VSKS Keyboard
The best Lithuanian keyboard for your phone.
Overview
For 3 million Lithuanian speakers worldwide, typing on iOS has always felt like an afterthought. Special characters buried behind long-press menus. Autocorrect that mangles Lithuanian grammar. A keyboard designed in Cupertino for English, with Lithuanian bolted on as a second thought.
VSKS Keyboard fixes this. It’s a purpose-built Lithuanian keyboard for iOS with an optimized layout, a custom language model, and the native feel Apple should have shipped from day one.
The Challenge
Apple’s default keyboard handles Lithuanian technically: you can type the characters. But “technically works” and “feels right” are miles apart. For a language with nine special characters used in everyday words, accessibility isn’t a nice-to-have. We needed to:
- Make every Lithuanian character reachable with a single, natural gesture
- Build autocorrect that actually understands Lithuanian grammar and idioms
- Match iOS system keyboard responsiveness so it feels native, not third-party
Technical Stack
- Platform: Native iOS Keyboard Extension
- Language: Swift
- Predictions: Custom language model trained on Lithuanian text
Key Features
Every Character, One Gesture Away
All nine Lithuanian characters (ą, č, ę, ė, į, š, ų, ū, ž) accessible through a single long-press, positioned exactly where your thumb expects them.
Autocorrect That Speaks Lithuanian
A custom language model trained on Lithuanian text. Predictions that understand declensions, conjugations, and the phrases people actually type, not translations from English.
Indistinguishable from Native
Designed to match iOS system keyboard behavior in every detail: animation, haptics, layout. Users forget it’s a third-party keyboard.
Results
Featured by Apple in Lithuania. Over 3,000 daily users, in a language with a small global speaker base. The word that comes up most in reviews: “finally.”
Lessons Learned
- Keyboard extensions are hostile territory: iOS imposes brutal memory and CPU limits, and engineering within those constraints is the real challenge
- Trust is the product: keyboards see every password, every message, so earning user trust requires transparency and restraint
- Small markets breed fierce loyalty: serve an underserved community well, and they’ll never leave you