K Kibo Get Kibo

Custom keyboard for iPhone

Your iPhone keyboard, with a mechanical click

Kibo replaces the flat grey keys with a board you actually chose: a blue-switch click under your thumb, a rainbow wave running across the keys, and a skin that follows you into every app — Messages, Instagram, email, all of it.

Download on the App Store

iPhone · iOS 16 or later · free to download

What you actually get

Key sounds that were switches first

17 of them, each synthesised rather than sampled from a stock library: Clicky is a blue switch — sharp, loud, a little obnoxious in a quiet room. Linear (red) is smooth and quiet. Tactile (brown) has the bump. Thock is the deep cushioned sound of a modded board. Piano gives every key a note on a pentatonic scale, so a sentence comes out as a melody. Full list: Clicky · Linear · Tactile · Thock · Typewriter · Piano · Pop · Water Drop · Cream · Wood · Glass · Drum · Bubble · Retro 8-bit · Laser · Bell · System.

56 themes, seven kinds of mood

5 Minimal, 8 Dark, 8 Cute, 6 Neon, 8 Gradient, 5 Colorful and 16 drawn patterns — stars, hive, polka. Each one sets the backdrop, the key fill, the pressed state, the corner radius and the text colour, so a theme reads as a keyboard rather than a tinted screenshot. Pick one and it appears in every app you type in.

RGB backlight, on a phone

15 effects, split between the ones that answer a keypress and the ones that just run. Press a key and Reactive Glow blooms under it, Ripple pushes a ring outward, Confetti Burst throws sparks. Leave it alone and Rainbow Wave, Fire, Meteor or Aurora keep moving. Continuous effects run on one 30fps timer and stop the moment the keyboard hides. Full list: Reactive Glow · Key Spotlight · Ripple · Confetti Burst · Typing Trail · Rainbow Wave · Rainbow Cycle · Breathing · Starlight · Snake · Fire · Rainbow Rain · Meteor · Pulse · Aurora.

Emoji, kaomoji and skin tones

10 tabs including a full kaomoji panel, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and friends. Recents sit at the front, section headers stick while you scroll, and skin-tone variants are one long-press away. All text, no image assets — which is what keeps the keyboard inside its memory budget.

12 fancy text styles

Bold, Italic, Bold Italic, Script, Double-struck, Mono, Small Caps, Wide, Circled, Squared, Upside Down and Strikethrough. Honest caveat: these are Unicode characters, not fonts, and Unicode is incomplete. Small Caps has no Q, Squared has no lowercase set. Kibo maps every letter it can and leaves the rest legible instead of drawing a tofu box — and numbers, punctuation and emoji always pass through untouched.

Typing help that keeps up

Word suggestions and Damerau-Levenshtein autocorrect (teh → the) with common words weighted forward, up to 12 candidates you can scroll sideways, plus next-word prediction so the bar still has something to say right after you press space.

30 languages, three of them composed

English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Thai, Korean, Japanese and Simplified Chinese. Korean assembles jamo into syllables, Japanese turns romaji into kana, Chinese takes pinyin and offers characters.

Snippets and secure entries

Save the address, the email signature, the reply you send twenty times a week, and drop it into any app from the keyboard. Card and ID numbers go in a separate Keychain-backed list that shows them masked.

Your own photo behind the keys

Pick a photo and it becomes the backdrop, with a dim slider so the keycaps stay readable. The app downsamples it once on import — the keyboard extension never touches the full-size image, because a 48MB decode would get the keyboard killed mid-sentence.

Shuffle

Three independent switches for theme, sound and lighting. A new combination is rolled when the keyboard appears, never while you are typing, and your hand-picked settings are stored separately so turning shuffle off puts you back where you were.

How to turn Kibo on

iOS hides every third-party keyboard until you add it by hand. This is the whole setup — about 20 seconds, once.

  1. Install Kibo and open itThe app walks you through this same list and has a button that jumps straight to the right settings page.
  2. Settings → General → KeyboardThat is the iOS Settings app, not Kibo.
  3. Keyboards → Add New Keyboard…Kibo appears under “Third-Party Keyboards”.
  4. Tap KiboIt joins your keyboard list. Nothing else is required — Full Access can stay off.
  5. Press the globe key in any appTap 🌐 to switch to Kibo. Hold it to pick from a list if you have several keyboards.

If Kibo does not appear in the list, make sure the app finished installing and reopen Settings — iOS caches that screen.

About Full Access

iOS shows a scary warning when you enable Full Access for any keyboard, so here is exactly what it means here.

Full Access is off by default and Kibo works without it: typing, autocorrect, all 56 themes, all 17 sounds, all 15 light effects, emoji, kaomoji, fancy text and every language work with the switch off.

Turning it on enables one thing: the Copy word / Copy line / Paste buttons on the keyboard toolbar, which need the system clipboard. That is the only place the app reads it.

Either way, Kibo has no account, no sign-in, no analytics, no ads and no server. What you type is not logged, not stored and not transmitted.

Price

Free to download. Typing, autocorrect, emoji, kaomoji and suggestions are never gated — a keyboard that will not type is broken, not free.

Kibo Pro is one optional purchase, paid once, that unlocks the remaining themes, sounds, light effects and fancy styles. No subscription, no ads, no account.

Download on the App Store

Questions people ask first

Does it work in every app?

Yes — a system keyboard is a system keyboard. Themes, sounds and lighting come with it into Messages, WhatsApp, Instagram, Safari, email and everything else. Apps that force a secure text field (passwords, payment sheets) fall back to the system keyboard; that is iOS, not Kibo.

Will I hear the key sounds through headphones or on silent?

Key sounds follow the system sound behaviour on your device, like any keyboard click. If the ringer switch is off you will not hear them.

iPad?

Not yet. Kibo is built for the iPhone portrait keyboard and ships iPhone-only.

Does it type Chinese, Japanese or Korean?

Yes. Pinyin gives you character candidates, romaji becomes kana, and jamo assemble into Hangul syllables. The app interface itself is in English.

How do I remove it?

Settings → General → Keyboard → Keyboards → Edit → delete Kibo, then delete the app. Nothing is left on a server because nothing was ever sent to one.