I think @TIMAI2 is using a Google Pixel? However, Google do not manufacture the phones, they contract them out to two or three other companies.
What keyboard are you using? I just tried a few different keyboards e.g samsung, swifty and google keyboard but they do the same. Been looking online and there is a way called disable full-screen keyboard but you need root access and other stuff so not really viable.
Just the default, which is either Android or Huawei, I do not know.
After researching it more it seems that its not just a Samsung problem. And that the reason it does it on some apps and not others is that some apps overwrite user settings for the keyboard. Apparently it can fixed by editing the extract UI settings on startup or connection then there were examples like:
android:imeOptions="flagNoExtractUI" .
I am not sure if this is useful information or not to help fix the issue?
Well, your App is not overwriting User settings for the keyboard, so that sounds like a 'red herring' in this case. The Phone Manufacturers do of course have a lot of leeway and they use it to try to be 'different', but I doubt that is the cause of the issue.
It might be that App Inventor is at fault somehow, but there are over 42 million App Inventor Projects out in the wild (400,000 active Users per month), so it's surprising that we have not had this problem reported before.
I have assigned your Topic to Evan Patton, our Head Honcho at MIT. He is of course a very busy chap so we can't expect an instant response.
Use this extension:
Joel, I think Patryk's extension fixes your issue - the 'big white box' is actually the keyboard input box of the full-screen keyboard!
Yes this works great! Thanks so much for all your help guys I really appreciate it.
That's good news Joel.
Big high five to Patryk for producing a brilliant solution in just over a nanosecond. I think this needs to be coded into App Inventor.
I agree this should be put into app inventor, I think a request keyboard function should also be added if possible.
You mean software keyboard opening?
Yes software keyboard opening . I haven't seen it if it's already there. I know there is request to close the keyboard but when using the blocks such as focus.textbox 1 it doesn't automatically open the software keyboard.
It is already in AI2, launching automatically on TextBox focus, so you can do that programmatically by placing a tiny TextBox, same background colour as it's parent component or screen (i.e. hidden in plain sight) and giving that TB focus, or of course the TB you want the User to type into.
Weird everytime I have used the textbox focus it sets the cursor to the text box but the keyboard doesn't pop up. Will have to try it again later
Yes, call TextBox.RequestFocus should pop-up the Keyboard and there is a Hide function too.
For me, the Samsung keyboard also does not open when we call focus programmatically.
Another Samsung specific issue I guess then
I updated the extension. I've added a method to show the keyboard if the built-in method doesn't work. Remove the previous extension from the project and add a new one. I think this extension will be developed with new keyboard related methods.