Google’s open-source nature brought a new feature, and this is stylus-friendly text input. Samsung is mostly the biggest one and it seems like we’re about to get another feature courtesy of the company in time for Android 13 – its advertisement shows it more friendliness.
Technical editor Mishaal Rahman has been tracking multiple threads in the Chromium Gerrit authored by one Samsung engineer implementing stylus handwriting-to-text input on Android T. That’s Android at least on editable, non-password text fields on Chrome and derived WebViews.
This feature of Android 13 enhances the Samsung devices with the S pen. Those devices use a house-made API called Direct Writing and a commit that enables handwriting-to-text input with this API (dependent on the use of Samsung Keyboard) has been merged into Chromium.
For high-performance, Samsung is still working on integrating S Pen gestures into the handwriting-to-text mode through the Chromium Gerrit.
Some Android devices will rely on a set of platform-level Stylus Writing APIs set to be introduced with Android 13. It appears that a developer option toggle needs to be improved and that the overarching input method supports the APIs. It means for this feature we need to check on Gboard, other keyboards and input apps are updated for this.
Google has been working on enhancing its own-brand apps for large-screen device formats, but while graphic user interfaces go a long way, enabling different input methods on larger canvasses will boost Android that extra mile. This feature enables ChromeOS to support handwriting-to-text at the platform level — being stuck solely with keyboard inputs feels antiquated for 2022.
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