Game Tools letterboxing on Samsung devices

Question

Samsung has something called Game Tools on the s7,s8, and s9 that automatically puts games in a letterbox mode. You have to dig into the Game Tools menu and toogle 'Full Screen' to eliminate this, in which case Game Tools asks to restart your game and restarts your game in true full screen mode if you accept. I've found after you quit the game it often turns itself back to letterbox mode. Very irritating, particularly as this often affects navigation button functionality.

Even though I've experimented with additional settings of my game to fullscreen and hide navigation and no tools in various ways, besides appropriate decorView settings, which should be enough on its own since my minSdkVersion is 21, the game comes up letterboxed when the Full Screen toogle has not been manually and recently set to on in the Game Tools menu. Is this something we just have to warn players about with a screen message at the start of the game now?

Answer 1

My guess is that this "Game Tools" feature is just a cover-up for the underlying problem: new Samsung phones have an aspect ratio that is higher than the default supported aspect ratio for Android apps. You have to manually modify your app's manifest to declare that you support these larger aspect ratios.

<meta-data android:name="android.max_aspect" android:value="2.1" />

Assuming I'm right that this is just an aspect ratio issue, you can read more here in this Google blog post: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/03/update-your-app-to-take-advantage-of.html