Relay for reddit vs Gboard - the Google Keyboard

A great feature of Relay is the UX for swiping between the post and the reddit comments. It's very fast to go back and forth between the views.

Relay uses screen space efficiently and can be navigated quickly. It is mostly designed for viewing a single subreddit at a time and making that experience as pleasurable as possible, with easy access to a subs from a dropdown menu at the top.

With support for multiple accounts, interface themes, and inline picture previews, Relay for reddit offers a large amount of features for any power reddit user.

There are also many unique functionalities that set Relay apart from the competition.

●It has a 'Remove unread' option to swipe away all read threads. This is especially useful when it's a large and busy subreddit with tons and tons of submissions, to the point where it can get overwhelming. This a convenient option for making your reddit-browsing experience a little easier.

●It offers compatability with the Multi-Window feature which is present on Samsung & L.G phones (soon to be present AndroidOS-wide). This greatly enhances multi-tasking.

●It offers an excellent Spoiler tag support and an AMA mode (conspicuously missing from its biggest competitor).

To keep a better context of the conversation, Relay doesn't hide the parent comment while browsing.

The abundant animations make browsing more enjoyable because it transitions so nicely.

GIFs are automatically converted to gfycat format; they therefore load much faster than on other apps.

The moment the user opens Relay for reddit and begins exploring all of its ins and outs, it becomes quite clear how wonderfully designed this app is. There is excellent UX for redditors who prefer discussions and news, rather than pictures, videos, and gifs.

● You can alternate between a cards and a lists UI with a compact list view optional.

● A drop-down menu of all your subreddits is present at the top for quick and easy access. If the user is adequately familiarized with the list, he/she can simply swipe on the banner so to quickly switch between subreddits.

●The comment format option is situated right next to the drop-down menu.

It's an all around wonderful application with many Material Design elements employed.

The app will automatically load a lower resolution image that is a closer match to your screen size to save bandwidth, with a button to load the original image if you need more detail.

The available night time theme allows the background to be dark with light colored text, which uses less battery on AMOLED screens.

Moderators on Reddit are allowed more functions over a normal user on Reddit, which is possible to be used in Pro for Relay. With these features included in the app it's possible to approve comments, check modque, and get specifically labelled moderator messages.

Opening links, animations, and transitions, as well as scrolling, all work well with no glitches or missed frames. The app feels extremely smooth thanks to the attention to detail in all of its inner workings.

The Google Keyboard supports swiping along the keyboard to spell out whole words.

After using a gesture a few times and clicking the correct word, Google Keyboard learns that the gesture should result in the word you've manually selected as the correct word. Swype doesn't seem to learn this, so even after 100 times clicking 'this' instead of 'thesis', it still produces 'thesis', where Google Keyboard learns that you meant to say 'this'.

Google Keyboard has material design themes the user can skin the keyboard with.

Hold down the key in the lower left hand corner and a keyboard if punctuation appears. Swipe over to the one you want, lift your finger, and the original keyboard pops back. It's very fast, and makes it much easier to spot the punctuation mark you want - instead of trying to squint at the secondary symbols in the keys.

This keyboard is not a free trial nor will it hold back any new features to sell you a paid version. The keyboard is completely 100% free.

While other keyboard options may be very functional, their visual design tends to differ from the rest of your Google device. The Google Keyboard was designed by Google and it looks like it.

Alternative keyboards tend to suck up system resources, often making them nearly unusable on older phones. Google Keyboard is very quick to open when typing and the keys rarely lag.

The keyboard has button that allows searching Google straight from the keyboard, and use the search results in the currently used app.

The GBoard has an emoji search that's very convenient, saves time looking for a specific one if you don't know/remember what category it's in.

The dynamic floating preview appears while gesture typing. Most gesture keyboards only show the preview above the keyboard in the suggested corrections. The dynamic floating preview is great because it makes it easier to gesture type by keeping your eyes focused on what you are typing.

For those that are used to typing on a Dvorak keyboard or prefer not to need multiple key presses to access special symbols they can enable these as additional quick switch options. Using the English PC layout for example gives the user a number row.

Makes it easier to type with no more than a thumb.

Google keyboard does not promise to be as "smart" as other keyboards besides offering a personalized dictionary. Surprisingly this is actually a good thing for some because with many "smart" keyboards predictions and corrections actually worsen over time. With Google Keyboard the experience will remain constant because it requires you to manually "touch again to save" before it changes your personal dictionary. This prevents mistakes from becoming part of your personal dictionary.

Most Android devices have GBoard installed.