Krishna Permi recalls how it all began. “I wanted to help my kid with Kannada homework,” says the 35-year-old independent developer from Bengaluru. It was this simple task at home that saw Permi develop Akshar, a free keyboard app that supports 21 Indian languages. Permi says he had been helping his son practise Kannada at home. To create reading exercises and notes for his child, he needed a way to type comfortably in Kannada on his iPhone. While he had learned to read and write the language by hand growing up in northern Karnataka, typing it digitally did not come naturally. Permi ended up doing what most people in his position do: he opened Google Input Tools in a browser. The web tool, which hasn’t changed much since its launch, lets him type phonetically in English and see Kannada characters appear on screen. “But whenever I used it on my phone, it was still not optimised for mobile,” he says. It required an internet connection, and it felt, in his words, “still stuck in that era”.…