 Smartphones are getting bigger than ever, which is great for everything from browsing the web to watching video to catching up on all of your ebooks. But with bigger phones comes one problem. It can be really hard to use your phone with one hand. Banging out a long message with your left hand while you're sucking down a piping hot coffee in your right can be quite a chore. Fortunately, iOS and Android both let you customize your keyboard, so you can make those long WhatsApp conversations less painful. Custom keyboards are pretty new to iOS. In fact, you couldn't even change out Apple's stock keyboard until the release of iOS 8 in 2014. The default keyboard has gotten a lot better too, and now has intelligent word predictions and smarter autocorrect. But if you want the best and easiest typing experience on the iPhone, we recommend SwiftKey. It's fast and responsive for tap typing, has a super useful and fast tracing feature, and it comes with the best word prediction you can get. Oftentimes, I don't even need to type a word, because SwiftKey already knows what I'm going to say. But using a third-party keyboard with iOS can still be a somewhat buggy experience. Certain actions like password entry are limited to Apple's keyboard, and apps like Messages can be prone to crashing when you're using a third-party option. SwiftKey is one of the most reliable ones that we've used, but even it can still crash and cause issues. But on the whole, SwiftKey works great with a large number of apps, and it can really make it easier to type on your iPhone, especially if you've got a 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus. Other keyboards like TouchPal or Flexi offer more theming options, have predictive emoji, or boast ultra-smart autocorrect. Minuum is a crazy keyboard that can shrink down to a fraction of the size of a normal keyboard and still let you type accurately. But SwiftKey's combination of fast typing response, smart word prediction, and effortless tracing make it the one that's easiest to use over the long run. Plus it's free, so there's no investment required to try it out. Over on Android, third-party keyboards are nothing new, and there are a ton of options. And unlike with iOS, Android keyboards work everywhere and are really quite reliable. Even though there are so many options available, we think that Google's keyboard is the best one for the most people. It's available pre-installed on a bunch of phones, but everyone else can download it for free from the Play Store. Here's what makes Google Keyboards so great. It's fast and responsive when you want to type out characters, and it also has a great tracing option for when you only have a single thumb to spare. It also has word prediction, built-in emoji, and a design that fits in with Google's material design rules. That isn't to say that some of the other Android keyboards aren't great. A lot of people really like SwiftKey for good reason, as it's the same super-smart word prediction engine as on iOS. It also has a ton of different themes to change how it looks. But we find that SwiftKey on Android isn't as good as Google's keyboards when you just want to peck out words manually. You've probably also heard of Swype, which was the first keyboard that let you trace out words with just a single finger. But while its tracing is really great, it's not very good for tap typing, which you need to do whenever you need to type in a password or a word not from the dictionary. The same can be said for Flexi, Minuum, and others. While they each might excel at one particular method of inputting text to your phone, none offer as many options or work as well across different methods as Google's keyboard. The physical keyboard is all but gone, and voice input isn't quite where we need it to be to replace your standard keyboard. But with SwiftKey for iOS and Google Keyboard on your Android devices, banking out long text messages or writing the next great American novel is within your reach.