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KDE Android News (September 2025)
Quoting: KDE Android News (September 2025) —
KDE’s Android builds as well as CI/CD and development containers and VM images have finally been switched to Android SDK 35 a few weeks ago. That was about time, with Google requiring this at least for Play Store updates starting from September 1st. Here’s why this took so long.
Starting with SDK 35 applications are drawing the entire screen, with the system status and navigation bars transparently overlaying the app content. This was possible in older SDKs already but generally wasn’t used by us. Now it’s the default and cannot be disabled anymore.
Not taking that into account would lead to parts of the application toolbar being inaccessible as the Android status bar handles input events there, as well as parts of the app UI being overdrawn by system controls, or ending up behind round screen corners, rounded screen edges or cameras placed in holes in the display.
To address that, Qt 6.9 introduced a new SafeArea API to tell the application which parts of the screen are safe to use for its content (see Qt’s blog post).