Enable gesture (swipe) input (on Fairphone 2) without Google Keyboard

The problem

The default AOSP keyboard does not ship with swipe. It will not appear in the settings.
The easy (but awkward) reason is that Google considered this feature to be too "secret" or so to release it in the open source code and thus they ship it in a proprietary library.

The solution

If you want, you can push that library to your device after the ROM installation (and each update!). It is named libjni_latinimegoogle.so and needs to be put in /system/lib.

For me (Android 7.1, ARM) this lib was a really small (944 kB) and oldish (updated 2008) thing. (sha256sum: 442a2a8bfcb25489564bc9433a916fa4dc0dba9000fe6f6f03f5939b985091e6)

Detailed guide

1. Download the correct Google Apps from http://opengapps.org/. (although I guess the lib may be the same for some versions, but well… just download the correct one)


2. Now get into the ZIP, respectively extract it. In the Optional dir you'll find another archive swypelibs-lib-arm.tar.lz. Extract that and you'll get the libjni_latinimegoogle.so file.


3. Now have your phone/device ready in recovery mode. Make sure to mount the /system partition in a writable way. In TWRP you have to go to "Mount" -> (if needed, uncheck) "mount /system in read-only" and then mount it by checking the box for "/system".


4. Now just push to file to your phone (adb push /path/to/libjni_latinimegoogle.so /system/lib) and restart.

It should work!

OTA survival

I said you need to do this for each update. You can, however, also create a small OTA survival script, which backs up the file when the system is updated.

Here is my (currently, experimental) proposal:

#!/sbin/sh

# 

# /system/addon.d/95-latinimegoogle.sh

# During an OS upgrade, this script backs up /system/lib/libjni_latinimegoogle.so,

# /system is formatted and reinstalled, then the file is restored.

#



. /tmp/backuptool.functions



list_files() {


cat <<EOF

lib/libjni_latinimegoogle.so

EOF


}




case "$1" in

  backup)


 list_files | while read FILE DUMMY; do


backup_file $S/"$FILE"


 done

  ;;

  restore)


 list_files | while read FILE REPLACEMENT; do


R=""


[ -n "$REPLACEMENT" ] && R="$S/$REPLACEMENT"


[ -f "$C/$S/$FILE" ] && restore_file $S/"$FILE" "$R"


 done

  ;;

  pre-backup)


 # Stub

  ;;

  post-backup)


 # Stub

  ;;

  pre-restore)


 # Stub

  ;;

  post-restore)


 # Stub

  ;;

esac

Also available on GitHub: https://gist.github.com/rugk/a4c9fa11c5c031faf45602d6bf922a1c

1. Just save that file, push it your device into the /system/addon.d dir (adb push 95-latinimegoogle.sh /system/addon.d). (Yet again, you have to make sure /system is mounted.)


2. And make it executable: adb shell into your device, go to the dir via cd /system/addon.d and: chmod +x 95-latinimegoogle.sh.