It's actually not a Gboard bug, but rather a side effect caused by a design choice of Gboard that Gboard tries to handle text editing in a normal text box by itself whenever possible. For example Gboard handles the delete key event by itself and delete the letter before the cursor directly instead of sending the delete key event to the app and rely on the app to delete the letter.
Gboard does it in this way for many reasons, but the side effect is that the app should not use a normal text box and expect to receive all key events. It's different than using a physical keyboard on a desktop/laptop computer. That said, do not expect a virtual keyboard to behave in the same way as a physical keyboard.
The workaround mentioned in the article makes sense.
Another possible solution for apps that want to receive raw key events is to use a password input box instead of a normal text box.
> It's actually not a Gboard bug, but rather a side effect caused by a design choice of Gboard…
It’s definitely a bug, because the design choice they made breaks invariants and causes buggy behaviour in otherwise functioning code.
Otherwise it would be like saying “segfaulting randomly is actually not a bug, but rather a side effect caused by a design choice we made to have sloppy code and terrible memory management”.
Gboard does it in this way for many reasons, but the side effect is that the app should not use a normal text box and expect to receive all key events. It's different than using a physical keyboard on a desktop/laptop computer. That said, do not expect a virtual keyboard to behave in the same way as a physical keyboard.
The workaround mentioned in the article makes sense. Another possible solution for apps that want to receive raw key events is to use a password input box instead of a normal text box.
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