Better support for iPhone 16 "Home Bar"

Feature Requests Engine Features
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1

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to create UI which compensates for the iPhone 16 “home bar”. The home bar is the thin bar at the bottom of the screen on the latest iphone models (shown in the screenshot)

The home bar is problematic because

  • It can sink events like Activated / MouseButton1Click, meaning players cannot click buttons at the bottom of the screen, even though events such as MouseEnter / MouseLeave seem to work
  • The studio emulator has no support for iPhone 16, meaning it is difficult to create UI which accounts for it
  • I don’t believe there is any way to detect through code whether the user has this home bar or not, which makes it difficult to create UI which dynamically adjusts for it.

iphone 16 home bar support
iphone 16 home bar support1920×869 129 KB

If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because:

  • I would be able to position UIs based on the presence of a home bar
  • Players would never be blocked from pressing buttons at the bottom of their screen, reducing their confusion and frustration.
6 Likes
2

I believe that that if you tap on the home bar, iOS will understand that there’s a possibility of you tapping something under it so it will wait about a second to make sure you aren’t trying to type to Siri and it you haven’t double tapped it, it will then tap the button underneath it

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3

In iOS 26 the home bar is going to be hidden by default entirely unless you just entered an app or have interacted with it so thankfully there isn’t really a need for this going forward.

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4

The “Home Bar” is hidden to prevent users from exiting Roblox on accident. What I’d do is create a ScreenGui with the device mask set to “iPhone 16 Pro”, then add the Bar to the bottom. That way, you can make your Gui fit to the user’s screen size.

5

I’ll just add on to this; Home bar isn’t Iphone 16 exclusive, it’s been implamented to all IPhones since TouchId removal, so IPhone X upwards.
This might also be true with newer Android devices.

6

I think the post is specifically referring to iPhone 16 models (and iPhone 15 Pro/Pro Max) where you can double tap the homebar to bring up Type to Siri. It’s part of the whole “Apple Intelligence (AI)” thing which an exclusive feature for those new models.

When you tap the homebar on older models, nothing happens other than the homebar appearing for a second or two. On those newer models, the worry of “what if my phone will mistaken me tapping the homebar for me trying to use Type to Siri?” may occur, and it could sink presses that may be trying to get to a button behind the homebar.

1 Like
7

My bad, I didn’t understand that issue was with the Siri. Good to know!