We’re shutting down Next Keyboard. Here’s why
This is one of the toughest announcements we’ve had to make…
We are shutting down Next Keyboard. We will no longer support Next Keyboard and are ceasing further development on it. In other words, we’re killing it 💔. Next Keyboard will be removed from the App Store on October 21st, 2016.
We’ve never had to write anything like this before, so we’re not quite sure how to express it.
We’re still very proud of what we’ve made and the sentiment and inspiration that drove it.
But at this moment, we’re guilty, disappointed, and — quite frankly — heartbroken. These feelings are amplified by one of responsibility that we feel towards the early users who bet on us, from whom we raised $65,000. When we set out to build the best keyboard for iPhone, we didn’t plan on the Next Keyboard turning out like this. We delivered a good product but weren’t able to deliver on all of our promises. You took a risk on us, and we’re sorry we let you down.
And as much as we say to ourselves that everybody loses sometimes, this loss doesn’t just affect us. It affects everyone who believed in us and believed in the app.
We’ve reflected on this many times, and we’ve figured out what killed Next Keyboard:
Next Keyboard was not a sustainable business. Our company started off in the App Store building paid apps (see Wake and Quick Fit), and we thought we could replicate our success with Next Keyboard. Unfortunately, the upfront price on paid apps have just become way too high a barrier for us to scale properly, especially in contrast to free apps. In other words, paid apps are (mostly) dead.
What went wrong with Next?
In spite of all the things that went right, the reality of the App Store is that it’s not an easy get-rich-quick method. It’s important for us to break through the hype. The stories and case studies that the media feeds you aren’t accurate. There was a great piece in The Verge following the app developer Pixite, and John Gruber recently wrote about shutting down his app Vesper.
Functional keyboards on mobile devices are important, but they don’t make for good sustainable businesses and they’re extremely complicated products that require a deep understanding of machine learning and NLP. The sad fact is that there’s not a lot of independent third-party keyboard developers left on iOS:
- Microsoft bought Swiftkey
- Fleksy was acquihired by Pinterest
- Minuum has pivoted from functional keyboard to emoji space with Dango
The big players got into the iOS keyboard wars. Google built their own keyboard for iOS, Gboard, and Apple’s keyboard kept improving by leaps and bounds. When iOS 10 came out, Apple vastly improved their QuickType keyboard with contextual predictions , emoji predictions (a feature that was available in Next Keyboard), multi-lingual typing (a feature Swiftkey first introduced) and ability to select text with multi touch gestures.
Third party keyboards, like Next, were restricted in capabilities that Apple’s wasn’t. For example, Apple’s keyboard is the only one that could record voice and do speech-to-text. iOS 10 will continue this trend. And let’s not get it confused — I’m very happy using Apple’s keyboard. Apple’s opening a new iOS 10 iMessages API, is something we’re excited about. We’ve already released several sticker packs and an iMessage app.
Nonetheless, you can see the focus with functional keyboards is turning to the big three players (Apple, Google, and Microsoft). Third parties are focusing on emojis, GIFs, and more playful ways to communicate visually.
Adding to the problem: people don’t trust these keyboards (full-access anyone?) which makes it hard to win the hearts of users. One blogger straight up said he wouldn’t cover Next Keyboard because keyboards are unusable on iOS:
“I’m not sure our readers are particularly thrilled about third-party keyboards on iOS anymore.” — Anonymous blogger
We’re not blaming the death of Next Keyboard entirely on Apple. Fundamentally, we bit off more than we could chew. Keyboards might sound simple, but they’re very complicated products. Under the hood, building a keyboard requires the combination of natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, and data science. We’re a relatively small independent product studio, and even the reasonable amount of cash we raised on Kickstarter only covered half the salary of one data scientist.
Next is dead, long live Next
Next Keyboard promised a few important features. It promised cursor control, which Gboard now has and Apple has as well. Apple is going all-in on emoji, so we were on the right track with emoji suggestions. In fact, Next Emoji Keyboard will survive and continue the Next Keyboard legacy. The sticker packs will survive as well — they’re available as iMessage packs.
Obviously, we’re still very excited about mobile messaging, emojis, and — increasingly — the bot space.
Honestly, we should’ve brought this up sooner. But the reason it took so long is because we weren’t sure we wanted to kill Next Keyboard. And even after deciding to pull the plug we wanted to deliver the message carefully. And, ultimately, despite losing the bet, I understand our journey better now. I don’t think we failed.
We’ve succailed (hat tip to Mills from ustwo). It’s raised our studio’s visibility, credibility, and it enabled us to develop new skill sets for new markets. It’s even generated some interest from companies looking to acquire us.
Moving forward
We’re in a way better position to innovate, and we believe we’re skating to where the puck is. Next is a state of mind for us. We’re always going to be looking to build the next big thing. As Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull says of the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, “The past can be a lesson, but the past is gone. His question was always, ‘What are we going to do moving forward?’”
Before we move forward and look into the future though, let’s have a moment for Next Keyboard.
Sincerely,
Robleh Jama, @robjama
CEO at Tiny Hearts
