The placeholder and initial content are two completely different things…
As @mikeloc pointed out, think of the placeholder as an instruction for the user, like “Please Type your Name Here…” or “Enter Your Phone Number…”.
And the initial content is a way to preload the input with data already in the database (or elsewhere).
To address your question, what you’re currently doing should work…
If the initial content is empty the placeholder should still show…
So if you’re sure (and you literally mean) that your input is blank when you preview your app, then there are only a couple of things I can think of to check…
- Your placeholder text colour is set to white (or the same colour as the background)?
- Your initial content is not actually empty, but contains one or more spaces (so the spaces will be showing rather then the placeholder)?
So I’d check both of those things first, but other that that it should work as you’re intending it to, so I’m not sure what’s going on otherwise…