On Wednesday, June 15, Fleksy has announced that it has been acquired by Pinterest. The amount of the transaction was not disclosed.
Android Police reports that Fleksy app is not going to be supported further, even if is still not being removed from the Play Store. The Fleksy website is down, the Twitter account has no updates and support emails were going unanswered.
According to some sources, Pinterest just acquired the team of engineers at Fleksy but not the technology behind the Fleksy keyboard. For instance, VentureBeat reports that Fleksy's keyboard app and technology will not be used by Pinterest. But as part of the deal, half of Fleksy's 10-person team will incorporate their knowledge of visual search into Pinterest's platform, since they just became part of Pinterest's mobile and mobile platform engineering departments.
Fleksy's aggressive autocorrect tool has been fairly popular among users. The app features a compact mode that relies on GIFs, gestures and various extensions. The keyboard app has its own dedicated fan base.
Fleksy gathered an important user base won some awards, including app of the month from Royal National Institute of Blind People and Apple's Best of App Store 2012. In the year 2014, the Fleksy keyword app was also used to break the fastest touch-screen text message record registerd in the Guinness World Records Book.
The Fleksy keyboard app will continue to be available in the Play Store, with the only change that is that now Fleksy is open sourcing some of the components related to support for the visually impaired and the blind.
According to Engadget, Pinterest will use Fleksy's team of award-winning keyboard developers to improve its digital scrapebook. Working for Pinterest, the software engineers will shift their focus to visual search.
Scott Goodson, Pinterest's Head of Core Experience said in a statement that the company aims to refine the mobile experiences on the social media platform on any device. Kosta Eleftheriou, Fleksy founder and CEO added that the company will continue working to improve the intuitive content discovery experiences on mobile on both Android and iOS operating systems.
