Whoa. It's not easy for me to be impressed by a keyboard. I have been a staunch Google Keyboard user on all of my devices from the day it was released as a standalone app on the Play Store many moons ago. Every other keyboard I have tried — and I've tried plenty — fails to even register within the usable spectrum for me: lags and/or lack of precision have killed many revered third-party options.
I confess, I'd never tried Chrooma before today, mainly because I'd given up on finding any third-party keyboard, regardless of how many cool options it has, that lets me type as efficiently and comfortably as Google Keyboard has. But boy oh boy, am I glad I decided to install Chrooma today!
The app was just updated to version 3.0 and it blatantly copies many of the gestures, themes, and options that were added in Google Keyboard 5.0 and 5.1. However, it pushes gestures slightly further to include text selection (super handy) and start a search in Google Now (I guess that's useful), and expands on themes by adding an adaptive mode that fits with the current app's color (cool).
This gesture makes text selection a quick and easy thing.
But there's also a one-handed mode, improved prediction, a choice of emoji styles (default from your phone or WhatsApp-like — unfortunately no Google-style), simultaneous multi-language support, and a customizable action bar that can be used for numbers, recent emojis, copy/paste, words, or letters.
WHAT'S NEW
That action bar, along with the responsiveness and the typing precision are the reasons I'm praising Chrooma now and have decided to give it a serious try for a few days to see if it could become my new keyboard. I don't hit the wrong keys while using it (which is something that always happened with Swiftkey, Samsung, and LG's keyboards) and I finally have that number row that I've wanted for years on Google's Keyboard. Seriously, how hard is adding that?
Anyway, long story short. Go try out Chrooma. It's free to download with most options available. You'll need to pay somewhere between $1.49 and $2.49 to unlock various premium features, but at least you get to give the free version a go first to know if it works for you.