Who makes iKeyboard

iKeyboard is built and maintained by Rawand Ahmed Shaswar, an independent developer. It is not a project of a company, an institute or a language body — which is worth saying plainly, because a keyboard is a piece of software you have to trust more than most.

Why it exists

Kurdish has around thirty million speakers, and a great many of them are still writing it on an Arabic or Turkish keyboard — improvising the letters that are missing and fighting an autocorrect that is trying to turn their sentences into a different language.

iKeyboard exists to remove that daily friction: the right letters on the right keys, a dictionary built from Kurdish rather than borrowed from a neighbour, and translation where the writing is already happening instead of in a browser tab.

Where it stands

The iOS app holds a 4.6 average from 3,662 ratings across 63 App Store storefronts. Its reviews are mostly in Kurdish, and a selection of them is on the homepage, unedited.

It is free. It carries ads, and there is an optional paid upgrade — that is what pays for the work, and it is the whole business model. Nothing about what you type is part of it, and nothing about what you type is for sale.

The Kurdish on this site

The app’s own strings are authored in Kurdish first — Central Kurdish is the source language of its string catalog, not a translation target. The homepage is published in Kurdish and in English; these longer pages are English only, deliberately, because publishing several thousand words of Kurdish that no Kurdish speaker had read would be a worse way to serve Kurdish readers than not publishing them yet.

Getting in touch

Bug reports, missing words, layout complaints and corrections to the Kurdish are all welcome at support@rawa.dev. There is a person at the other end of it.

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