Frankendrop presents · in the basement · nightly

FrankenDrop

Starring FrankenCases and FrankenKeys

A stitched green ghoul with a bolt through its neck holding a phone as lightning arcs off it.

It was assembled out of parts in a basement by somebody with no formal training. So was your phone.

N/I
Rated N/I: no internet permission
Contains no telemetry, no ads, no accounts.
Go and verify it in Android's own settings.

Get the free keyboard

A grinning green Frankenstein ghoul in a stained lab coat, presenting with one arm swept out.

Evening. Five cases, five keyboards, each pair cut from its own number. Two hundred and fifty of each, and then I put the lights out. Have a look while I am still standing.

A phone case built from mismatched panels sewn together with heavy stitches and bolts.

FrankenCases

The spliced hardware

Drawn monsters printed over a ground grown from a published number. Five designs per drop, two hundred and fifty of each, numbered, never reprinted.

See the cases
A phone keyboard alive as a monster: keycaps as rotten teeth, a lolling tongue and a bulging eye.

FrankenKeys

The Android keyboard

A keyboard that holds no internet permission, with 30 press effects and sound synthesised live. Free, on Google Play.

See the keyboard

The demonstration

Touch a key. Then touch all of them.

LIVE
This is the keyboard, not a picture of it. All 30 press effects, all 50 key sounds and all 31 themes are here, ported from the app's own source. The clicks are synthesised in your browser the way the app synthesises them on the phone. Nothing is recorded.

qwertyuiopasdfghjkl⇧zxcvbnm⌫?123,.⏎

Sound is off until you switch it on, and nothing plays on its own. The clicks are rendered on the spot from the same parameter rows the app feeds its synthesiser, and every key has its own pitch, so q and p are not the same click. The swipe is the app's decoder over 44,953 of its 45,008 English words: the 55 it leaves out have an apostrophe in them, and no keyboard has a key for one. What is not here is the bonus the phone gives the word you just typed, and anything it has learned from you, because this page has never seen you type.

Three things it cannot show you. The 20 haptic profiles need a motor. The 10 shaders are GPU shaders and run on the phone's own compositor. Voice typing and the grammar clean up are Android's on device model, which is on your phone and not on this page.

Get it on Google Play

A crate prised open with a crowbar, a patchwork case and a glowing phone packed in straw inside.

Drop 001, The Classics · in production

Five cases. Five keyboards.
Cut from the same body.

A drop is a collection. Drop 001 is called The Classics and it is five monsters, each in its own limited run, each paired with the keyboard theme that was born alongside it. Not a colour match. One seed feeds the generator twice: one object you can hold, one on your screen, both stitched out of the same parts. The monster on each case is drawn; the screen he is printed over and the theme are grown from that design's own number.

Each splice is drawn by a generator from one number, and all five numbers get published, so anyone can run them and get the exact artwork back. They were fixed before the drop opened and they cannot be quietly improved afterwards. The keyboard half rides in the box on a card you scan.

The keyboard half is Android. FrankenKeys is on Google Play and nowhere else. The case is a snap case made for 24 phones across iPhone and Samsung Galaxy, so the pair is a pair on the Galaxy half of that list, and on the iPhone half it is a case.

Designs

5

Each made

250

Reprints

0

Keyboard half

Free, Android

No date yet · 5 designs, 250 of each, numbered 001 to 250 within their own design · A design closes when its run is gone, the collection closes when the window ends · Nothing unsold is ever sold later

Nothing

the keyboard sees

gets out.

Not a policy. An absence. Android will show you the hole where the permission is not.

The permission it does not have

The keyboard holds no internet permission.

Not a policy. Not a promise buried on a privacy page. Android itself blocks it, and Android will show you: Settings, Apps, FrankenKeys, Permissions, then the three-dot menu, All permissions. Under Other, look for "have full network access". It is not there, because the app never asked for it. The AI clean-up runs on your phone. Voice typing is handed to Android's own recogniser, which on Android 12 and up we bind explicitly to the on-device one. Release builds ship unobfuscated, so you can pull it apart and check all of that.

Which is the joke, really. Of everything on your phone, the thing stitched together in a basement out of spare parts is the one that cannot get out.

Read the permission list
A sick full moon over a dead forest, with an open cellar door in the ground pouring green light into the sky.

Exhibit · the cellar door · left open

The door is open. Nothing leaves.

The corkboard over the bench

Specimens, pinned.

Everything on this board is on the page somewhere, smaller and on a pin. Pick one up if you like. It goes back.

Specimen 00 · the subject

A single keycap floating in a jar of green fluid.

Specimen 04 · one keycap, preserved

Lab note. The case and the keyboard are cut from one number. Run it yourself and you get this exact splice back. That is the whole reason it is published.

Specimen 01 · the case

No internet permission.Settings, Apps, FrankenKeys, All permissions. Under Other it is not there.

Specimen 02 · the keyboard

Warning to the audience

Contains flashing keys, audible switch noise and one keyboard that will not stop grinning at you. Does not contain adverts, accounts, telemetry, or an internet permission. Persons hoping to be tracked will leave disappointed.

A green ghoul giving a thumbs up.

Specimen 05 · approved by nobody

Specimen 03 · packed in straw

Nothing unsold is ever sold later. A drop that times out at ninety is a run of ninety, and the rest were never made.

Exhibit · the cellar door

Exhibit · the bench, 2am

A cellar workshop: patchwork cases hanging from meat hooks over a bench, a Tesla coil throwing sparks.

Where it comes from

One person, a bench, and no committee.

Both halves of this are made by one person. That is the reason the cases are runs of two hundred and fifty instead of ten thousand, and the reason the keyboard has no accounts to manage, no server to pay for and no quarterly target that would make tracking you tempting.

It is also the reason it can be this weird. Nobody had to approve the teeth.

A stitched green hand pushing a single bone envelope into a black iron letterbox slot, with one cyan spark.
A black brick wall with three blank keyboards taped up like specimens, hazard tape at the corners, and a ghoul peeking in from the edge.

The wall · boards other people built

Somebody has to go first.

The wall

Boards other people built.

A whole keyboard build travels as one code: theme, press effects, key sounds, the lot. Paste one here and it goes up for everybody else to install. No account, because asking you to make one in order to share a keyboard would be a bit rich coming from us.

Nothing on the wall yet. Somebody has to go first.