How to Fix a Game Not Filling the Screen on Notched Phones

Black bars on notched phones is not opting into the cutout. Here is how to fix it.

How to fix it

1. Opt into the cutout area

Set the display cutout mode so the game renders into the full screen including around the notch, rather than the OS letterboxing it to avoid the cutout. This fills the screen edge to edge.

2. Respect the safe area for UI

While rendering background art edge to edge, keep interactive and critical UI within the safe area so the notch does not cover it. Render into the cutout for visuals but inset the UI.

3. Test on cutout devices

Test on phones with notches, hole-punches, and rounded corners to confirm the game fills the screen and UI stays clear of the cutout. Cutout shapes vary, so verify across representative devices.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every mobile error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.