Does Appium use the soft Keyboard on Android / iOS?
or ist the text directly set in the filed?
Thanks for any pointers,
Roman
i really would appreciate if anyone can point me in the right direction 
i did some testing an have the impression that ios uses the soft-keyboard. I’m not to sure about android though.
Well… I hope someone correct if I say anything wrong. I’m not on my pc, so I cannot even test what I’m about to say.
On Android, currently, there is only sendKeys. It does not use the soft keyboard, but from what I recall is currently sending key by key. If you want to send accent or other “strange” characters you should go with appium keyboard (seach for unicodeKeyboard and resetKeyboard capabilities). From what I see there is a plan to add the possibility to change the strategy: https://github.com/appium/appium/issues/5393
On iOS, you can use sendKeys or setValue [this was changed from MobileElement to iOSElement]. The second attempts to set entire value (similar to set_immediate_value in ruby client).
With sendKeys it will respect the capability you set (or the default if you do not set) sendKeyStrategy (look for sendKeyStrategy in http://appium.io/slate/en/master/?java#ios-only).
Hope it helps.
thanks for the input.
so iOS uses the soft keyboard right? at least that’s what I think, as the hw keyboard has to be deactivated when using a simulator.
on iOS its up to you. There are more than one strategy to input value into a textfield