Swype was one of the first stand out third party developed keyboards for android, but it was only shipped with certain devices.  Sure they had a limited access beta that you could sign up for and use on other devices but it wasn’t publicly accessible.

For some reason they decided that the best route was to market to carriers and manufacturers which saw it bundled in, amongst others, Samsung and Motorola devices.

Meanwhile Swiftkey did the other route, they released apps to the play store, everyone could use it, it gained massive popularity, spends most of its time as most downloaded app and everyone, even non-technologically enhanced people (aka non-geeks) use it, and love it!

Swiftkey then added Flow, their own version of swype, it was massive, works really well and has probably taken most of the market away from Swype.

So why have Swype released the app now?  Timing seems odd to me, those who still use it will probably be happy to see it, but I cannot see it being as successful as it might have been had they of released it straight away, or certainly before Swiftkey Flow was released.

Anyway: Grab it if you want, the link is below, it is on sale for a limited time.

[appaware-app pname=’com.nuance.swype.dtc’]