content/posts/enable-swype-aosp-keyboard.md


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---
title: "Enabling Swype on the AOSP keyboard"
date: 2021-01-31T14:42:00
tags: ["Android", "Linux", "Snippets", "Software"]
---

I've recently changed my phone to a Pixel 4, one of the reasons for this was to have as much of an open source device as possible. Naturally my operating system of choice was [LineageOS 17](https://lineageos.org/).

With this however, the included AOSP keyboard will not support gesture inputs without a proprietary Google library. To get this working, you'll first want to download the [Pico package of Open GApps](https://opengapps.org/) for your phone, I'm using ARM64 architecture for my Pixel 4 device however yours may be different.

Once downloaded, extract your archive:
```
unzip open_gapps-arm64-9.0-pico-20210127.zip
```

Now move to the directory containing the library and extract that:
```
cd Optional
tar --lzip -xf swypelibs-lib-arm64.tar.lz
cd swypelibs-lib-arm64/common/lib64
ls
```

Here, you should now have `libjni-latinimegoogle.so`. With this, you want to push this library to your phone.
Once connected via ADB (and with root access enabled in the debugging menu), do the following:
```
adb devices
adb root
adb remount
adb push libjni_latinimegoogle.so /system/lib64/
adb unroot
adb reboot
```

Once rebooted, browse to:
```
Settings > System > Languages & input > Virtual Keyboard > Android Keyboard (AOSP) > Gesture Typing > Enable gesture typing
```

And you should be done.