I had a simular problem, even when switching tabs the keyboard popped up automatically and stayed up, with Android 3.2.1 on a Tablet. Use the following method:
Interestingly, this documentation https://developer.android.com/training/keyboard-input/visibility.html states that when an activity starts and focus is given to a text field, the soft keyboard is not shown (and then goes on to show you how to have the keyboard shown if you want to with some code).
On my Samsung Galaxy S5, this is how my app (with no manifest entry or specific code) works -- no soft keyboard. However on a Lollipop AVD, a soft keyboard is shown -- contravening the doc given above.
If you get this behavior when testing in an AVD, you might want to test on a real device to see what happens.
This occurs when your EditText automatically gets Focus as when you activity starts. So one easy and stable way to fix this, is simply to set the initial focus to any other view, such as a Button etc.
You can do this in your layout XML, no code required..
<!-- 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"/>
NOTE : The dummy item has to be PLACED RIGHT BEFORE the focusable element.
And I think it should work perfectly even with ScrollView and haven't had any problems with accessibility either for this.