Gboard could soon stop adding spaces when you don’t want them

Today, we revealed that Google is working on a potentially important Gboard accessibility feature that could translate sign language captured by your phone’s camera in written text. This has the potential to make a real difference for people who rely on sign language, but it wasn’t the only change we detected. Google also appears to be preparing a typing option that, although smaller in terms of impact, could be useful for a much broader group of Gboard users by giving them more control over when the keyboard adds a space.

Right now, Gboard automatically inserts a space after you tap one of the words in its autocorrect suggestions strip. This is usually useful when continuing a sentence, but can cause you to have to remove an unwanted space when you want to add punctuation or attach something directly to the selected word. Like almost all aspects of android keyboardsIt’s the kind of thing that some users would like to be able to customize.

Google seems to agree. While playing around in the app, we managed to activate a new ‘Auto space after suggestions’ option in Gboard’s Corrections & Suggestions settings. The option allows you to decide whether the keyboard should continue adding that space after choosing a suggested word. You can see the change in the screenshot below.

The setup works as expected in our tests. Turning it off prevents Gboard from inserting spaces, while leaving it enabled preserves the keyboard’s current behavior.

The option is not yet available and there is no guarantee that Google will implement it publicly. But if we speculate, since this seems like a simple additional control for anyone who finds Gboard’s auto-spacing more annoying than useful, we’d be surprised if it doesn’t make it to a stable release.