I just found Futo keyboard. Works very well and has offline voice input that works great.
So it might be that Fairphone is not aware how to make the notification bar transparent. It’s a setting in android development they can enable. (Disclaimer: I’m not a developer.)
With that in mind, they seem to be saying it was intentional to hide their lack of knowledge. It’s simply unreasonable that any developer would want such a hideous defect permanently at the top of the home screen.
On a positive note, I believe android 15 is supposed to correct this when the developer does not.
It seems to be how apps can link themselves to a URL. This service just verifies the link is good.
Here is a writeup on it: https://grapheneos.org/usage#app-link-verification
Been using smart launcher for a while. I like that the pro version offers blur.