No on-screen keyboard after 4.11 update

1

I’m late to upgrading from iodéOS 4.10 to 4.11 due to moving home, but having now just done it, I no longer have any working on-screen keyboard.

I note that Heliboard has now taken over but on any screen where I tap to normally get a keyboard pop-up, I get a bar along the bottom. The left-most keyboard icon with a down arrow does nothing but descends the bar again. The 3rd button from the left allows to Choose Input Method, but there is only KDE Connect remote keyboard in the list. The right-most button just confirms ‘Remote keyboard connection is active.’

I saw in this French thread that somebody was advised to go into the main Settings → System → Languages and input → On-screen keyboard and change any setting, then go back and it should be activated. It doesn’t work for me. There I see once more KDE Connect Remote keyboard as the default, if I tap on that I also see Heliboard top of the list of 2, but the button is greyed out, deactivated and cannot be changed. The KDE Connect Remote Keyboard button below is also greyed out and unchangeable, but is activated. Tapping on Heliboard and going through the parameters, changing anything there has no effect.

In app permissions, I tried setting Heliboard to ‘run at startup’, and rebooted, to no avail.

Since it’s my birthday and several people have sent me well wishes by text message to which I cannot respond, they all think I’m either rude or dead.

2

After wasting precious hours this evening on this gnarly issue, I solved the problem by searching keyboard apps (using KDE Connect remote keyboard) in F-Droid and reinstalling Heliboard. Now it works as it should. But I’d already tried preferring the standard F-Droid repo version to the iodé version (which sort of switched it back to Openboard but only in name, I still couldn’t access anything useful to make it visible) and that made no difference, and I couldn’t find any other way to change app versions in F-Droid under the ‘Manage Installed Apps’.

Now Heliboard shows up on the main app icons screen which it didn’t before. It also now has two entries both in F-Droid installed apps and in the system settings → languages and input → On-screen keyboard page. Once I swiped the button there to activate the newly installed version, the previously greyed out inaccessible button for the iodé version also flipped in unison. The iodé install of Heliboard is hence completely horked in my case. Should have mentioned this is on my Fairphone 3+.

Thank heavens for KDE Connect which has once again got me out of a prickly problem.