to look. I did, however, discover that Unicode actually has built in Greek characters (like “ἆ”), but including all of those as separate characters would clutter up the keyboard. So, I’d like to request one of two features (or both, if you’ve got the time, but please don’t feel pressured to implement them):1. Better rendering support for combining Unicode characters so they stack rather than get squished next to each other (not sure if this is possible, but it’d be cool if it did.)2. A hold-down feature in which you can select from multiple different version of the same character, like how holding down “a” on the default iOS English keyboard gets you options such as æ, ã, and å. You already kind of have this with the long-press feature, but as far as I know, that only allows one character rather than multiple.All that said, this is a really good app, and I look forward to seeing what else you do with it! God bless!
Very good app overall
10/23/2022

Adambergen112
This app has a lot of very nice features and works seamlessly with other standard iOS keyboards. Very few bugs and glitches, and it rarely crashes. And when it does crash it never forgets my completed work or anything like that which is very nice.I use this as a hobby linguist trying to make a better alphabet for English spelling, and I’m able to upload almost every Unicode character into the app and it always works perfectly with the more unique characters.One major feedback I would suggest is haptic feedback, not only for typing but also for long-press buttons, like how Apple does if you want to add diacritics to a letter like á or something. When using this app I never feel like I know if I’ve pressed the button long enough to activate the new letter (and I usually haven’t).But other than that, as the title says this is a very good app overall and has filled a useful niche interest of mine. It’s the only app I found that could fill my needs and it runs extremely well, so thanks!
Very good app overall
10/23/2022

Adambergen112

This app has a lot of very nice features and works seamlessly with other standard iOS keyboards. Very few bugs and glitches, and it rarely crashes. And when it does crash it never forgets my completed work or anything like that which is very nice.I use this as a hobby linguist trying to make a better alphabet for English spelling, and I’m able to upload almost every Unicode character into the app and it always works perfectly with the more unique characters.One major feedback I would suggest is haptic feedback, not only for typing but also for long-press buttons, like how Apple does if you want to add diacritics to a letter like á or something. When using this app I never feel like I know if I’ve pressed the button long enough to activate the new letter (and I usually haven’t).But other than that, as the title says this is a very good app overall and has filled a useful niche interest of mine. It’s the only app I found that could fill my needs and it runs extremely well, so thanks!

• Makes the Paste option always visible when adding a key, to aid discovery. • Updated to use iOS 18 SDKs. • Adds emoji jump option for the unicode picker. (Slow, but doesn’t crash!) • Various optimisations.

Version 1.7.4 10/08/2024

Data Not Collected

The developer does not collect any data from this app.

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Accessibility

Information

Seller: Jamie Froggatt
Size: 2.5 MB
Category: Utilities
Compatibility: Requires iOS 15.0 or later.

iPhone
Requires iOS 15.0 or later.

iPad
Requires iPadOS 15.0 or later.

iPod touch
Requires iOS 15.0 or later.

Mac
Requires macOS 12.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later.

Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
Languages: English
Age Rating: 4+

4+

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