While developing a keyboard app based on the Roman alphabet, I realized how simple English is as a writing system. It only needs 26 letters and maybe an apostrophe. German adds umlauts and ß, and French or Spanish come with even more diacritics. Designing layouts for those makes things much more complicated.

While working on this project, I often felt that QWERTY is a better-designed layout than people think. Its vowel positions are surprisingly well-balanced compared to alternatives like Dvorak or Colemak. Of course, I can’t present any scientific evidence for this - it’s just how it feels to me, so I hope no one takes it too critically.

Now I’m preparing for multilingual versions - German, French, Spanish, maybe Chinese Pinyin - though it already feels like a big mountain ahead. Honestly, I’m not even sure where the line is for “Roman alphabet-based” languages - like Danish, Russian, Dutch, or Turkish, I really don’t know for sure. Sorry about that. can’t even dare to imagine tackling languages like Russian, Hindi or Japanese.

As a Korean developer, I built a layout that supports both Hangul (Korean script) and English. Hangul is scientifically brilliant, but its vowel usage leans heavily toward the right thumb, which makes it hard to balance the layout like English. It’s a bit disappointing that I can’t make a wide version like the one for English. So far, I’ve only completed the standard Korean version, but the feedback has been positive.

A senior writer recently reviewed my English Android version and gave me thoughtful feedback. I’m deeply grateful for that. I’m sharing the link below - please be kind. I hope we can share good ideas and feedback with each other, and I just hope more good keyboard ideas keep coming out to make typing easier for everyone. Good luck, everyone.

I tried a weird 16-key keyboard, and it made me rethink phone typing