PS Remote Play full screen on Android: Fit or Fill?

Black bars on a wide Android phone usually mean the app is keeping the console's 16:9 picture intact. Your phone may be 20:9 in landscape. You cannot fill that wider shape, keep every pixel and avoid distortion all at once.

Why the bars appear

The console sends a 16:9 stream even when the game is shown on a wide phone. A 1080p stream is 1920 × 1080; turning up stream resolution doesn't change that shape. Fit scales the complete picture to the available screen height and leaves space at the sides.

The linked Backbone discussion documents the same complaint with Sony's app. It is user feedback about unused space, not evidence that a cropped picture contains more game detail.

Fit keeps the whole image

Choose Fit in PlayRoam's Android picture settings when you want the full game view, including HUD, subtitles and menus. It is also the safer default for first setup: you can see whether a game puts important information close to the edges.

Fit is part of Free. It does not need FSR, frame generation or a Vulkan 1.3 GPU.

Fill covers the screen by cropping

Choose Fill for a larger picture on a wide phone. PlayRoam scales the stream until it covers the display, preserving the original proportions. Android has no Stretch mode. Circles stay circular; the edges of the source picture are what you give up.

On a 20:9 screen, Fill crops the top and bottom, not the sides. Compared with the original 16:9 frame, about 20% of its height is outside the display: roughly 10% at each edge for a centred image. On a taller-than-16:9 tablet, the cropped edges can instead be on the left and right.

Try Fill during actual gameplay, not just the title screen. If a subtitle, health bar or mission prompt disappears, switch back to Fit. Fill does not unlock a wider field of view in the game.

Camera cutouts and touch controls

The video runs under the phone's camera cutout so it can cover the display. The on-screen controls stay clear of the camera. The cutout can still obscure part of the picture; keeping controls safe doesn't recover pixels behind it.

Use the touch-controller editor to move or hide controls and resize them from 0.6 to 1.6 times their original size. Set opacity or auto-hide to reduce the amount of picture behind buttons. A physical controller avoids that overlay altogether.

Picture sharpness is a separate setting

Start with a 1080p stream on a stable network. Fill enlarges it more than Fit, which can make softness easier to see. Pro's FSR 1 scales the stream to the screen with sharpening on a Vulkan 1.3 GPU; it matters most on QHD phones, tablets and TVs. It cannot restore cropped edges or turn the source into native QHD.

Frame generation on Android is another separate choice: it smooths a 30 FPS stream to 60 FPS and adds delay. Neither picture feature is required to use Fill. For the full setup, read PS5 Remote Play on Android or check Android availability.