Android system bars and window insets

Understand how Android system bars and window insets affect the device screen space available for your application.

The Android system bars are Android system UI elements that generate window insets when visible. Window insets define the screen area these UI elements occupy, restricting your application to use the remaining available screen space. The Android system bars include:

• Status bar: Appears at the top of the screen and contains information such as time, battery, and notifications.
• Navigation bar: Appears at the bottom of the screen and contains navigation elements to move to the previous, home, or recent applications.

You can control the Android system bars through the System Bars section in the Android Player settings. This section provides settings to control whether the system bars are visible, how they look, how they respond to gestures, and whether your application content renders behind them.

• When you make the Android system bars visible and don’t render content behind them, your application content can use only the area available on the device screen, excluding the visible system bars or physical display cutouts.
• When you render your application content behind a visible system bar, your application content also uses that screen space, without hiding the bar. Screen.safeArea still excludes the area the bar covers.
• When you hide the Android system bars, your application content utilizes the full available screen space. This helps create a seamless full-screen user experience. Additionally, hiding the system bars reduces the risk of users exiting the application by mistake.

Note: On Android versions earlier than 15, the Render Outside Safe Area Player setting determines whether the full available screen space includes the area around physical display cutouts. On Android 15 and later, the Android operating system allows application content to extend over the display cutouts. However, in this case the application content cannot use the screen area Android system bars occupy when visible.

Additional resources

• Configure edge-to-edge rendering
• About window insets
• Hide system bars for immersive mode