---
name: Home indicator
slug: home-indicator
category: layout
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: The thin bar at the bottom of a gesture driven phone screen,
  reserved space that app content must not sit beneath.
aliases:
  - name: home bar
    source: community
  - name: gesture bar
    source: android
tags:
  - platform-registers
  - touch
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - edge-swipe
    - safe-area
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso: []
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: Layout, Human Interface Guidelines
    url: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/layout
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: the reserved strip at the bottom of a modern phone
---

When the hardware home button went away, the gesture that replaced it needed somewhere to
live and something to point at. The home indicator is that something: a short rounded bar
along the bottom edge, drawn by the system, doing two jobs at once. It is a signifier,
telling a first time user that swiping up from the bottom edge goes home, and it is a claim
on space, because the band it sits in belongs to the system rather than to the application
drawing behind it.

The second job is the one layouts get wrong, and it is not really about the pixels. Touches
that begin inside that band are the system's before they are yours. A button whose lower
half sits under the indicator can still be tapped in its upper half and looks perfectly
fine in a screenshot, but a swipe that starts on it goes home instead of doing whatever the
button promised. The same trap catches a carousel, a slider, or a swipe-to-dismiss row
parked at the very bottom of the screen: the control is visible, reachable, in the
[thumb zone](/thumb-zone), and quietly losing its first gesture to the operating system.

It is worth keeping apart from the [display cutout](/display-cutout), because the two are
mirror images and only one of them takes input. A cutout eats into the display from the top,
removing pixels you may still paint but nobody will ever see. A home indicator reserves a
strip at the bottom that you may paint and that everyone can see, and it swallows a gesture
that starts there. The [status bar](/status-bar) is the third member of the set and the
tamest: it claims a band at the top and hands back everything below it. All three arrive as
part of one number from the platform, the [safe area](/safe-area), which is why the honest
fix is almost never a hardcoded value.

Two practical notes. Inset from the reported bottom inset rather than from a remembered
figure: the strip is not the same height on every device, it is zero on a phone that still
has a home button, and it changes when the device rotates. And full screen content is
allowed to run underneath it, which is what a video player or a game does, at which point
the system dims the indicator so it stops competing with the picture. Dimmed is not gone.
The strip keeps the gesture, so the first swipe up brings the indicator back rather than
reaching your content, and any control you left down there is still going to lose.