Android soft keyboard show numbers view first

Question

I have a login screen on my app which accepts a CPF as login (CPF is an unique number identification that every Brazilian citizen have, e.g: 10546819546), but it can also accept passport numbers as the login, and these may have letters on it.

My problem is that I want the keyboard, when it pops up, to show to number/symbols "view" before the default alphabet one. Changing the inputMethod to phone or number does not solve my problem, because as I said, the login may contain letters.

I've seen some explanations to questions somewhat similar to mine but all of them either didn't solve my problem or it was too overcomplicated.

This is merely a small adjust to slightly improve user experience and entertain me developing the app, so if the solution is something like "override the default keyboard, make a custom component" etc, I'll just leave it alone.

TL;DR: I want to show the number/symbol soft keyboard before the letters one.

Answer 1

Unfortunately when it comes to the soft keyboard you are somewhat at the mercy of whoever made the one the user has their device set to. Lots of devices come pre-loaded and defaulted to the swype keyboard. But many others have soft keyboards that were made by the manufacturer of that device. It it up to whoever created it to decide how the keyboard reacts to the android:inputType that you pass to it. It is possible that some of the ones out there right now actual have the behavior you are looking for when you set them to number or phone. I just checked it out on my sidekick and found that it was the same as yours both number and phone provided no way to input letters.