In my attempt to de-google my phone, I’ve been using Unexpected Keyboard. It’s amazing and I love it. I’ve used adb to remove the stock google keyboard from my phone and I never ran into any problem until today.
My exams are coming up so I had decided to shift to using a long password to unlock my phone instead of my fingerprint (it helps in significantly reducing my screen time).
It was going well until I restarted my phone and I was fully locked out. The keyboard wouldn’t show up because Android won’t allow you to use any third party keyboard on your lockscreen the first time you boot it up. I genuinely thought that I was fucked and that I’d have to reset my phone to unlock it again. I tried many things for an hour and miraculously using a usb keyboard with an otg cable worked. It was a relief to know that I wouldn’t be losing my photos and documents.
But I don’t like that this even happened.
Like what if this happened when I was outside and I really needed to use my phone? It’d be a disaster. I really don’t want to be forced to keep gboard on my phone and I don’t like the potential risk of being locked out of my phone.
Is there a way to force android to let me use non-stock apps on my lockscreen? Can I somehow turn my non-stock keyboard into a system app? Can I do it without rooting my phone? (I don’t want to do it before the warranty is over).