I am using a “keyboard” with hiragana handwriting and when I draw a ‘へ’ I am given two options that for me look absolutely the same. Are there two different へ?
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It looks exactly the same in both hiragana and katana although fonts do try to make them look a little bit different with the katana へ being slightly more angular. However, they’re considered different characters.
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So for a hiragana へ I should “flatten the curve”?
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You should give it more context to work with - write it with other characters rather than on its own.
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The first one seems to be katakana, the second is hiragana. See the difference in font weight?
I think it’s a stylistic choice since the stroke order is identical. I’d bet most people just write it the same.
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The font weight doesn’t make the difference. The selected character is always in bold font.
In lingodeer for example it happened that I got a へ marked as error although a へ was expected. But apparently I took the wrong one.
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For me it seems like a way to let the user know which one is which at the selection screen, since they look identical otherwise.
Edit: ah, I misunderstood you. So, you’re saying you can pick any of the suggested characters and they’ll be highlighted.
The writing IMEs I’ve used will present the hiragana option first unless there’s context to indicate that it’s katakana.
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Just in case you didn’t see my edit, since you both were so quick with your answers. 
Do you have to enter a single kana on it’s own? If you enter a whole word IME will suggest a katakana version.
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No, I enter whole sentences. But autocorrection is probably turned off by the app.
I’ve played around with unicode lookup over here:
Basically when using handwritten input it’s pretty inconsistent. Sometimes it picks katakana by default, sometimes hiragana.
If you want to make sure you’re correct use the flip/romaji input instead of handwritten one.
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I think the best tip I saw is to just write two or more characters, select those, then delete. For example へん. If the second is explicitly hiragana, IME is going to assume hiragana for the first one as well.
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Just keep typing.
Don’t type ヘ when wanikani expects へ, you’ll get an error 
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You’ll run into this issue with ロ as well, as the IME lists mouth, katakana ro, and the bigger radical you see in kanji like 国. Especially the former two might mix you up. 口 ← is kuchi, while the one further up, is ro.
But they’re not as indistiguishable as へ
Also ニ and 二.
My IME tells me the difference between them in the suggestion menu (there’s little notes on the right side saying [漢数字] and [全][カナ]). But yeah, in your sort of situation, you need to give it context to work with.
Context is king.
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Also 工 and エ
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