Swype is probably the most hyped, loved, and fun and innovative input method to have hit mobile devices since T9 (Text on 9 keys). If you haven’t heard of Swype yet, check out the demo video at the bottom of the post.
However, Swype for Android is still in closed beta for some reason, even though it comes preloaded on a bunch of Android devices and it’s available for anyone to download on supported Symbian phones.
Luckily, you can still get Swype running on your Android, and likely in your own language as well, thanks to a multilingual version of Swype that is floating around the interwebs. It’s a very large install (12.6MB), though, and it will take up plenty of internal storage unless you trim it down. Here’s how:
Version 1.60.36.8214 of Swype supports the following languages: English US, English UK, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Polish, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Czech, Slovak, Russian, Romanian, Greek, Croatian.
- For WVGA (800×480) devices
- For FWVGA (854×480) devices
- For HVGA (480×320) devices
Here’s a more recent release (v2.15.56.14870), but it only supports English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese and Chinese.
- For WVGA (800×480) devices
- For FWVGA (854×480) devices
- For HVGA (480×320) devices
- In case Swype was in a compressed archive, extract it on your desktop.
- You should then get a file that is called Swype_1.60.36.8214_WVGA.apk or similar, depending on which version you downloaded.
- Now simply change the filename extension of Swype from .apk to .zip by renaming the file to Swype_1.60.36.8214_WVGA.zip.
- If you don’t already have WinRAR, download it from rarlabs.com and install.
- Open Swype_1.60.36.8214_WVGA.zip with WinRAR, and navigate to the folder assets/files within WinRAR.
- Now it’s time to remove unnecessary language packs and keyboard layouts. Delete all .htm and .le files that are for languages that you don’t need. For example, to delete the Greek language pack, select Greek.htm, Greek.zdb.le, and Greek-full.htm and press the Delete hardware key. Repeat this procedure for all redundant languages.
- Remove unused keyboard layouts, depending on where you’re from. I deleted all files that start with Azerty and Qwertz. If your language is a Latin language, keep all files with “latin” in them.
- Go back one step and enter the keyboards folder and remove all unnecessary keyboard images. Since the image filenames contain the name of the language or a country abbreviation, it’s easy to know which ones to delete. Again, I removed all Azerty and Qwertz files. Keep files that start with SwypeRef and wcw.
- Now we’re almost done. Close WinRAR and change the filename extension back to .apk.
- Copy Swype_1.60.36.8214_WVGA.apk to your Android device, and install it with a file manager such as AndroZip or Astro by locating it on the memory card and simply tapping on it.
By following these steps, I managed to reduce the size of the .apk from 12.6MB to 2.8MB. I actually tried to take this streamlining of Swype one step further by removing all redundant languages from the file languages.lst in the assets/files folder (that way they’re not shown as options in Swype), and I even managed to rebuild all the files into a new .apk using the Android SDK and then signing the package, but when the installation failed anyway I gave up.
To set Swype as your default Android keyboard, follow these instructions. Good luck!
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