Installation

WM Keyboard doesn’t have a packaged release yet: you build the APK yourself with Gradle, in two editions, and install it like any other app. It takes a few minutes and no developer experience beyond running commands from a terminal.

Building the APK

1. Install a JDK 17 or newer and the Android SDK. (The dictionary-compiler build tool pins its own JDK 17 toolchain, auto-provisioned via Foojay if you don’t already have one.)

2. Clone the repository and, from its root, run one of:

   ./gradlew assembleFullDebug   # every feature
   ./gradlew assembleLiteDebug   # smaller download, fewer tools

   Swap Debug for Release if you want a release build; without a configured signing key it falls back to the debug signature, which is fine for installing on your own device but means the APK won’t accept updates signed by a different machine later.

3. The APK lands under app/build/outputs/apk/full/debug/ (or lite/debug/). Copy it to your device and install it.

Screenshot pending

First launch after install, before the setup wizard starts.

Choosing an edition

Both editions are the same keyboard (same layouts, prediction, themes, and tools); the difference is which on-device intelligence ships in the box:

	Full edition only	Lite edition only
Handwriting, OCR text scan, QR/barcode scanner, document scanner	Included	Not included
Grammar check (Harper)	Included	Not included
Offline Whisper voice dictation	Included	Not included
On-device local LLM	Included	Not included

Lite leaves out the ML Kit and Harper native libraries those features need, so its APK is meaningfully smaller: a locally built release measured around 65 MB for Full versus 15 MB for Lite (arm64-v8a; exact numbers shift as dependencies update). If you’re short on storage or don’t need handwriting, scanning, grammar checking, or offline voice/LLM features, Lite gets you everything else for a fraction of the download.

See Full vs Lite for the complete feature comparison and how to tell which edition you’re already running.

Installing from the APK

Android blocks installs from outside the Play Store by default, so you’ll see an “install unknown apps” prompt the first time you install the file, so grant permission to whichever app you used to open it (Files, a browser download, etc.) and continue. This is standard Android behavior, not anything WM Keyboard adds.

Opening the app for the first time drops you straight into a short setup wizard rather than a home screen. See Enable the keyboard for what each step does. The wizard won’t run again on later launches once you’ve completed it.

Updating and what carries over

Installing a new build over an existing install (same package, same signing key) works like any Android app update: your settings, themes, learned words, snippets, and everything else stay exactly as they were, automatically.

Reinstalling from scratch or moving to a new phone is different: nothing carries over automatically unless you’ve set one of these up beforehand.

WM Keyboard›Data›Backup & restore

Export your configuration to a file you keep or move to another device, then import it after reinstalling. You choose what’s included per export; the defaults are:

Included by default	Off by default
Settings, themes, snippets, custom word lists, addon repository list	API keys inside settings, stickers, icons, learned dictionary, clipboard history

Import always shows a confirmation before it writes anything, so restoring isn’t something you discover after the fact.

WM Keyboard›Data›Privacy›Android backup›Back up with Android

A separate, off by default toggle that opts the keyboard into Android’s own backup and phone-to-phone transfer system, independent of the manual export above. Leave it off (the default) and Android won’t carry any WM Keyboard data across a device switch on its own; turn it on and Android’s platform-level backup includes this app the next time it runs.

System requirements

• Android 7.0 (API 24) or newer is the floor the app is built against; it targets Android 16 (API 36).
• Supported CPU architectures: arm64-v8a, armeabi-v7a, and x86_64. Generic 32-bit x86 is not supported (only 64-bit x86_64 is).
• Camera, microphone, and sensor access are all optional: every hardware-backed tool (camera scanner, voice dictation, compass, etc.) declares the underlying hardware feature as non-required in the manifest, so missing hardware just disables that one tool rather than blocking install.

Details & edge cases

• There’s no in-app auto-updater; each new build is a manual install like the first one.
• If you build release APKs on more than one machine without sharing a signing keystore, they’ll carry different signatures and Android will refuse to install one over the other. You’ll need to uninstall first, which loses data unless you’ve exported a backup.
• The Backup & restore export has a separate “include API keys” switch (off by default) for the translate, GIF, search, and AI tool keys you may have entered; exporting with it on produces a file worth treating like a password, since anyone with the file gets those keys too.
• Data that’s cheap to re-fetch, like downloaded (not custom) dictionaries, emoji keyword packs, Whisper/LLM model weights, and cached camera captures, is deliberately left out of both the manual backup and Android’s own backup, since re-downloading is simpler than restoring it.