iOS 8 brought a feature that I had been looking forward for 4 years: support for 3rd party keyboards. I wanted to use gesture based input to improve the effectiveness of my typing on the touch screen. I had had some experience with Swype, one of the first such keyboards, back in 2009 when someone ported the version of Swype that came bundled with Samsung Omnia Pro (if I recall correctly) to the Samsung Omnia i900 that I had for a brief period of time. I felt that was the best app to have on a touch screen phone. I cannot remember if the stock keyboard on the Omnia had autocorrect built in; I guess not. So typing with that keyboard was very cumbersome. Swype was a pleasant upgrade for that phone.
Apple's stock keyboard wasn't bad but it could be improved. Apple might or might not add gesture based input to the stock keyboard, but as of iOS 8, they haven't reached that milestone. But with the support for 3rd party keyboards, all the major keyboard developers embraced the Apple's beloved platform with no further invitation. I bought Swype, but it didn't impress me for some reason. Then I bought SwiftKey which has superior predictive capabilities to Swype, and it worked out reasonably well.
Even though Apple is known to implement features properly - especially when they are copying a feature from a rival platform - they messed it up this time round. There were many stability issues with their implementation such as the keyboards disappearing randomly, keyboard hesitating to pop-up and Apple not letting 3rd party keyboards enter passwords etc. Still, I continued to use SwiftKey.
Come 2015 and I have switched platform. Now I'm using a Google Nexus 5 phone with Android Lollipop on it. Compared to iOS, Android has had support for 3rd party keyboard for as long as I could remember, and doesn't seem to be plagued with the issues iOS was having with respect to 3rd party keyboards. Only issue would be the keyboard taking a long time to show up for the first time after a reboot of the device. Still, it was faster than iOS on the iPhone 5S. As I was using SwiftKey on the iPhone, that's the first keyboard that I installed on the Nexus 5.
