'Showing soft keyboard when autofocusing on a text input does not work without user interaction

I want to autofocus on a text field and show the soft keyboard when I load my page in the android system webview. Unfortunately, it appears that the soft keyboard never shows up unless I explicitly click a button that calls input.focus().

I'm using androidx.webkit:webkit:1.4.0 and can reproduce the issue on an emulator as well as a physical device using this minimal sample app: https://github.com/dsyang/android-webview-auto-soft-keyboard-bug

In the sample app, I load the webview url like this:

/* MainActivity.kt */ 
...
// Load the content
binding.webview.loadUrl("......./index.html")
binding.webview.requestFocus()
...
override fun onPageFinished(view: WebView?, url: String?) {
  val webView = view ?: return
  webView.requestFocus()
  webView.evaluateJavascript("""
      onPageFinished()
  """.trimIndent(), null)
}

The html and javascript look like this:

/* index.html */
  <body>
    <input type="text" id="focusme" placeholder="Auto focus and show soft keyboard" />
    <button class="button" onclick="focusToShowSoftKeyboard()" type="button" value="Focus">Focus #focusme</button>
  </body>

/* main.js */

function focusToShowSoftKeyboard() {
    console.log("I am about to focus the following element: ", document.getElementById("focusme"));
    document.getElementById("focusme").focus();
    console.log("details", {
      activeElement: document.activeElement,
      hasFocus: document.hasFocus(),
      focusMe: document.getElementById("focusme")
    })
}

function onPageFinished() {
    console.log("onPageFinished")
    setTimeout(() => {
      console.log("focusing to show keyboard")
      focusToShowSoftKeyboard()
    }, 1000)
}

There's a video of the sample app in action in the repo (link: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/529969/169964147-665722e7-58a1-4c55-baa5-b231d6a87f43.mp4). You can see that the input field focuses on page load but it doesn't show the soft keyboard unless I focus it with the button.

What do I need to do so that I can focus on the input field and get the soft keyboard to show up on page load?

android android-webview

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'Showing soft keyboard when autofocusing on a text input does not work without user interaction

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