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Moritz Stoltenburg mstoltenburg

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iOS restrictions re: bringing up the keyboard on programmatic focus

I can't find exact specifications on this, but it seems that iOS restricts bringing up the keyboard via programmatically focusing on <input>. It only brings up the keyboard in response to explicit user interaction.

  1. iOS focus on input field only brings up keyboard when called inside a click handler.
  2. It doesn’t work if the focus is async.

This presents a curious problem when you want to autofocus an input inside a modal or lightbox, since what you generally do is click on a button to bring up the lightbox, and then focus on the input after the lightbox has been opened. Without anything fancy, it actually works ok. The problem shows up when you try to add something fancy like a setTimeout or a promise.then(). I don't know why people would want to use a setTimeout here, but waiting for a promise is actually a pretty common use case. E.g. we try to batch dom manipulations like getting a lightbox to show up inside `requestAnimati