Can't find keyplane that supports type 4 for keyboard iPhone-PortraitChoco-NumberPad

Question

I am currently updating my application to iOS 11. Suddenly my keyboard gets this failure/error:

Can't find keyplane that supports type 4 for keyboard iPhone-PortraitChoco-NumberPad; using 4072550144015629828_PortraitChoco_iPhone-Simple-Pad_Default

I am using a device to test the app. And therefor this fix with "Connect hardware keyboard" is not a solution.

Has anyone got the same error?

Please note that this happens in ios 11.

Answer 1

So this issue is iOS is telling you that it couldn't figure out how to lay out a keyboard to your specifications. In the olden days, this was usually because you were using a keyboard type that wasn't available for the OSes you were targeting (such as using a decimal pad but targeting OSes before 4.0, where it was added). This is why the old solutions say you should enable the hardware keyboard, since it meant the OS would skip the "can I lay out a software keyboard correctly" check.

Nowadays this happens because of mysterious and undocumented bugs and edge cases in the OS. In particular, the one you're seeing is saying (I believe) that it can't figure out how to layout a number pad type keyboard with an input accessory view on top of it. Why iOS can't figure this out is a matter of much debate and black magic, but the end effect is that it falls back to the "simple pad" keyboard (the one with a decimal point in the corner and a phone-style numbers and letters layout), which is fine for most cases. (You can also find examples of this error online for situations like popping an emoji keyboard with a search field accessory, etc.)

If the fallback rendering is fine for your case, I suggest ignoring the error. If not, then the only solution I've found that works for this is to create a custom input keyboard with the number pad laid out exactly as you want it.