Ionic: setFocus & ion-textarea

i’m using ionic 3 and trying to achieve setting focus to an ion-textarea that’s within the footer. The problem is that when I use ion-textarea in the footer, it disappears when the keyboard is open (not great) BUT .setFocus() works. When I use a regular textarea, the footer moves up with the keyboard but setFocus() does not work!

Is there a workaround for this? Preferably fixing issue 1 (making ion-textarea) move up with the keyboard…