slashit
Save it once, slash it anywhere.
Screenshots
Store listings have the latest shots, links above.
What It Does
Save a shortcut like WOT for "Working on it, will update you shortly."
Then, on the slashit keyboard, type /WOT in WhatsApp, Gmail, Slack, a
browser, anywhere, and tap the suggestion. The shortcut is replaced with
the full message.
That is the whole product. One job, done everywhere you type.
Why We Built It
Everyone retypes the same things. Status updates, addresses, invoice details, the same reply to the same question for the hundredth time. Desktop users have had text expanders for decades. On mobile the options are the built-in keyboard shortcut settings, which are awkward, limited to short strings, and buried in system menus.
The interesting constraint is Android's. An app cannot simply watch what you type in other apps, and should not want to. The only mechanism that can legitimately insert text into another app is a keyboard.
The Build
The management app is React Native (Expo). The keyboard is a native
Kotlin InputMethodService, because that is the only policy-safe way to
expand text inside other apps. Both halves ship in one APK and read the
same on-device SQLite database.
We deliberately did not use an Accessibility Service. Accessibility APIs can read screen content, which would make expansion easier to build and far more invasive. Google has been tightening enforcement against apps that misuse those APIs for non-accessibility purposes, and rightly so. A keyboard is the honest implementation: it only ever sees text while it is the keyboard you chose to use.
Privacy By Construction
slashit has no account, no backend, and no analytics. Release builds have
the INTERNET permission stripped out at build time by a config plugin,
so the app cannot phone home even by accident. Your snippets stay in
app-private storage on your device.
A keyboard necessarily processes what you type while it is active. slashit uses that only in memory, to spot the trigger character and match your own saved shortcuts. It does not log it, store it, or send it anywhere. The full policy is linked above.
The tradeoff is honest: expansion works only while slashit is your active keyboard. We think that is the right side of the tradeoff.
Current State
In development. The app is code complete and builds in CI, pending device testing and a first release on Google Play.
Key features
- Save a shortcut once and expand it in any app
- Works through the slashit keyboard, so it needs no accessibility access
- Suggestions appear as you type, tap one to insert
- Snippets stored only on the device, in app-private storage
- Shipped builds ship without the internet permission at all
- Most-used shortcuts sort to the top automatically
- Light and dark keyboard themes