[ScreenFooter] - Fix taps absorbed in footer area on Android (physical devices)

[MIchaelZablianov]

Description

On Android physical devices, taps in the empty padding area of ScreenFooter (and therefore FloatingButton, which is now backed by ScreenFooter) are absorbed instead of falling through to content behind. This breaks FlatList items that scroll under a FloatingButton — their onPress never fires.

Root cause: ScreenFooter wraps everything in a Reanimated Animated.View and tries to enable fall-through via pointerEvents="box-none". That prop on a Reanimated Animated.View is unreliable on Android (see referenced upstream issues — pointerEvents is silently ignored, taps in the band are captured).

Reproduces only on Android physical devices (not iOS, not Android emulators).

When the caller doesn't need an entrance animation (animationDuration === 0 — which is what FloatingButton's withoutAnimation prop sets), no transform is needed at all. We add a static-visible short-circuit to both branches (HOISTED and STICKY) that bypasses Reanimated entirely and renders a plain RN View tree. Plain Views honour pointerEvents correctly on Android.

For HOISTED, pointerEvents="box-none" is also forwarded to KeyboardAccessoryView, which propagates it via {...others} to the inner KeyboardTrackingView (a plain RN View on Android). The prop isn't part of KeyboardAccessoryView's typed surface, so the spread + cast {...({pointerEvents: 'box-none'} as object)} is used.

The non-static (animated) branches are intentionally left unchanged — those still rely on pointerEvents on Animated.View and are still subject to the same upstream bug. Solving that requires a separate, more invasive change (e.g. shrinking the Animated.View to wrap only the buttons, or replacing it).

Repro snippet:

<View flex>
  <FlatList ... />
  <FloatingButton
    button={{label: 'Add', onPress: () => {}}}
    visible
    withoutAnimation
    bottomMargin={32}
  />
</View>

On an Android physical device: scroll FlatList items into the FAB band, taps on those items don't fire. With this fix, they do.

Upstream references (why pointerEvents is broken on Reanimated Animated.View on Android):

• Animated.View: Touches are not working for positioned absolutely animated.view on Android only software-mansion/react-native-reanimated#8497
• pointerEvents="box-none" does not work on Animated.View on Android? software-mansion/react-native-gesture-handler#1270

Changelog

ScreenFooter - Fix taps in the footer's transparent area being absorbed instead of falling through to content behind on Android (physical devices) when animationDuration is 0. Affects FloatingButton with withoutAnimation.

Additional info

N/A

Made with Cursor

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[M-i-k-e-l]

This line has a good potential for a better solution (a little less footprint and a little more readable IMO).

Click to see a hint

How is `animationDuration === 0` called in `FloatingButton`?

[M-i-k-e-l]

Also, did you go over the description? :)

[MIchaelZablianov]

work on it continued in #3990