Matnsaz is coming to Android

We are elated to announce that Matnsaz, the world’s easiest Urdu keyboard, is finally coming to Android. This has been, by far, the top request made to the Matnsaz team.

Work on Matnsaz for Android began 3 years ago, a few months after the iOS release. There are a number of reasons why it took us this long to start shipping.

First, we hold a high bar for our releases. Essential to the ethos of Matnsaz, is the belief that software for Urdu and other languages from our region has no reason to be lower quality than software for Western languages. Delivering at this quality requires a deep attention to detail. On Android you will not see a simple port of our app from iOS. We did not build our app using cross-compiling technologies, that may add unnecessary layers of complication between the UI and the system. We also wanted to develop interfaces native to each platform, making the typing experience seamless regardless of what platform you are on. In effect, instead of prioritizing easier development that would make Matnsaz look the same on iOS and Android (an efficiency for our development team), we prioritized making Matnsaz fit in well to Android. This puts your needs over ours. Matnsaz reflects Android conventions, such as a differences in keyboard layout, and dynamic colors.

Second, we took our time establishing a sustainable way for us to build and maintain Matnsaz for the long term. To scale from iOS to another platform, we needed to build a team. However, to keep Matnsaz free of cost, we had to be very thoughtful in our investments. In addition, our hope was to build this team in Lahore, where Matnsaz originated. Our team was built as a partnership, allowing our engineering, design and marketing partners to find mutually beneficial parts of the project to work on. We hoped to contribute in a small way to the technological ecosystem of Lahore. I’d like to say my thanks to Tintash, and to the following individuals (in alphabetical order): Abdul Rafay, Bismah Azhar, Hasan Kapasi, Maaz Azhar, Mannan Amin, Muhammad Salman & Mustansar Saeed.

Third, in our development on Android we took the time to find better ways of doing things on both platforms. Our autocorrect has improved on iOS, with similar improvements included in Android from the beginning. During development, we also explored how we could incorporate transformer architectures behind today’s LLM advancements into Matnsaz. The results of this work are yet to ship, but we are continuing our research.

Matnsaz for Android has slowly onboarded testers starting earlier this year. It is currently in early access on the Google Play Store. During this early access period, we hope to identify edge cases and room for improvement. We look forward to hearing your feedback.