Twitch mobile safe zones: where your cam, chat, and alerts should go on a vertical stream

Updated August 2026. About a 7 minute read.

You built a nice vertical layout, went live, then opened the Twitch app on your phone to check it. Half your overlay is gone. Your alert text is sitting under the chat box. The subscribe button is covering your facecam's chin.

None of that is a bug in your scene. It's Twitch drawing its own interface on top of your video, and it happens on every vertical stream, planned for or not. If you know where those controls land, you can build around them. This guide walks through where they go and how to place your stuff so nothing important gets covered.

What the Twitch app actually draws on top of your video

On a vertical stream, the mobile app renders your 9:16 feed full screen. Your video is the whole background. Then Twitch layers its interface over that background, and you don't get to move any of it.

There are three regions to care about.

The top holds the channel title, your name, the live badge, viewer count, and a close or minimize control. It sits across the top edge in a band.

The bottom is the busiest part. Chat scrolls there, the message input sits there, and a little row of stream controls lives down there too. On phones it also has to clear the device's own home indicator or gesture bar. This one eats the most screen.

The right edge carries a vertical strip of action buttons: follow, share, the heart or reactions, sometimes a settings or more menu. It's narrow but it runs a good chunk of the height.

None of this appears in OBS. Your preview and the Aitum Vertical dock both show a clean 1080x1920 canvas. The overlays only exist inside the Twitch app, so the only way to see them is to go live and look at your phone, or to plan for them ahead of time.

The approximate zones

On a 1080x1920 canvas, rough numbers to design against:

Top band: about the first 180px. Title, status, and viewer count live here.

Bottom band: about the last 320px. Chat and the input box live here, and this one is bigger than people expect.

Right edge: roughly the outer 120px or so of width, running down the middle portion of the screen where the action buttons sit.

Treat all of these as approximate. Twitch tweaks the app, chat can expand when it's busy, and different phones have different safe areas and notches. The point isn't to hit a pixel. It's to keep a margin so the app has room to draw without landing on the thing you care about.

Where to put each piece

Facecam goes in the top third, below the status bar. The top ~180px belongs to Twitch, so start your camera under that. Sizing your face to sit in the upper third reads well at phone scale and keeps it clear of both the top band and the chat down below. Don't push it all the way to the top edge or the title text clips into it.

Main content sits centered. Gameplay, the app you're demoing, whatever people are actually here to watch, put it in the vertical middle. Keep its 16:9 shape rather than stretching it, which lands it around 1080x607 running full width. The middle of the screen is the one part Twitch mostly leaves alone, so that's where your important pixels belong. Just watch the right edge, since the action buttons overlap the middle vertically. Keep score counters, timers, and anything you're reading off the screen away from that right strip.

Alerts go over the content, not at the bottom. A lot of people park alerts near the bottom out of habit from horizontal layouts. On mobile the bottom is chat. Put your follow and sub alerts in the middle band, over your content, where they'll actually be seen. You want them high enough to clear chat but still below the title. The center works.

Keep the bottom third empty of anything that matters. This is the single most useful rule. The bottom ~320px is going to have chat scrolling over it and an input box pinned to it. Any text or counter or logo you drop down there is getting covered. Leave it as background or fill it with something you don't mind losing, like a bit of scenery or a solid color.

One more thing. Your own burned-in chat box is usually redundant now. Twitch draws chat over vertical streams itself, so if you keep a chat source in your scene it shows up twice. Hide it on the vertical canvas.

SceneFlip handles the zones for you

Working these margins out by hand for every scene is the tedious part, so SceneFlip does it automatically.

You export your scene collection from OBS (Scene Collection, then Export, which saves a .json and touches nothing live), drop the file into SceneFlip in your browser, and it rebuilds each scene at 1080x1920 with these safe zones already applied. It puts the facecam up top under the status band, centers your content and keeps it off the right edge, drops alerts over the content, leaves the bottom third clear, and hides the burned-in chat. It's free, it runs entirely in the browser, and nothing uploads. Your scenes never leave your machine.

You get a side-by-side preview and a plain list of what it moved and why, so you can see the zones it applied before you import anything. If you want layouts tuned per genre, like a cam-heavy talk-show setup or a full-screen gameplay one, SceneFlip Pro ships presets for that. And since everything it outputs is a normal OBS scene, you can nudge any source in the Aitum Vertical dock afterward.

The zones aren't complicated. They're just invisible until you're live. Build with them in mind and your phone viewers see a clean stream instead of a title bar sitting on your face.

SceneFlip is a free tool for streamers going vertical. It runs entirely in your browser and your scene collection never leaves your machine. sceneflip.com