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Report the window safe area insets through Dimensions - #58110

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Report the window safe area insets through Dimensions#58110
janicduplessis wants to merge 3 commits into
react:mainfrom
janicduplessis:safe-area/3-window-insets-in-dimensions

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@janicduplessis janicduplessis commented Aug 24, 2026

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Summary:

Dimensions.get('window').experimental_safeAreaInsets (and useWindowDimensions) reports the safe area insets of the window, using the same native computation as the view prop applied to the window itself.

Unlike the prop, this is available synchronously at startup — no event has to arrive first — and it updates through the existing change event. That is what react-native-safe-area-context needs initialWindowMetrics for, its last remaining native module, and it is what lets a component render padded on its first frame instead of correcting itself once the first inset event lands.

The field is absent, rather than zeroed, on platforms and versions that cannot report it, so a consumer can tell "no insets" from "unknown".

Prefixed members are stripped from ReactNativeApi.d.ts, so the public API snapshot is unchanged; the generated TypeScript types carry the field.

Stacked on #58109 — Android reads the insets through the observer that PR adds. This PR's diff includes the ones below it until they merge; review the top commit.

Changelog:

[GENERAL] [ADDED] - Report the window safe area insets as Dimensions.get('window').experimental_safeAreaInsets

Test Plan:

yarn fantom packages/react-native/Libraries/Utilities/__tests__/Dimensions-itest.js   # 4 passed

covering the physical-pixels-to-dp scaling and that the field is absent when native does not report it.

In RNTester, the new "Window safe area insets from Dimensions" section reports the same values as the view prop does for a full-screen view, on an iPhone 17 Pro simulator and an Android 16 emulator — screenshots in #57967.


Stack — split out of #57967, which stays open as the prototype and design discussion. GitHub will not take a fork branch as a pull request base, so each of these targets main and its diff contains the ones below it until they merge.

This PR's own change, without the ones below it: 13 files.

1. #58108 — Process synchronous event beats in the frame that requested them
2. #58109 — Add an `experimental_onSafeAreaInsetsChange` view prop

👉 3. #58110 — Report the window safe area insets through Dimensions
4. #58111 — Warn in development when a view reports its safe area insets in a loop
5. #58112 — Render the internal SafeAreaView from the safe area insets prop
6. #58113 — Remove the native SafeAreaView and the deprecated public export

`EventEmitter::experimental_flushSync` only *requests* a beat, which is
processed at the next `EventBeat::induce`. On Android the induce happens
within the frame, before drawing, so a synchronous request made during
layout is processed in that frame. On iOS it is not: the run loop observer
that induces the beat runs before Core Animation's commit observer, so a
request made from `layoutSubviews` — inside CA's commit cycle — is only
processed one frame later.

`AppleEventBeat` now also schedules an induce in the display phase of the
current commit cycle. Core Animation runs a commit as layout → display →
commit, so a zero-sized layer marked as needing display during layout has
its `display` called after the whole layout pass and before the transaction
is committed. A layer is kept in every visible window of every foreground
scene, since the request can come from any of them — a modal and the LogBox
are windows of their own — and only a layer in the tree being committed is
guaranteed a display this cycle. Requests within one cycle coalesce into a
single induce, so mounting ten observing views is one beat rather than ten.

Two related fixes in `EventBeat` itself: a synchronous request is no longer
stranded behind an already-scheduled asynchronous beat (it would silently
lose its this-frame guarantee, and the leftover flag would make an unrelated
later beat blocking), and `induce` becomes public so platform beats can call
it from a callback. `AppleEventBeat.cpp` becomes `.mm` for the Objective-C.

Covered by new unit tests in `EventBeatTest.cpp`.

This is the platform half of the safe area insets work: it is what makes an
inset change reported from `layoutSubviews` render in the frame it happened
in. `VirtualView` uses the same mechanism.
Reports the part of a view that is covered by the system UI, as a view prop:

```jsx
<View
  experimental_onSafeAreaInsetsChange={({nativeEvent: {insets, frame}}) => {
    // insets: {top, right, bottom, left}, frame: {x, y, width, height}
  }}
/>
```

`SafeAreaView` is deprecated in favour of `react-native-safe-area-context`,
but core surfaces like LogBox and the element inspector cannot depend on the
library, so core keeps a private copy of the deprecated component alive. The
smallest primitive that lets both sides go away is native code reporting
inset values to JavaScript — today the library's own `RNCSafeAreaProvider`
component. This adds that primitive, with the payload the library already
uses, so `SafeAreaProvider` can swap its native component for a plain `View`.

Insets are relative to the view: one laid out inside the safe area reports
zeros. That is what makes the prop composable and stops nested providers
from double-padding.

**Cost when unused.** The prop is a `bool` in `BaseViewProps`, like
`onLayout`; native only observes the safe area when it is set. On iOS the
flag is read from the props the view already holds and the last-sent insets
live behind a single pointer ivar that stays nil unless the view observes;
the only unconditional cost is a branch in `layoutSubviews`,
`didMoveToWindow` and `safeAreaInsetsDidChange`.

**Cost when used.** Events fire only when the *insets* change — the frame is
in the payload but not in the trigger — so a view moving inside a scroll
view emits nothing, and 50 observing rows scroll at the same frame times as
zero. An observing view allocates nothing per frame on Android in the steady
state. Benchmarked with the "Scroll benchmark" section of the new RNTester
example.

**Synchronous dispatch.** The event goes out through
`EventEmitter::experimental_flushSync` as a `Discrete` event, so inset-driven
layout is mounted in the frame the insets changed in — first mount included,
and on rotation the padding animates with the transition instead of jumping
after it.

Edge cases covered: view flattening (the prop forms a stacking context so
the host view cannot be optimized away), view recycling on both platforms,
Android views fully clipped by an ancestor, and multi-window iPad.
`Dimensions.get('window').experimental_safeAreaInsets` (and
`useWindowDimensions`) reports the safe area insets of the window, using the
same native computation as the view prop applied to the window itself.

Unlike the prop, this is available synchronously at startup — no event has to
arrive first — and it updates through the existing `change` event. That is
what the safe area context library needs `initialWindowMetrics` for, its last
remaining native module, and it is what lets a component render padded on its
very first frame instead of correcting itself once the first inset event
lands.

The field is absent on platforms and versions that cannot report it, rather
than reported as zeros, so a consumer can tell "no insets" from "unknown".
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