Support

Installing the open beta

Steady is distributed through Apple’s TestFlight. Anyone can join — no invite code, no waiting list.

1. Install TestFlight from the App Store, if you don’t have it.
2. Open the Steady beta link on your iPhone or iPad and tap Accept.
3. Tap Install. Steady appears on your Home Screen like any app.

You need iOS 16 or later. Beta builds expire after 90 days; TestFlight will prompt you to update before that happens.

Enabling the keyboard

iOS does not let an app add a keyboard on its own — you have to turn it on in Settings. The Steady app walks you through this on first launch, and here it is in full:

1. Open Settings › General › Keyboard › Keyboards.
2. Tap Add New Keyboard… and choose Steady.
3. In any app, press and hold the globe key (🌐) and pick Steady.

Want to practise before using it for real? The Steady app has a practice pad with the same keyboard inside it.

Choosing how much the keys resize

Open the Steady app and go to Settings. The resize strength sets how far keys are allowed to grow and shrink:

• Off — every key stays the same size. Predictions still appear on the chips above the keys.
• Medium — likely letters grow a little; unlikely ones shrink and fade.
• Aggressive — the same idea across a much wider size range, so the likeliest letter is close to twice its normal width. This is the default.

Two switches sit underneath:

• Remove impossible keys (on by default) — letters that cannot continue any word leave the row entirely, so a stray tap can’t land on them. Turn it off and they stay in place, shrunken and faded, instead.
• Enlarge likely keys (on by default) — turn it off to keep every key at its normal size or smaller, never larger.

Whatever the setting, rows keep a fixed height and keys keep their order, so a key you are reaching for will not move out from under you.

The suggestion chips

Three large chips sit above the keys. Partway through a word they offer completions; right after a space they offer likely next words. Tapping one inserts the whole word and a space. Steady never swaps a word out on its own — if you don’t tap a chip, what you typed is what you get. You can hide the chips entirely in Settings.

Names and phrases

• Names — saved entries that insert exactly as written, for proper nouns prediction will never guess: people, places, medications, your street.
• Phrases — sentence templates with fill-in-the-blank slots, such as “Can you pass me the {thing}?”. A name slot draws from your Names list. Picking a phrase walks you through each blank with large chips, then inserts the finished sentence.

Both are edited in the Steady app and are available in the keyboard immediately.

Troubleshooting

The keys aren’t resizing

Check that resize strength isn’t set to Off. In password and other secure fields, Steady deliberately falls back to a plain, fixed layout — the reshaping would otherwise reveal something about what you are typing.

Steady isn’t in the globe menu

It has to be added in Settings › General › Keyboard › Keyboards first — see enabling the keyboard above. If it is listed there but still missing, restarting the device usually settles it.

My names or phrases aren’t showing up

They are shared between the app and the keyboard through a private container. Switching away from Steady and back refreshes it.

The keyboard forgot my settings after an update

Settings survive updates, but not deleting the app. Reinstalling a TestFlight build over the top keeps them; removing the app first does not.

Reporting a problem

Beta feedback is the whole point of this phase, and small reports are welcome.

• From TestFlight — open the TestFlight app, choose Steady, and tap Send Beta Feedback. It attaches a screenshot and your device and iOS version automatically. You can also take a screenshot inside Steady and tap Share Beta Feedback.
• On GitHub — open an issue at github.com/GabrielAboyDev/steady/issues.

Useful things to include: what app you were typing in, what you expected, what happened instead, and your resize strength setting.

Credits

Steady is built on openly licensed work:

• Word frequencies — FrequencyWords by hermitdave, derived from the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus, licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0. The word list embedded in this site’s keyboard demo is derived from it and carries the same licence.
• Next-word pairs — count_2w.txt from Peter Norvig’s n-gram collection, from the Google Web Trillion Word Corpus.
• Typeface — Atkinson Hyperlegible, designed by the Braille Institute of America for low-vision legibility, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.