Android Keyboard issues

Hi All,

I know this is not the place to file bugs (I already filed a bug for one of the issues using report bug from the editor)

But I just wanted to share with you issues and frustrations I encountered with Android keyboard when i started porting my app from iOS to Android hoping that someone encountered similar issues .

The app has compose message section which requires the user to be able to press buttons and interact with Unity view while typing a message.. this works fine on iOS

I am using Unity 3.5.5f3 PRO on Mac

Issues noticed so far:

1. When TouchScreenKeyboard.hideInput set to False

• 
  On old versions of Android, tested on 2.2 and 2.3 (HTC desire and Nexus One): no touch events are received to unity.. you can only type and dismiss the keyboard without being able to interact with Unity view

• 
  New versions of Android, tested on ICS (Google Nexus and Samsung galaxy S3): any touch outside the keyboard and the text field dismisses the keyboard

Expected behaviour is to be able to interact with Unity view while the keyboard is shown

2. When TouchScreenKeyboard.hideInput set to True
You can interact with Unity view, however more issues will rise (This works fine if the TouchScreenKeyboard.hideInput = false):

• 
  Dismissing the keyboard with Back button (tested on 2.2, 2.3 ICS): works fine at the beginning, but once the app pause to the background then resumes the 1st event of back button dismisses the keyboard without changing the statuses of TouchScreenKeyboard instance (visible, active and done) will remain true as if the keyboard still shown. 2nd press on Back button will make the keyboard visible but toggles the statuses (visible active done) to false as if the keyboard is not shown.

• 
  Inputing certain characters such as £,€,¥,¿,¡ turns the values of the variable (text) to empty string.

• 
  Unable to change TouchScreenKeyboardType the keyboard will be always set to default

Unless Unity fixes these issues.. we might have to write our own plugin for the keyboard.

Did anyone else encountered similar issues?

Many Thanks

Yas

 

No one!!

 

I am having lots of trouble using the TouchScreenKeyboard which I tried to use last week. Turning the hide input on and off has changed how it works in very odd ways and now testing on iOS doesn't seem to pass the entered in value back to my target text field (was working fine in Android). The visible flag doesn't seem to work at all as I have a HTC Desire S that has a hide keyboard button that doesn't set it. I cannot detect if it is hidden with any of the available parameters.

Can I assume this is a really buggy system??? (Am using the same version)

Let me know if you find a good plugin!

 

Seems buggy to me.

we will launch our first version of the app with the bugs. and we might start working on the fix in the next release

I am still hoping that Unity will fix these issues. Maybe keyboard issues are not on top of their list at the moment (might be true for most games)

If we find any solution I will post it.

 

From what I've found out it does seem like a bug, if you could report it and post the case number that would be great!

 

I 've already submitted a bug report back in July

the case number is: 479234

I also sent a detailed email once I was contacted for further details

 

I saw you sent another follow up e-mail, I'll have a nosey for you

 

Thanks alot!

 

Looks like this has been fixed for 4.0 but not in 3.5 I'm afraid

 

I see...

At least its fixed

 

Hi!

This bug has been... uhm, bugging for the last couple of days. You said it's fixed on Unity 4, but does anyone have a quick fix for this? For 3.5? Any solution? Upgrading to 4 is not an option right now. Or if ever anybody found/made a good plug in, that could help too.

Thanks!

 

The bug has been fixed in 3.5.6.

 

I tested the latest version of Unity 3.5.6 ... Didn't see any difference in regard with the keyboard :-(

Did they fix all the issues mentioned?

 

So sorry, I got this mixed up with another bug! I'm really sorry for the misinformation, as far as I know it's not fixed but I'm chasing it up.

*Edit* I have word that something was fixed for 3.5.6 but I am just investigating what. I'll get back to you.

 

Ok, Thank you!

 

Just as an update:

I got a reply from Unity QA regarding the issues and bugs:

- Simultaneous interaction (keyboard and Unity view) was not planned and the actual planned behavior is to dismiss the keyboard when the user touches outside its area (both ios and android)
- Other bugs have been assigned to developers

 

Yes, I've been seeing the stir this has caused

 

We've launched the app with the current bugs (due to deadlines), hopefully we will be able to update it once Unity is updated.

the app:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/158246-Avatar-Messenger-for-Android

 

Any status on this bug?
I'm currently finding myself in a similar ugly mess

 

Didn't have the time to try the latest version of unity 3 (3.5.7) but i will post the results once done..

if you would like to try : http://unity3d.com/unity/download/archive

 

I forgot to come back and update, I tried the latest Unity 3 and that fixed my issues. Phew!

 

@skullthug What were your issues?

On my side I can confirm that the characters issue is fixed.... but the keyboard statuses after the app goes to the background still the same

 

My issue was with the keyboard not reporting correctly to Unity when it had closed, so my keyboard IEnumerator would get stuck in its waiting loop.

 

Had to update this thread since character '#' is still producing the old problem with empty strings from Android keyboard when hideInputs = true (tested on Unity 4.1.3)

 

We've updated the app with Unity 4 now.

Most issues with the keyboard were resolved apart from the interaction with Unity with native input for keyboard which is really a shame...

After this experimental version of Avatar Messenger we will try to make our own Android keyboard plugin instead of using unity's to have better compose message experience

Link to Google Play

 

We have encountered one of the bugs you have mentioned:
New versions of Android, tested on ICS (Google Nexus and Samsung galaxy S3): any touch outside the keyboard and the text field dismisses the keyboard
on unity 4.1.5f1.
Drove me crazy till I found this thread now...
Any news on that? SolidSnake - what's unity's official stand on this at the moment? After all it's been known for at least a year now...
Did you find a plugin that you can recommend on?
Regards,
Meyrav

 

Hi Meyrav,

I understand your frustration as I feel the same way
Unity response was

"Thank you for such a detailed reply.
I would like to give you an update on the current situation regarding touch screen keyboard input.

I've talked with our Android and iOS developers and they told me that we do not support simultaneous interaction with the game and on screen keyboard and if that works somewhere - that is only a lucky coincidence. That means it can stop working on iOS at any point in time and it will not be fixed.

Now regarding the bugs and wrong behavior that you've described in your e-mail. The 1st part "When TouchScreenKeyboard.hideInput set to False" you mention that no touch events are received on pre ICS devices and the keyboard is dismissed on ICS devices when the area outside the keyboard is touched. This behavior should stay in Unity 3.5.x, but in Unity 4.0 keyboard will be dismissed on all Android versions when the outside area is touched. There was a bug that would prevent the keyboard from reappearing after it was dismissed by touching outside of keyboard area but it was already fixed. The 2nd part "When TouchScreenKeyboard.hideInput set to True" indeed has a couple of bugs that must be fixed. First I want to remind you, that the ability to receive simultaneous input in game and in keyboard on screen can disappear at any point in time, but while it works, you can use it if you want. The bug regarding the visible, active and done statuses of the keyboard was fixed and they should be correct even after the application resume. The bug with certain special characters that makes the input string empty is still present, but it is assigned to developers and should be fixed. Finally, the last issue that you can not change the keyboard type to anything but default might be an issue with the documentation. I think that the documentation about this is not very clear and I will investigate it now, but I can't promise that this will be fixed."

at the moment this happens only when you have the native text input visible as I mentioned previously and we did it in Avatar Messenger.

I couldn't find any plugin that solves this so we are implementing our own at the moment (using Android plugins route)
the initial result seems that if you have the keyboard in separate window then Android limits the touch and we got the same result as Unity's current implementation.
However when we included the keyboard inside the same activity as Unity's it worked as we expected but without overlaying Unity view (the keyboard pushes unity view upwards when displayed)
Ideally Unity should implement it in this way as it is the expected behaviour in most cases. I am guessing they didn't see it as important.

I will have to check once we have a working solution whether we can share it with unity's community

 

Ran into same problem here. Hard to offer a nice user experience to user like many other games do, while hideInput does not work properly, nor allows you to have simultaneous input guaranteed. Also, hideInput is completely broken on Android 4.2+, no backspace gets sent. It also does not show the correct keyboard when I ask for the "email" keyboard for example with hideInput to true. Ugh. I wish there was a good plugin for iOS/Android that took care of all this or that Unity would put a tiny bit more effort into this. =(((

 

Same problem here. The whole touchscreenkeyboard thing is not that useful. Not all keyboard types are supported (at least for iOS, Android I can't say exactly), closing keyboard from code is not supported, getting the keyboard size is only for iOS,... if there where a plugin in for all that, I would buy it

 

Thanks SolidSnake,
We have implemented a new algorithm to work around the simultaneous input issue , based on the response you got I understand now I should probably enable it in iOS as well.
Now we are facing a different issue : we need to prevent the usage of non- english characters. the "TouchScreenKeyboardType.ASCIICapable" prevents it in iOS but not in Android.
is this the issue you were referring to as default keyboard?

 

Hi there,

Is there any way available to change the default look (full screen) of keyboard in android when it's in landscape mode. I want see a normal keyboard (half visible) when i use the text field in landscape mode. Can any one suggest soon.. please..

 

I have same problem too
see PM,SolidSnake

ps. I very like you name lol

 

Native keyboard support is just very lacking on iOS/Android.. SOMEONE make a Unity plugin!! Will insta-buy =)

 

We have also run into the simultaneous input with the keyboard on both Android and iOS recently. IMHO, it's rather silly to actively refuse to support this. For one thing, it means any sort of in-game chat system you might want in a multiplayer game is impossible.

We have solved the problem (more or less) for iOS by using a post-process to "patch" they Keyboard.mm source file that Unity provides. Of course, this means that we have to review these patches every time we switch to a new version of Unity.

As yet, we have no solution for the problem on Android. SolidSnake or Mey, if you have any pointers or suggestions on how to go about this, It would be greatly appreciated.

It's so sad that Unity just washes their hands of this problem. As some one else commented, "it's a shame".

= Ed =

 

+1

 

We've updated our app and implemented a plugin for android for now (which is not working properly with Unity 4.3 update) but did the job for our usecase. more details on the app: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/236347-Avatar-Messenger-2-0-for-Android

Video demo including the messaging screen:

I am trying now to convince my employer to publish the plugin as an asset or even open source it but its not straight forward...

I still don't understand why a decent keyboard implementation is not a priority for Unity.

 

Agreed, you would think this is a core feature that Unity would place some minimal effort on. No idea if they monitor these threads though.

 

I think its used to be easier with a smaller community... This thread was noticed at the early stage by Aurore who is a community manager which helped at least in fixing quite few small bugs but not in changing their core implementation of the keyboard as their QA reply indicated

 

So I followed the rabbit hole of this touchscreen keyboard isues on Android all the way here. This has definitely been the most helpful thread but sounds like there is still no solution outside of making your own plugin. Well I guess creating native mobile plugins is something I should learn eventually.

Hey SolidSnake, any advice or gotchas that would be useful to know as I try to recreate what you all were able to do with the native keyboard? All I have to go on is the Unity Doc for creating a native plugin and the Android docs about handling input method visibility.

http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/PluginsForAndroid.html
http://developer.android.com/training/keyboard-input/index.html

 

So has anybody managed to write the plugin and sell it? Will purchase right away!

 

Does anyone know the status of this bug:

Inputing certain characters such as £,€,¥,¿,¡ turns the values of the variable (text) to empty string.

We have an in-game chat system for our game in production, and our international players are unable to type any non-ASCII characters!

 

http://u3d.as/content/oh-yeah-dev/android-keyboard
This new plug-in can be helpful for you.

 

There's no easy solution.
The keyboard which is shown is the Android OS standard keyboard. (I think I've seen the similar in the other apps).
You always can write a plugin on your own, but it's even harder to make it work on all the devices.

 

2019.3, still not fixed...

 

I'm having this problem as well. Using Unity 2020.1.0b13.3980.

All I want is to be able to interact with the area not covered by the keyboard while it is open and not have the keyboard automatically close.

I've noticed the unity app Hearthstone for android has figured out some way around this. In that app you can chat with someone and while the keyboard is open you can drag the chat log scroll view up and down and the keyboard remains open. As far as I can tell it is using the default android keyboard too.

 

Hey guys! All of the problems with mobile keyboards are solved by this package: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/gui/advanced-input-field-2-185464

Yes, it is a bit expensive but if you try to implement this on your own it would most probably cost you a month or so in development time.
Also, the package has some additional cool features.

Happy coding!