How to Stop EditText from gaining focus at Activity startup

Excellent answers from Luc and Mark however a good code sample is missing:

<!-- Dummy item to prevent AutoCompleteTextView from receiving focus -->
<LinearLayout
    android:focusable="true" 
    android:focusableInTouchMode="true"
    android:layout_width="0px" 
    android:layout_height="0px"/>

<!-- :nextFocusUp and :nextFocusLeft have been set to the id of this component
to prevent the dummy from receiving focus again -->
<AutoCompleteTextView android:id="@+id/autotext"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent" 
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:nextFocusUp="@id/autotext" 
    android:nextFocusLeft="@id/autotext"/>

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Is the actual problem that you just don't want it to have focus at all? Or you don't want it to show the virtual keyboard as a result of focusing the EditText? I don't really see an issue with the EditText having focus on start, but it's definitely a problem to have the softInput window open when the user did not explicitly request to focus on the EditText (and open the keyboard as a result)

If it's the problem of the virtual keyboard, see the AndroidManifest.xml <activity> elementdocumentation.

android:windowSoftInputMode="stateHidden" - always hide it when entering the activity

or android:windowSoftInputMode="stateUnchanged" - don't change it (e.g., don't show it if it isn't already shown, but if it was open when entering the activity, leave it open)

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A more simple solution exists. Set these attributes in your parent layout:

<RelativeLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:id="@+id/mainLayout"
    android:descendantFocusability="beforeDescendants"
    android:focusableInTouchMode="true" >

And now, when the activity starts this main layout will get focus by default.

Also, we can remove focus from child views at runtime (e.g., after finishing child editing) by giving the focus to the main layout again, like this:

findViewById(R.id.mainLayout).requestFocus();

Good comment from Guillaume Perrot:

android:descendantFocusability="beforeDescendants" seems to be the default (integer value is 0). It works just by adding android:focusableInTouchMode="true".

Really, we can see that the beforeDescendants set as default in the ViewGroup.initViewGroup()method (Android 2.2.2). But not equal to 0. ViewGroup.FOCUS_BEFORE_DESCENDANTS = 0x20000;

Thanks to Guillaume.