Permi ended up doing what most people in his position do: he opened Google Input Tools in a browser. The web tool, which hasn’t changed much since its launch, lets him type phonetically in English and see Kannada characters appear on screen. “But whenever I used it on my phone, it was still not optimised for mobile,” he says. It required an internet connection, and it felt, in his words, “still stuck in that era”.
So he built an app himself. He took the Google Input Tools API, wrapped it in a native iPhone app, and used it for about a year. Eventually, he decided to put it on the App Store. That’s when a small but consequential detail surfaced. When Apple asked developers to declare what data their app collects, the privacy nutrition label, Permi realised that even though he personally wasn’t storing anything, every transliteration query was still going out to an external server.
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