Actually, guys, there is a way. I struggled mightily to figure this out for [LINK REMOVED] (try it on an iPhone or iPad).
Basically, Safari on touchscreen devices is stingy when it comes to focus()ing textboxes. Even some desktop browsers do better if you do click().focus(). But the designers of Safari on touchscreen devices realized it’s annoying to users when the keyboard keeps coming up, so they made the focus appear only on the following conditions:
1) The user clicked somewhere and focus() was called while executing the click event. If you are doing an AJAX call, then you must do it synchronously, such as with the deprecated (but still available) $.ajax({async:false}) option in jQuery.
2) Furthermore — and this one kept me busy for a while — focus() still doesn’t seem to work if some other textbox is focused at the time. I had a “Go” button which did the AJAX, so I tried blurring the textbox on the touchstart event of the Go button, but that just made the keyboard disappear and moved the viewport before I had a chance to complete the click on the Go button. Finally I tried blurring the textbox on the touchend event of the Go button, and this worked like a charm!
When you put #1 and #2 together, you get a magical result that will set your login forms apart from all the crappy web login forms, by placing the focus in your password fields, and make them feel more native. Enjoy! 🙂