5 ways to customise your Samsung smartphone’s keyboard

One of the benefits of an Android phone, and particularly of Samsung Galaxy smartphones, is the sheer amount of customisability on offer.

You can change wallpapers, themes, icons, colours, font styles, and modify just about anything else on the phone. For today, though, we’re focusing only on keyboard customisation. Again, on Samsung smartphones in particular. And within them, their keyboards. Intrigued? Read on.

How to switching themes on your Samsung smartphone’s keyboard

Samsung phones have a built-in theme selector for the keyboard app itself. This allows you to switch between a black and white theme, as well as a few font options.

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To do this, open your phone and head to Settings. Now scroll down to General Management, tap keyboard settings, and scroll down to ‘Theme’.

Here you can choose between light and dark themes — which lightens or darkens the keyboard — as well as solid light and solid dark themes which remove the highlight around the keys themselves.

Enabling high-contrast mode

If you’re concerned about legibility and need more contrast, Samsung Galaxy smartphones have an option for this as well. You head to Settings > General Management > Keyboard settings, and enable the toggle for ‘High Contrast Mode’. This will use brighter colours with a higher contrast background to help the keys stand out.

Changing the colour palette

Fun fact, you can even change the colours on the keyboard of your Samsung device entirely. To do that, open Settings>Wallpaper and style> Colour Palette. Choose a colour that you like and hit apply. Your keyboard — and the rest of the phone — will now boast of fresh new colours.

Installing a theme

Yet another option is to install a theme for OneUI. This one is quite simple to implement. You just open the Settings app and head to ‘Themes,’ and then use the theme browser to find one that you like. Hit ‘download and apply’ to install the theme and you’re done. Both your keyboard and your phone now have a new look.

Using third-party apps

If you’re comfortable with using third-party apps, you have several options. One app that we’d recommend is Key Cafe. You’ll also need its companion app — Theme Park. Both these apps are available on the Samsung Galaxy Store as free downloads.

Key Cafe is an app that lets you tailor the keyboard to your needs. This includes customised icons and colours, as well as editable layouts. Theme Cafe, on the other hand, is a theme manager for Samsung phones.

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To customise your keyboard open Key Cafe and toggle the ‘Style your own keyboard’ switch. You’ll be presented with a bunch of themes and layouts to try, and you could also create your own. To use one of the visible themes you simply tap on it and follow the instructions.

To create your own theme, tap the ‘+’ icon to get started. Here you’ll be given a preview of your current keyboard and some buttons you can press to customise it. Tapping on the button that looks like an image will allow you to set a custom background for your keyboard.

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This background can be an image from your gallery or even a wallpaper that you downloaded from somewhere. You can also tap on individual keys and change their colour, icon, or even image. Once customised, tap the download button to install the keyboard theme and give it a name. To apply it, tap the ‘On’ button in Key Cafe.

And that’s it! You now have a fully custom keyboard for your Samsung Galaxy smartphone!