Bug 301994 – REGRESSION (iOS 26.1): Status bar remains visible in fullscreen mode in Home Screen Web apps

• Component: WebKit Misc.
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

Created attachment 477302 [details]
Wrong behavior of status bar area in fullscreen mode (it should be transparent instead of blocking white)

Installed PWAs (both local and online) are no longer displayed correctly in fullscreen mode since iOS 26.1.

The status bar at the top now remains constantly visible (in white), which reduces the visible area of the webpage content — it no longer covers the entire display. (See attached video)

In my case, previously on iOS 26.0, the layout still behaved as expected — truly fullscreen, from the bottom edge to the top edge of the screen, including the area of the status bar.

I couldn’t find any notes in the release documentation indicating that the syntax related to this behavior has changed, or that any modifications were made at all.

I therefore assume this is a bug and would like to request that the previous fullscreen web app behavior from iOS 26.0 be restored.

Thank you very much.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

Thank you for the report!

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/164130526>

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

We are seeing the same behavior on iOS 18.6, 26.0 and 26.1. Could you please verify if anything is different between the tests, or perhaps highlight what exactly has changed if it's subtle?

(In reply to Alexey Proskuryakov from comment #3)
> We are seeing the same behavior on iOS 18.6, 26.0 and 26.1. Could you please
> verify if anything is different between the tests, or perhaps highlight what
> exactly has changed if it's subtle?

On iOS 26.0 (iPhone 12 mini), my PWA and others were able to fully occupy the entire screen without issues. Since updating to iOS 26.1, the status bar has started to reclaim screen space again.
Previously, several steps were required to achieve full-screen behavior, including setting display: standalone in the manifest and using viewport-fit=cover in the HTML header. Without changing any of these settings from iOS 26.0 to iOS 26.1, the system update caused the PWA to stop rendering content behind the status bar. It happens to all of my PWAs installed on the Home Screen.

Additionally, env(safe-area-inset-top) now returns 0, whereas before the update it was approximately 44pt.

Does this information help?
I am not an expert and cannot assess whether the issue lies in WebKit or in changes made by Apple at the system level.

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

rdar://164021232

[Callum Gare]

I’m also running into this. In iOS 18.6 and 26.0 it was possible to cover the entire screen with content including behind the status bar using viewport-fit=“cover” and then use safe area inset to make sure no controls or important content was covered. Now this seems like no longer the case as there is a permanent solid rectangle of colour behind the status bar and content is pushed down and safe area inset is 0.

Also it appears that the css units vh and lvh is arguably broken in this situation. svh and dvh both are equal to the distance between the bottom of the status bar background rectangle and the bottom screen (which again as far as I can tell is the maximum height it is now possible to display content) but by and lvh seem to be the distance between the top of the physical phone screen to the bottom (again, even though it seems like it is no longer possible to get a viewport size this big).

You can see that in this screen shot here https://i.imgur.com/2adOORR.png where I’ve saved https://skwbr.net/sample/sizecheck/ using “add to Home Screen”

We are also seeing this issue in 26.1. Everything was working as expected eg. full screen in 26.0 but now its showing a black/white cover at the top. None of our meta tags, safe-areas or manifest values have changed. 

This is a web app saving using "Add to Homescreen"

You can see the current 26.1 issue here https://postimg.cc/ppbx2R96
You can see how it used to look on 26.0 and how we expect it to look here https://postimg.cc/mhMfpJdw

I also seeing this issue in 26.1

I see the same thing on our PWA, full screen works on 26.2 beta 3 (23C5044b) and 18.7.2 but not 26.1 (23B85)

[gohan]

I see this bug was fixed on 26.2.

I can confirm, that 26.2 fixed the issue. Thanks to the developers!