Prevent Entry soft keyboard from showing on Android

I am programmatically entering text into a bunch of Entry controls in a ContentPage. I don't want the keyboard to show since the user isn't supposed to type into them - the text comes from a different async service. But I do want the blinking cursor to show as visual feedback.

This is a common problem in Android land with everyone stating the same solutions (here and here).

So I have a custom renderer for the Entry control, which looks like this for Android:

[assembly: ExportRenderer (typeof (MyEntry), typeof (MyEntryRenderer_Android))]
public class MyEntryRenderer_Android: EntryRenderer
{   
    protected override void OnElementChanged (ElementChangedEventArgs<Entry> e)
    {
        base.OnElementChanged (e);
        if (e.OldElement == null) {
            //  **** this doesn't work
            InputMethodManager imm = (InputMethodManager)Context.GetSystemService(global::Android.Content.Context.InputMethodService);
            imm.HideSoftInputFromWindow(Control.WindowToken, HideSoftInputFlags.None);
        }
    }

    protected override void OnAttachedToWindow()
    {
        //  **** this doesn't work either
        InputMethodManager imm = (InputMethodManager)Context.GetSystemService(global::Android.Content.Context.InputMethodService);
        imm.HideSoftInputFromWindow(Control.WindowToken, HideSoftInputFlags.None);
        base.OnAttachedToWindow();
    }

    public override bool OnInterceptTouchEvent(MotionEvent e)
    {
        // **** this does work
        Control.RequestFocus();
        if (UIControl.Instance.VoiceInputEnabled)
        {
            return true;
        }
        else
        {
            return false;
        }
    }
}

You can see my attempts at preventing the keyboard in OnElementChangedand OnAttachedToWindow. They don't work, it still pops up when I programmatically set focus to the control. However, if the user clicks on the entry, that OnInterceptTouchEvent override is called and that does prevent the keyboard from showing.

BTW I have also tried this in my MainActivity.cs for Android:

protected override void OnCreate(Bundle bundle)
{
    base.OnCreate(bundle);
    this.Window.SetSoftInputMode(SoftInput.StateAlwaysHidden);

    //...
}

Still no dice. How can prevent it from showing?