I would love to utilize the whole screen area of the iPhone Duo. To do that, my app needs to show the controls on the side under the status indicators. It works nice if you use system NavigationStacks and TabBars. But what if you don’t?
I work on a browser app, and we don’t use system toolbars and tab bars, because they don’t provide enough flexibility for our tasks. For example, playing an icon animation in a tab bar is a bit challenging with the stock TabBar.
As far as I know, only system toolbars and tab bars move to the side, and there’s no API to know where this region exactly is.
So if you use some custom views you want to present on the side under the status indicators, you may need to guess its location depending on safe area margins, orientation and hinge state. I don’t want to do that, it doesn’t seem reliable.
It differs from the previous times screen shape changed. On an iPhone X, you just continued to put interactive content inside safe area, and in many cases you don’t need to go outside it. But in the case of iPhone Duo, you get a blank, unused space on the side, so it feels like we should do something about it.
So is there any way for the apps that do not use system tab bars and navigation system to put custom views in that blank area on the side?