Native keyboard support for iPad

I have an iPad with Apples first party keyboard and out of habit when playing roblox games I hit ‘/’ to begin typing but nothing happens so I have to awkwardly go select the chat by hand then go back to my keyboard. Sometimes pressing enter to send my message also doesn’t work. It would be nice if roblox knew I was trying to open the chat on my tablet keyboard & worked a little better as the social experience on an external keyboard on roblox sucks right now.

189 Likes

With the new iPad released today supporting mouse/keyboard more than ever before, I’d love to see this…

52 Likes

Howdy. Welcome back. We’re approaching 3 years. I would still really like to see this work as it’s such a basic and useful feature.

56 Likes

To this day it’s beyond me why Roblox doesn’t support bluetooth keyboards/mice on mobile and tablet devices.

35 Likes

With how powerful tablets are nowadays and how common attachment keyboards for them are becoming this is just a no brainer.

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Hi. This is still important! I play on my iPad like once a week and still try to press / to chat on my ipad keyboard and nothing happens.

33 Likes

Really support this.

I have an iPad with the Keyboard and I can’t chat and walk with it. This is really annoying.

21 Likes

Adding on to this, if we have a mouse and keyboard connected to our devices we should have the ability to turn on desktop mode for the Roblox app, so we can make our mobile devices act as a PC so you can do more advanced things with a keyboard and mouse.

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I’m amazed that Roblox hasn’t added support for Bluetooth Keyboards/Mice. Even the Xbox Edition (which imo is the worse version of Roblox) has support for keyboards and mouses (at least wired, haven’t tested wireless cuz I hate Xbox Edition and don’t want to play on it at all.) Would allow for a lot more games to be accessible on mobile since the player will now be able to use a keyboard and mouse like a desktop/laptop experience. Would also make chatting 100x easier, sorry I just ain’t good typing on mobile keyboards.

I know it’s 3 months since the last comment on this but itz a good suggestion/feature idea

14 Likes

Minecraft pocket edition has the feature, and it works really well. It makes sense for them to add this feature since the majority of roblox players play on mobile.

This developer video shows its possible.

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iPads have gotten more powerful now, and I think that now would be a great time to add support, more and more games on the Apple App Store are adding support for keyboard and mouse. With the new iPad Pros getting more powerful than ever, it would definitely benefit PC users for portability purposes.

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Fun fact - it’s not caused by the Roblox application being “mobile version”. All versions of Roblox do actually support keyboard and mouse, while best supported on desktop OSes such as Windows and macOS (I would also include Linux here but Hyperion broke it…) - Android do actually support them and if your Android version treats the right click properly, one of them which is the latest Samsung’s One UI (3.x or later i think), or if you’re able to configure the right click to do “right click / menu context” in your Android mouse input settings, you’re actually able to play it almost like the “desktop” version you usually play!

To be honest it’s the Apple’s restrictions that’s causing this issue. Although there exists the native support and even used by certain games like Minecraft, Roblox sadly didn’t implement the feature yet.
A seemingly temporary solution is to enable “Allow Full Keyboard Access” option in the Accessibility Settings, but didn’t sure if it will work well as the native keyboard support on other OSes.

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I use SamsungDex on a portable monitor and it is true you can get the full desktop experience on Android however there is no cursor capture on the window or real fullscreening, so you cannot turn your camera 360 only 180 this is very annoying in FPS games because you will turn and hit an invisible “wall” and can’t turn any further, very very annoying. It sucks because the android version of roblox basically does have full keyboard and mouse support except this bug.

They need to add complete fullscreen support or cursor capturing on the roblox mobile app so the mouse doesn’t wander off the screen or get stuck anymore. This could benefit apple as well.

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Yes, I definitely agree! Roblox should add keyboard and mouse support to IPad especially since Apple has made these iPad to function like a computer pretty much.

It would be nice if they just recognized it and added some kind of support.

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Agreed! Some people’s iPad are much more powerful and reliable than their PC/Laptop, like me. I’d love to use my iPad to play ROBLOX since it can run max graphics without experiencing FPS drop.

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I love this comment so much! It’s incredible how well roblox performs and is optimized on for certain mobile devices, giving a high-performance and quality experience and making it a budget friendly option and provides flexibility to players who are not able to buy an entire PC to run Roblox!

Some players already happen to own one piece of technology that works, they shouldn’t have to buy completely new hardware to play when they have hardware that is able to run roblox effectively already! This is a key philosophy Roblox needs to consider if they want to boast cross-platform availability.

4 Likes

Yes I agree so much! And it seems like this is becoming a more popular idea since the last 6 out of these 16 comments have been within the last 5 months.

Come on guys…. between this and the Studio for iPads, I wouldn’t even need a laptop…

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If there are legitimate plans in place for mobile studio, it would be embarrassing to release roblox studio on mobile and not have proper mouse & keyboard accessory support. Where are the engineers being assigned to address this I thought their ticket assignment goals were that every bug would have a person assigned to address it?

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There’s no point in studio mobile. Do you see VSCode mobile? No. Do you see Unity mobile? No.

It would bring terrible perf anyway, the amount of memory studio takes up is a lot, and rewriting studio Swift is crazy.

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I don’t understand you guys who are against a mobile Studio.

I’m not even talking about coding, just the performance aspect.

iPad Airs have the M1 chip and 8gb of memory, the same amount as many of their laptops and quite frankly I always used studio on an old 8gb laptop I had. I’m not even sure about the iPad pros, but I think they have at least 16gb (and an M2 chip) as the highest amount, which is more than enough.

I’m sure the airs will soon have 12gb of RAM and an M2, and pros will have the base as 12 or 16gb and up to 32gb of ram eventually, with an M3 chip of course. I’m not taking into account android devices right now as Apple devices are easier to support due to them not being spread across any and all devices imaginable.

Everyone is complaining of iPads not reaching their full potential, especially with mouse and keyboard support increasing. But those same people seem to be contradicting themselves.

2 Likes