Fabric TextInput never invokes the touch keyboard on focus in a WinAppSDK island app (windowless RichEdit) — keyboard never appears on a keyboard-less tablet

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Problem Description

On a Windows tablet with no physical keyboard, tapping a single-line <TextInput> never raises the on-screen touch keyboard. The field focuses (caret blinks) but there is no way to type.

Fabric/Composition TextInput (WindowsTextInputComponentView) does nothing to invoke the touch keyboard on focus, and in a WinAppSDK Win32 island app there is no CoreWindow and the RichEdit is hosted windowless via ITextServices (no child edit HWND) — so the OS's own touch-keyboard auto-invoke heuristic (which keys off a focused editable HWND + touch focus + the OS setting) never fires either. Net: the keyboard never appears.

Root cause — confirmed in 0.83.2 source. In vnext/Microsoft.ReactNative/Fabric/Composition/TextInput/WindowsTextInputComponentView.cpp, onGotFocus only forwards WM_SETFOCUS to the RichEdit ITextServices and handles clearTextOnFocus/selectTextOnFocus; it never touches InputPane/CoreInputView. A full-tree search for InputPane | IInputPaneInterop | TryShow | CoreInputView | CoreTextServicesManager | ShowKeyboard finds a single hit — ScrollViewComponentView.cpp calling CoreInputView::GetForCurrentView().TryHide() for keyboardDismissMode, which is itself a no-op without a CoreWindow. The old UWP-era PR #2029 attempted show-on-focus for the Paper renderer and was closed; it relied on GetForCurrentView() APIs that don't apply to the island model.

The OS Settings toggle Time & language → Typing → Touch keyboard → "Show the touch keyboard when there's no keyboard attached" does not help, because the heuristic has no focused edit control to observe for the windowless RichEdit host — a programmatic InputPane.TryShow() is required.

Steps To Reproduce

1. New-architecture RNW 0.83.2 app (WinAppSDK island / ReactNativeWin32App), deployed to a Windows tablet with no physical keyboard attached (or detach the keyboard cover on a 2-in-1). Note: Windows suppresses the touch keyboard while a hardware keyboard is attached, so the bug must be observed with the keyboard detached.
2. Render <TextInput placeholder="tap me" /> and tap it with touch.
3. Observe: the field focuses (caret blinks) but the touch keyboard never appears — there is no way to enter text.
4. Also: after any dismissal of the keyboard, re-tapping the (still-focused) field does not re-raise it, because a tap on an already-focused field does not fire onGotFocus.

Expected Results

Focusing or tapping a TextInput on a touch device with no hardware keyboard should raise the touch keyboard (iOS/Android parity and the platform expectation). Re-tapping a field after the keyboard was dismissed should re-raise it.

CLI version

18.0.0

Environment

System:
  OS: Windows 11 10.0.26200 (x64 tablet)
  CPU: x64
  Memory: ~16 GB
Binaries:
  Node: 22.x
  Yarn: 4.5.1
SDKs:
  Windows SDK versions: 10.0.19041.0, 10.0.22621.0, 10.0.26100.0
IDEs:
  Visual Studio: 17.14 (Community 2022), 18.6 (Community 2026)
npmPackages:
  react-native: 0.83.2
  react-native-windows: 0.83.2 (New Architecture / Fabric composition)
  Microsoft.WindowsAppSDK: 1.8

Community Modules

Not relevant — reproduces with the core TextInput.

Target React Native Architecture

New Architecture (WinAppSDK) Only

Target Platform Version

10.0.22621

Visual Studio Version

Visual Studio 2022

Build Configuration

Release

Snack, code example, screenshot, or link to a repository

// On a keyboard-less tablet, tapping this never raises the touch keyboard:
<TextInput placeholder="tap me on a keyboard-less tablet" />

Context: found during a Windows hardening pass of a production RNW 0.83.2 new-arch app (Facilitron FIT), validated on physical x64 tablet hardware. Fix PR: #16330. Sibling TextInput fixes from the same investigation: #16302, #16303.