Give EditText focus without showing the soft input

Question

I have an EditText configured in the following way because I have a custom keyboard to display:

    binding.editText.showSoftInputOnFocus = false

It works alright but I want to give the focus to the field when I load the screen, so I'm doing the following in my onStart method:

    binding.editText.requestFocus()

When I do this the default keyboard unfortunately shows and hide my custom keyboard. How to give the focus to the EditText without showing the soft input?