Android makes you ask twice
A keyboard is not an ordinary app. It is an input method, so Android treats it as something that will see everything you type, and the system deliberately refuses to let one become active just because it was installed.
Enabling tells Android that this keyboard is allowed to exist as an option. You do it once, in the system settings, and Android will show a warning while you do it. That warning is not a sign that something is wrong. It appears for every keyboard, including the one your phone came with, because it is describing what input methods can do in general rather than what this one does.
Selecting tells Android to actually use it right now. This is a separate action, because you may have several keyboards enabled and want to move between them during the day.
People install a keyboard, look at their phone, see the old one still sitting there and assume the install failed. It did not. Step two has not happened yet, and no amount of reinstalling brings it forward.
Where each of the two steps lives
Enable it. Open Android's settings and look under the section covering languages and input, usually called something like "Language and input" or "System, Languages and input" depending on your phone. In there you will find a list of on-screen keyboards or virtual keyboards, with switches for the ones installed. Turn on the one you want, then confirm the warning.
The exact wording and depth of that menu varies by manufacturer and Android version, so look for the section rather than for a particular sequence of taps. An exact path would be wrong on half the phones it was written for.
Select it. Open any app and tap a text field so a keyboard appears. Most phones then show a small keyboard or globe icon, often in the navigation bar or in the corner of the keyboard itself, which opens a list of the enabled keyboards. Choose yours.
That second step takes effect immediately and applies everywhere, in every app, until you change it again.
Six things that go wrong, and what each one means
The keyboard is not in the list. It was installed, but the settings list was already open when the install finished. Leave the screen and come back.
It appears in the list but nothing changes. You enabled it without selecting it. The two are separate, and this is the single most common way to get stuck.
It switched back on its own. A system update or a restore from backup can reset the default input method. Repeat step two.
A permission was needed and never asked for. Keyboards ask for things like microphone access the first time you use the relevant feature, not at the moment you install them. If a feature does nothing at all, check the app's permissions in Android's settings.
Everything works except in one app. A few apps request a plain system keyboard for particular fields, most often payment or password entry. That is the app's decision and not a fault in your keyboard.
You want your old keyboard back. It never left. Enabling a new keyboard does not remove or disable the previous one, and the selector you used in step two is how you move between them. If that selector icon does not appear on your phone, the same list is usually reachable from the settings screen where you enabled the keyboard, under a "current keyboard" or "default keyboard" option.
That last one matters more than it sounds when you are trying something new. You can leave your existing keyboard enabled indefinitely and switch back mid-sentence, without uninstalling anything and without losing a single setting.
Language and layout, before you find out the hard way
Once a keyboard is selected, two settings deserve a visit straight away.
The language. On most keyboards this drives more than it appears to: the layout you see, the dictionary used for corrections, and, if the keyboard dictates, the language it expects to hear. Setting it deliberately avoids a whole category of confusing behaviour where autocorrect keeps fighting you because it believes you are writing in something else.
The layout. QWERTY, QWERTZ and AZERTY exist because different countries standardised differently, and a keyboard usually offers the one matching your language with the alternatives available if you prefer them. Anyone who learned to type in one country and lives in another will want to check this on day one rather than fighting the punctuation keys for a week.
Beyond those two, most people leave the defaults alone and there is no reason not to. Autocorrect, next-word suggestions and the emoji picker work out of the box on any keyboard worth installing.
Three questions to ask of anything that sees your typing
Does it request internet access? You can see this in Android's app settings. A keyboard that never contacts anything cannot send your typing anywhere, which is a stronger statement than any policy document.
Where does your learned dictionary live? On the device, or synced to an account that follows you to a new phone. Both are legitimate positions, and they are different trades rather than a right answer and a wrong one.
What does it do in password fields? Android tells the keyboard when a field is a password, and what the keyboard does with that is a design decision you can check in ten seconds.
Two Android steps, plus one model download
LocalType follows the procedure above exactly: enable it in the language and input settings, then select it from the keyboard selector. There is no account to create and nothing to sign in to at any point.
One extra step applies to dictation. The microphone key needs a speech model, which you choose and download from within the app, and it needs microphone permission, which is requested the first time you press the key. After the model is on the phone, no part of dictation asks for the network again: internet access is used for exactly one purpose, fetching the model you chose.
That download comes in three sizes, at 60, 190 and 539 MB, so you can decide between speed and accuracy yourself, with the middle one recommended for most phones. On the 4 GB test handset it turned 6.9 seconds of speech into text in 4.1 seconds. Only one size sits on the phone at a time, so changing your mind later swaps the file rather than adding a second one.
One thing to know before you commit: LocalType keeps its data out of Android's cloud backup on purpose, so moving to a new phone means installing it and downloading a model again, and words you added to the dictionary stay on the old device for the same reason. Nothing reappears by itself. There is no advertising in the product, no behavioural tracking inside it, and no archive of your recordings, and the model file sits in storage only the app can read. Dictation is not offered at all in password fields, because Android tells the keyboard when a field is one.
None of that is a commitment on day one. Your previous keyboard is still enabled and one tap away, you can run both for a month and use whichever suits the moment, and the one you stop reaching for is the one you eventually remove. That is the entire reason Android makes you do this in two steps rather than one.