Hey everyone,

You might’ve noticed there hasn’t been an update on CrosKeys for a month now.

Well, that’s because last month, Google casually dropped that the upcoming change to Lacros will break some of ChromeOS’ native functions–including IME extensions.

What does that mean? No more custom keyboards.

We pleaded our case to the developer relations team, and the only thing they did was provide an extension to their deprecation timeline. So, as of ChromeOS 119 (likely to drop in December), Google will effectively remove support for CrosKeys.

Here is there official post:

https://chromeos.dev/en/posts/chrome-input-ime-deprecation

I don’t know when the extension will stop working, but that does mean we’ll have to cease development on it. We’re planning one final update (the one we were already working on to put the extension fully in the background), but then we’ll shelve it after that.

Obviously, this is an unfortunate development in more ways than one, so there’ll be repercussions beyond just losing CrosKeys. If the ChromeOS team is willing to drop a core system API right after adding Linux support, there’s nothing about developing for Chromebooks that’s actually safe.

That being the case, we’re definitely going to slow our release of consumer ChromeOS software, as the platform will likely be on shaky ground for 1+ year.

If you don’t know why, please check out our blog post on the laughable lacros project.

There’s more to share on this, but that’s all I have time for now.