- The status and navigation bars take up precious screen space, but they’re capable of going transparent so Android apps can display content underneath them.
- This is called edge-to-edge mode, but many apps do not support this feature.
- Code snippets suggest that Android 15 could force some apps to go edge-to-edge by default.
Smartphones are much bigger than they used to be a decade ago. Thanks to the increased screen space, you can fit more content than you could in the past. But the sizes of smartphones and their bezels have plateaued in the last few years, so app developers need to get clever with how they use the available space. Android has long offered apps the ability to use the entire height and width of the display — i.e., go edge-to-edge — but many apps don’t take advantage of this. That could change with the release of Android 15, though, which is poised to force some apps to go edge-to-edge by default.
Today, in order to go edge-to-edge, apps need to opt-in by implementing a few APIs. This is because drawing the UI behind the navigation bar and status bar (otherwise known as “system bars”) might not make sense for every app, especially if there are interactive elements like buttons that would overlap with the system bars. Developers have a way to address these overlaps before enabling edge-to-edge mode for their apps, but the fact that this is necessary shows why Google has so far chosen not to enforce this behavior for every app. Those days might be ending, though, as I discovered code in the latest Android 14 QPR2 beta that suggests the OS might enforce this behavior for apps that target the next version of Android.