Virtual Keyboard sometimes disappearing on Android! Anyone else?

[altenbach]

When traveling or commuting, I am using my Galaxy Nexus (Android 4.3) and the chrome browser to use the forum (full site, not mobile site).

In the last couple of days a new very annoying bug has appeared occasionally:

In the middle of composing a message, the virtual keyboard suddenly disappears from the screen and I can no longer type. Nothing happens when pressing in the edit area. Sometimes, after a long time (tens of seconds), the keyboard magically reappears and is usable, only to disappear again a while later.

Who is to blame???

• There were two android keyboard software updates recently, so it is possible that there is a bug there.
• I wonder if it could be that the NI forum changed something in the page code?

I never had that problem until recently, so something changed. Anyone else seen this?

[tst]

I don't usually use my phone, but I'm writing this on the phone (A Nexus 4, Android 4.3, full site on chrome) and so far I'm not seeing a problem, although I understand the problem is only occasional, so this casual use may not reveal it.

I don't see uninstalled updates to the keyboard, but I do have one for chrome. Maybe that's the culprit?

[altenbach]

Thanks. I actually also now started getting weird crashes of chrome (which was also recently updated). Chrome would crash and curoisly the desktop background would change from animated to the default static background.

I went into app management and noticed that chrome had >1GB of cached data and such. I reset everything and things now seem better.

(The nice thing with chrome is that, after a reset, all customization (bookmarks, saved passwords, etc) will be restored once you login to the browser. Maybe there was some corrupted cached data....

I'll keep watching it.

[JÞB]

Christian,

You are actually lucky!  I have to use the mobile site to reply when on my mobile since I never get the Virtual keyboard at all on the full site.  Luckilly I had an opportunity to demonstrate the issue to a Li muckety-muck (I'm sure you met her too, at the same party)  Resolution of Virtual Keyboard issues is in development.  until then reply via the mobile site as a workaround.

[altenbach]

I have been lucky until recently that things always worked (bought the phone in April 2012, well over a year ago) and it was always rock-stable. However, since the last keyboard and chrome update, it now crashes every other day. Usually, only chrome crashes, but yesterday the chrome crash caused a reboot of the phone. This is NOT good and they better track down what changed in the update that causes this.

I have it se to automatically send chrash statistics, so hopefully google can figure out what they broke and fix it again.

... fingers crossed.