Best Practices for Designing Around Presence/Absence of Home Button on Tablets?

Question

Older iPads used to have a home button:

Newer iPads don't have it. They have a line on the screen you're supposed to swipe up to get to the home screen:

Now if an app has a row of links or buttons at the bottom of the screen, it has to leave extra space for that line on the screen.

How are people handling this? Am I supposed to do device sniffing to figure out whether to leave that extra space for that line? I thought device sniffing was deprecated.

Answer 1

Mobile devices feature complex screen layouts, with camera insets, rounded screens, and hovering navigation elements. Web applications cannot query the exact geometry of these features. However, CSS provides a “safe area inset” environment variable that indicates how much padding you must add to get an unobstructed rectangular content region, and is therefore suggested by Apple for websites that target modern iOS devices.