Up until today, Google Keyboard for Android devices did not offer much in terms of customization besides switching between light and dark themes. An anomaly for a platform that is known first for being the most open OS to customization. Google has been working to fix that for a while and you would know if you signed up to join the Android Nougat beta program,because the new features in today's update are already baked into Nougat. Let's see what's in there for non-Nougat devices. There is a few minor updates for Nougat as well. See the bottom of this post for the change log.
With this update you will get more than the light and dark themes to choose from. As can be seen in the screenshot of my Nexus 6 keyboard settings, you'll get a new palette of colors to pick from and make your keyboard all colorful. And there's more there for you as Google lets you use an image as your keyboard background. A feature I suspect will be very popular for users. Now, if only Google could make this setting easily accessible in the device settings, that would be awesome. It's kind of buried right now, though I doubt that will be a deterrence.
The update also brings new gesture typing and suggestions in a bunch of new languages, new layout support, bug fixes and Android N support. See the detailed change log and head over to Google Play store to download the Keyboard app. Happy customization!
• Themes: Customize keyboard with favorite photos or colors
• Gesture typing & suggestions in: Albanian, Arabic, Basque, Bosnian, English (Australia), English (India), Esperanto, Irish, Javanese, Mongolian, Montenegrin (Cyrillic, Latin), Nepali, Portuguese (Africa), Sundanese, Tajik, Tatar, Zulu
• Layout support: Burmese, Southern Sotho, Turkmen, Urdu, Welsh, Xhosa
• Add recent emoji to suggestion strip
• Bug fixes, including passwords with Talkback and missing key labels
• Support Android N
