Google logo spacebar on your Android Gboard keyboard, and how to fix it
Overnight masses of Android users found the GOOGLE brand appear on their smartphone keyboards. This branding appeared on the GBOARD space bar – that's the space bar on the official Google-made Android keyboard. There SHOULD be a way to switch this particular design element off, but for the moment, we're all in the same boat.
A few hours before this article was written, a post was made to Reddit's Android Community, r/Android, with a link to a Google support request. The Reddit post had 1.4k upvotes in 7 hours. The Android Community thread had 133 replies in 8 hours (that's a significant amount for that support forum, to be sure). It would appear that Android users to NOT like having text on their keyboard spacebar.
The change was likely server-side, since it's appeared so suddenly for so many users. It's something that should be able to be removed relatively easily by Google if and when they decide that it's not the direction that makes the most sense for the near future. But for now, we need a short-term solution.
How to remove Google logo from spacebar
To get rid of the Google logo, you'll need to have Multiple Languages selected. Even if you do this, you'll see something like what we've got here – "EN ES" but it's slightly less distracting than the "Google."
We can cross our fingers and hope Google will switch to a slightly less insane design iteration in the near future. But for now, there's this. To enact this change, tap a space in your phone that'd show your keyboard, open settings, Languages, and add a language.
Gboard Alternatives
Above you'll see the steps you can take to change the keyboard's display of the word Google. Until we find a better way to modify the keyboard, you could also just... get a different keyboard. There's SwiftKey, Fleksy, TouchPal, Chrooma, Facemoji Emoji Keyboard – and more!
The bummer here is that Google's made such a great standard keyboard in Gboard that literally none of our team in the office right here and now have used any alternatives in the last few months. We're certainly going to try now, if Google doesn't get rid of the spacebar text situation above – but we'll see!