[lifthrasiir]

The existence of direct keyboard layouts doesn't always imply that they would be popular though. I think this happens fairly regularly around the world and the only major exception I'm aware of is Korean where no phonetic input methods were widespread at any moment.

[the_g0d_f4ther]

It’s also related to the the layout of the first phone’s keyboards, where you had to type up to three times to select a letter ( it also was latin characters only)

[j16sdiz]

Korean is phonetic.

[lifthrasiir]

Not exactly, though. And Japanese kana should be phonetic enough that a direct input method should be used for kana, but the dominant input method there is Romaji, i.e. typing Latin characters to get both kana and kanji. So that is not a defining factor.