iOS 13 - Bluetooth keyboard arrow keys not working

Bug Report

Problem

The arrow keys (UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT) of the external bluetooth keyboard do not work in iOS 13. It was working fine in earlier versions. Other keys are working fine.

Note that, the arrow keys work fine in other iOS native apps. Also, the issue exists only with the UIWebView. The WKWebView works fine.

What is expected to happen?

The Arrow keys of the external keyboard should work fine.

What does actually happen?

The Arrow keys of the external keyboard are not working.

Information

I see the following console error in Xcode when I press one of the arrow keys.

2019-09-17 16:06:08.114428-0500 My_APP_NAME[375:30929] -[UIThreadSafeNode canPerformAction:withSender:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x283523040
2019-09-17 16:06:08.115002-0500 My_APP_NAME[375:30929] *** WebKit discarded an uncaught exception in the handleKeyTextCommandForCurrentEvent delegate: <NSInvalidArgumentException> -[UIThreadSafeNode canPerformAction:withSender:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x283523040

Environment, Platform, Device

Cordova : 9.0.0 Xcode : 11.0 iPad : iOS 13.1
NodeJS : v10.14.2 npm : 6.4.1 OS : macOS Mojave

[breautek]

Does this project use UIWebView? I’m seeing a similar issue on my UIWebView app. Replacing UIWebView with WKWebView seems to solve the issue.

The default webview for cordova-ios is the UIWebView. WKWebView will be the new default sometime soon since UIWebView is deprecated.

[shortercode]

I appear to also be having this issue with WKWebView on ipados 13.2.3. Confirmed that it was WKWebView using the “debug view hierarchy” tool in xcode.

Did anyone file a report about this with Apple?

EDIT: this is with a document level event listener, with no input elements. I have discovered that by adding a <input type="button> and having the user click it will cause events to trigger at a global level again. However, manually focusing the element using .focus() is not sufficient.