Appium Android Chrome can show keyboard state without exposing Gboard candidates

What happened

The remaining Android legacy row was no longer structural editing.

It was real keyboard-feature behavior:

• autocorrect
• glide typing
• voice input

Direct local probes on the Android Chrome emulator showed that the stack is only half-open:

• Appium can load the real Slate route
• Appium can focus the editor
• /appium/device/is_keyboard_shown returns true
• Appium exposes both CHROMIUM and NATIVE_APP

But the transport still does not expose the part that matters for autocorrect:

• NATIVE_APP element lookup returns zero com.google.android.inputmethod.latin nodes
• suggestion/candidate lookup returns zero nodes
• Appium native source only exposes Chrome, not the visible Gboard candidate strip

What still failed

Hardware-style key injection is not an honest autocorrect proof here.

Typing cant plus space through Android keycodes produced literal text:

• blockTexts: "cant "
• recent events were plain beforeinput:insertText:*
• no correction was accepted

That proves the local transport can still drive literal text insertion while missing the real candidate-acceptance path.

An ADB uiautomator dump follow-up with the keyboard visible also failed cleanly enough to be unhelpful here, returning only Killed instead of a full IME tree.

Why this matters

This separates two different claims:

1. Android Chrome editor input is locally provable for ordinary typing and the structural rows
2. Android keyboard-feature behavior is not locally provable on the current Appium + Chrome stack

Do not treat visible keyboard state as proof that you can inspect or drive Gboard suggestions.

Reusable rule

For Android keyboard-feature parity on this repo:

• treat keyboardShown: true as setup truth only
• treat NATIVE_APP availability as setup truth only
• if Gboard candidate nodes are absent and keycodes only yield literal text, mark the row tooling-blocked
• do not pretend hardware keycodes are a substitute for autocorrect, glide, or voice-input proof
• move the remaining row to an external/manual or alternate-transport evidence lane