Fleksy announces its team is joining Pinterest, its keyboard app will remain in App Store, and it plans to open source some of its technology for the blind
Context & Ripple Effects
Fleksy spent 2015 repositioning as a business: it dropped its paid price and bet on premium themes and extensions, then added deep-linking to open new revenue. The acqui-hire by Pinterest ends that independent experiment — and follows the same script as Apple's quiet purchase of the Dryft keyboard app a year earlier.
For Pinterest, the deal lands mid-flight: execs and engineers have been discussing an overhaul of its underlying software and new iOS app aimed at international audiences, and designer Susan Kare already joined its creative team last summer. Fleksy brings input and typing expertise at exactly the moment Pinterest is rebuilding its mobile experience.
First-order effects
- Fleksy's existing users keep the keyboard — the company confirms the app stays in the App Store — but the freemium themes-and-extensions strategy loses its team overnight.
- Pinterest gains Fleksy's engineering talent for its iOS overhaul, adding keyboard and text-input expertise to a product rebuild already underway.
Second-order effects
- Open-sourcing Fleksy's accessibility technology hands assistive-tech developers a maintained codebase for blind users outside any commercial roadmap, since no Fleksy team remains to monetize it.
- The keyboard space thins further: with Apple having absorbed Dryft and Pinterest absorbing Fleksy, remaining third-party keyboards face less competition for users who want alternatives to stock keyboards.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, standalone keyboard apps are structurally unviable as businesses — their endgame is acqui-hire by platforms that need input-layer talent, not revenue-generating products in their own right.
- Accessibility features increasingly survive corporate exits through open source rather than through commercial support, shifting maintenance of tools for blind users onto community and successor projects like the later ThingThing arrangement with Fleksy's founders.
The trend: Mobile keyboard startups are exiting via acqui-hire into larger platforms rather than scaling independently, with their accessibility technology migrating to open source.