By default, React Navigation tries to ensure that the elements of the navigators display correctly on devices with notches [e.g. iPhone X] and UI elements which may overlap the app content. Such items include:
- Physical notches
- Status bar overlay
- Home activity indicator on iOS
- Navigation bar on Android
The area not overlapped by such items is referred to as "safe area".
We try to apply proper insets on the UI elements of the navigators to avoid being overlapped by such items. The goal is to [a] maximize usage of the screen [b] without hiding content or making it difficult to interact with by having it obscured by a physical display cutout or some operating system UI.
While React Navigation handles safe areas for the built-in UI elements by default, your own content may also need to handle it to ensure that content isn't hidden by these items.
It's tempting to solve [a] by wrapping your entire app in a container with padding that ensures all content will not be occluded. But in doing so, we waste a bunch of space on the screen, as pictured in the image on the left below. What we ideally want is the image pictured on the right.
While React Native exports a SafeAreaView component, this component only supports iOS 10+ with no support for older iOS versions or Android. In addition, it also has some issues, i.e. if a screen containing safe area is animating, it causes jumpy behavior. So we recommend to use the useSafeAreaInsets hook from the react-native-safe-area-context library to handle safe areas in a more reliable way.
warning
The react-native-safe-area-context library also exports a SafeAreaView component. While it works on Android, it also has the same issues related to jumpy behavior when animating. So we recommend always using the useSafeAreaInsets hook instead and avoid using the SafeAreaView component.
The rest of this guide gives more information on how to support safe areas in React Navigation.
React Navigation handles safe area in the default header. However, if you're using a custom header, it's important to ensure your UI is within the safe area.
For example, if I render nothing for the header or
import {
SafeAreaProvider,
useSafeAreaInsets,
} from 'react-native-safe-area-context';
function Demo[] {
const insets = useSafeAreaInsets[];
return [