burgerk1ng16/vertick-ime

Vertick IME is a free, open-source Android keyboard app for typing Chinese, built for Android 15 and later. It handles offline Pinyin typing, English word suggestions, voice dictation, AI-assisted text cleanup, and a built-in question-and-answer mode, all from the keyboard itself. The Pinyin dictionary and suggestion engine work fully offline and on the device, using a precompiled dictionary so the phone does not need to build one on first use. Extra dictionary packages are optional and only download after a user turns them on, with checksum verification so a broken download never replaces a working one. Speech recognition and AI text polishing rely on cloud services, but the user provides their own account credentials for these, rather than being locked into one vendor. Those credentials are stored securely using Android's built-in secure storage system and are never saved in the app's code, build settings, or logs. Features like dictation history and clipboard history are turned off by default, and clipboard history, when turned on, keeps only a small number of items for a short time. The author built this after finding a similar paid subscription product effective but too expensive, and used the AI coding tool Codex to build this alternative from scratch. Compared to closed-source subscription keyboard apps, Vertick's main differences are that its code is public, it lets users choose and pay for their own speech and text AI providers directly, and it keeps as much data on the device as possible. Setting it up requires downloading an APK file from the project's Releases page, installing it, granting permissions, and enabling it as an Android input method, then configuring your own AI service connection under the app's account settings. Building the app from source requires the Android SDK, a specific NDK version, JDK 17, and Gradle. The project is released under the GPL-3.0-or-later license, partly because it includes a dictionary engine that requires this license.