Zihao Input Method Lands on iPhone: Built on the Rime Engine, Supports Importing Custom Schemes

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People who use Squirrel on Mac and Weasel on Windows have probably all had the same regret: switch to an iPhone and you're back to the system keyboard, or settling for one of the various third-party keyboards full of ads that require an internet connection. The Rime experience—where the dictionary is in your own hands and the schemas are yours to tune—breaks off once you get to the phone.

Zi Hao is the keyboard I built for this. It's based on the Rime (Zhongzhou Yun) engine, comes with Rime Ice built in, and has specially designed keyboards for iPhone, iPad, and iPhone Duo. Basic typing is entirely free, there are no ads, and what you type is processed only on the phone. The on-device voice input model, or optionally an online AI voice model—the simplest way to put it is that it's customizable.

Rime Ice, ready to use out of the box

The first time you open Zi Hao, the app deploys Rime Ice on the phone and downloads a roughly 6.8 MB whole-sentence grammar model, "Zi Hao Spoken," optimized from Wikipedia's spoken Chinese. After that, the keyboard is the familiar Rime Ice:

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Simplified, Traditional, Taiwan Traditional, and Hong Kong Traditional output; these are not natively supported at present and will be optimized in a targeted way later via Daqian Zhuyin and the like;

rq sj xq nl for date, time, day of the week, and lunar calendar; R1234 for uppercase amounts; U62fc to type by code; vfh for symbols.

Rime Ice can check for updates in the app; you can see what changed before updating, and the words you've learned are unaffected.

Home screen: keyboard ready, input schemas, my typing stats

Your own schemas can come along too

This is the part I most wanted to get right. Under "Schemas" you can import a Rime configuration folder, ZIP, YAML, or text dictionary, or directly enter a public GitHub repository (such as iDvel/rime-ice), choose a branch and directory, and set it to auto-update daily or weekly. Schemas are compiled on the phone without going through any server, and you can add your own configuration files—your habits stay in your own hands.

Words you've typed are saved in Rime format in the sync folder on iCloud Drive. Point sync_dir in Squirrel's installation.yaml to the same folder, and the user dictionaries on your phone and Mac can be merged. The app lets you copy this setting with one tap.

What's harder on a phone: off-center taps

Rime rarely needs error correction on a computer because the keyboard is physical. A phone is different—your thumb often lands on the neighboring key. Beyond Rime, Zi Hao does correction based on tap location: combining where your finger pressed with pinyin rules, it recognizes the character you meant to type, while the original pinyin stays in the candidates.

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In long sentences, two or three wrong letters can be corrected together. In our simulated tests, for sentences with 2 wrong letters, getting it right in one pass rose from 36% to 56%, and for 3 wrong letters from 26% to 53%; not a single correctly typed sentence was broken. Candidates appear all at once—no showing one and then jumping to another—so results are more intuitive.

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Pick homophones based on preceding text

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Keyboard details

The emoji key can be changed to a Chinese/English toggle, with a long press doing the other;

Email and URL input fields automatically switch to English, with @ . / right next to the space bar;

The symbol page in English mode matches the iOS English keyboard, all half-width;

On the iPhone Duo's inner screen held horizontally, the 26-key layout can split into left and right halves, and the nine-grid uses a wide-screen layout modeled on Apple's.

Privacy

A keyboard can see everything you type, so Zi Hao's principle is simple: typing, correction, learning, and both models all happen on the phone and are never uploaded. iOS requires "Allow Full Access" to be enabled before the keyboard can read the app's dictionaries and settings; enabling it does not cause Zi Hao to upload anything.

Zi Hao also has AI features (translation, polishing, summarization, replies, translate-as-you-write), but it doesn't bundle any service: you enter your own key for OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, or a translation API, and requests go directly from the phone to the provider you choose, without passing through us. Starting with 1.0.9, before sending, information such as phone numbers, ID numbers, bank card numbers, emails, and verification codes is replaced with placeholders, and the result is swapped back to the original text on the phone when it returns.

Pricing

All typing-related features are free: 26-key and nine-grid, Xiaohe double pinyin, correction, learning, quick phrases, and importing Rime schemas. Zi Hao Pro is a one-time purchase for permanent use, with no subscription, unlocking translate-as-you-write, AI scripts, all themes and background images, and multi-device sync.

Download

Zi Hao is a free download on the App Store; the initial release does not include mainland China or the EU. The official site is hareime.com, which has a page dedicated to using Rime: hareime.com/rime-ios.

Simply put, this is a keyboard customized for you personally. If you also miss Squirrel on your phone, give it a try, and tell me directly if you have any problems.

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