Inconsistent Safe Area and Status Bar Behavior on Samsung Devices (Capacitor + React)

Capacitor
1

Hey everyone, I’m really stuck on this one.

For reference im only using capacitor with react. I do not use the ionic framework.

I’ve tried using the Safe Area community plugin and also implemented the Status Bar plugin with overlay: false. However, I’m getting inconsistent results — especially on Samsung devices.

Is this expected behavior, and what’s the current recommended solution?

I’ve seen older posts where people mentioned that the Safe Area community plugin worked well, but now that it’s showing a “deprecated” message, I’m unsure whether it’s still the right approach.

On some devices, everything works perfectly — the safe areas and status bar color display correctly. But on others (like the Samsung S24), the status bar color doesn’t show, and the safe area gets messed up. It only partially works when I manually add certain CSS classes like the ones below

What’s the current best practice or go-to solution for handling safe areas and status bar styling across devices in Capacitor?

capacitator.config

…..

StatusBar: {

  overlaysWebView: false,

  backgroundColor: "#f7c56f",

  style: "LIGHT",

}

}

.css

--safe-area-top: env(safe-area-inset-top, 0px);

--safe-area-bottom: env(safe-area-inset-bottom, 0px);

--safe-area-left: env(safe-area-inset-left, 0px);

--safe-area-right: env(safe-area-inset-right, 0px);

}

}

/* Modern utilities and animations */

@layer utilities {

.safe-area-top {

padding-top: var(--safe-area-top);

}

.safe-area-bottom {

padding-bottom: var(--safe-area-bottom);

}

.safe-area-left {

padding-left: var(--safe-area-left);

}

.safe-area-right {

padding-right: var(--safe-area-right);

}

.safe-area-x {

padding-left: var(--safe-area-left);

padding-right: var(--safe-area-right);

}

.safe-area-y {

padding-top: var(--safe-area-top);

padding-bottom: var(--safe-area-bottom);

}

.safe-area-all {

padding-top: var(--safe-area-top);

padding-right: var(--safe-area-right);

padding-bottom: var(--safe-area-bottom);

padding-left: var(--safe-area-left);

}

2

From what I’ve seen, there isn’t a perfect solution yet.

You an use Android Edge-to-Edge Support Plugin for Capacitor - Capawesome to completely disable Edge-to-Edge.

Or in the Capacitor config, set android.adjustMarginsForEdgeToEdge to disable.

In our app, we were allowing the webview to overlap the status bar prior to the Edge-to-Edge feature so the solutions above didn’t work for us.

We are currently using the Safe Area plugin you mentioned so we can maintain the status bar overlay and support edge-to-edge for the nav bar. It’s not perfect but it works for us for now until better support comes. You probably saw the issue linked in the plugin here - [Feature]: natively support and document safe area insets · Issue #8121 · ionic-team/capacitor · GitHub.

Some people have posted custom configurations. See Edge to edge Android and the other related forum posts that show there.

3

Thanks for that.. Edge to edge plugin is actually working quite nice for me.. i choose that one.

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