Why does my custom iPhone keyboard have a gap at the bottom?
A thin strip below the bottom row that doesn’t match the theme above it is almost always the home indicator area — the reserved strip every Face ID iPhone keeps for the swipe-up gesture — showing through because the keyboard’s own background stopped short of it.
Everything above it looks right — the keys line up, the theme is solid, the spacing is even — and then, right at the very edge of the screen, there is a thin strip that doesn’t belong. Sometimes it’s plain white showing under a dark theme, sometimes plain black under a light one, sometimes just a shade off from the colour sitting a few pixels above it. It reads like a rendering mistake. On an iPhone with no home button, there is a specific, unglamorous reason for it: a strip of screen at the very bottom has a job to do, and not every keyboard’s background reaches all the way into it.
The strip is the home indicator’s territory
Every iPhone since the physical home button was dropped keeps a thin horizontal bar at the very bottom of the screen — the one you swipe up on to go home from any app. iOS reserves a strip of screen for it on every full-screen view, keyboards included, and that strip sits below what developers call the “safe area”: the region apps are told to keep their actual content clear of, so a button or a line of text never ends up hidden under the swipe gesture. A keyboard extension gets handed a rectangle at the bottom of the screen and draws every key, background and colour inside it itself, and that rectangle includes this reserved strip whether or not the keyboard’s own drawing code bothers to fill it.
Why it shows up on some keyboards and not others
That is the actual variable. A keyboard can extend its themed background color all the way to the physical bottom edge of the screen, behind the home indicator, so the reserved strip simply looks like more of the same theme — which is what you see on Apple’s own keyboard and on most third-party ones that got this detail right. Or it can stop drawing at the edge of the safe area instead, treating the strip below it as someone else’s problem. When that happens, iOS falls back to whatever the view’s own default background is underneath — typically plain white or plain black depending on the system appearance — and that default colour has no relationship to the theme sitting directly above it, which is exactly the mismatch you are looking at.
Not a bug in iOS, and not something a setting fixes
There is no toggle in Settings → General → Keyboard for this, because it isn’t a setting-level behaviour — it is a decision baked into how a specific keyboard’s layout code measures itself, made once by that keyboard’s developer and shipped the same way to everyone. iOS itself is not doing anything wrong here; it reserves the same strip for every app and every keyboard equally and lets each one decide how to handle it. The inconsistency you are noticing between keyboards is really just different developers making different choices about one small rectangle at the bottom of their own view.
How to tell what you are actually looking at
- The strip is the same colour as the theme right above it → not a gap at all, just the theme correctly extending into the reserved area. Nothing to fix.
- The strip is plain white or plain black and stays that colour no matter which theme you pick → the keyboard’s background is stopping at the safe area boundary instead of reaching the physical edge. This is the case described above.
- The strip only appears in one specific app and not in others → a different cause, most likely that app’s own view showing through behind the keyboard rather than anything about the keyboard’s theme.
Where Kibo fits
Kibo’s themes set the backdrop, the key fill, the pressed state, the corner radius and the text colour as one designed unit rather than a tint laid over an existing background, which is the same full-canvas approach that keeps a mismatched strip like this from showing through in the first place. It is free to download and works with Full Access left off — none of this is a Full Access matter either way, since it is purely how far a keyboard’s own drawing reaches on screen.
Frequently asked questions
What is the strip at the very bottom of an iPhone keyboard?
It is the home indicator area — the reserved strip every Face ID iPhone keeps at the bottom of the screen for the swipe-up-to-go-home gesture. Every full-screen view, keyboards included, has this strip; whether it looks like part of the theme or like a mismatched bar depends on whether that keyboard’s background was drawn to reach all the way to the physical edge of the screen.
Is a mismatched bar at the bottom of my keyboard a bug?
Not in the sense of something broken — it is a layout choice a keyboard’s developer made, whether deliberately or by not accounting for the home indicator strip. It doesn’t affect typing, sound or any other keyboard feature; it is purely cosmetic.
Can I turn this off in Settings?
No. There is no iOS setting that controls how far a third-party keyboard’s background extends — that is decided in the keyboard’s own layout code, not exposed anywhere in Settings → General → Keyboard.
Try it on your own keyboard
Kibo is a free custom keyboard for iPhone with real mechanical key sounds, a wardrobe of themes and RGB backlight effects. No account, no ads, and it works with Full Access left off.