Five years ago, the tech world was up in arms when Apple introduced the notch in its iPhone X. It was described as ugly and made fun of and lampooned by rivals and analysts alike. It was criticised as something that obstructed the view of users and was about as welcome and as intrusive as a bull in a shop packed with ceramic. Fast forward to the present day, and the most talked-about feature in the latest iPhone 14 Pro series is actually a variant of that much-despised feature. Apple has now given it a new shape and even built an interface around it and now calls it the Dynamic Island. What was once considered ugly and intrusive is now actually a unique selling proposition.
Two schools of notch thought
The arrival of Dynamic Island also marked a key moment in what some initially called the “notch wars” between Apple and Android brands. Ever since Apple introduced the notch, the Android competition’s reaction — as often happens — began with sneering contempt, moved to imitation, and then graduated to imitation with innovation.
The interesting part, however, was that while Android did adopt the notch to the extent that almost every regular (non-foldable) smartphone launched on that platform in recent times has come with some sort of notch or the other, its interpretation of the notch was very different from Apple’s. The result of this notch face-off is that while Apple has made Dynamic Island appear like something special, Android has reduced the notch to a largely regular, almost boringly normal feature.
Android’s tryst with notched destiny… but first, pop-up cameras
It was not always thus, though. In the initial phase, Android brands seemed to be far more innovative in their approach toward the notch. Once they had stopped poking fun at it and adopted it as one of their own, that is.
For a period of time, most Android players followed an approach that adopted the notch as a sort of necessary evil at lower price points while still trying to avoid it altogether at higher prices.
A number of phones in 2018-19 came without notches, instead having pop-up selfie cameras that nestled behind the display and, as their names indicated, ‘popped up’ when one needed to take a selfie or use face ID. There were attempts to distinguish between pop-up cameras depending on their location (to the right, left, or top centre), and some (such as on the Redmi K20i) even emerged with flashing lights. Different shapes were tried as well, with Oppo going with a ‘shark fin’ shaped pop-up camera. However, the pop-up camera approach proved unsustainable in the long run as the presence of a moving part made devices more fragile and also more difficult to protect against water and dust.
Android vs Apple notches: Form vs function
Somewhere around late 2019, Android made its peace with the notch. This led to the dawn of the punch-hole notch era, with notches being totally cut out in different shapes at the top of the display, rather than appearing like an extension of the top of the phone into the display itself (what some called the “raindrop notch”).
Some brands went with a capsule form factor, accommodating more than one camera and flash in the notch, while others focused on making the notch as small and unobtrusive as possible, and fiddled with its location on top of the phone. Millimetre measurements of notch diameters became part of spec sheet readouts at phone launches.
Even while Android was engulfed in notch tweaking, Apple stubbornly stuck to broadly the same notch — a bit like a rectangle on top of the display with slightly rounded edges. Its size changed from time to time, shrinking slightly, but by and large, it remained the same alleged eyesore that came into our tech lives via the iPhone X in 2017. Every year, speculation would mount around what Apple would do with the notch, and every year Apple would persist with the same design.
Apple’s reason for persisting with the design reveals the difference between the Cupertino company’s approach to the notch as compared to its Android rivals. For Apple, the notch was more about function than form. That was because one of the main reasons behind the introduction of the notch on iPhones was not just to remove bezels from around the display, but also to facilitate Face ID.
The notch on an iPhone contained not only a selfie camera, but also an array of sensors to ensure that you could safely and securely unlock your iPhone with just a glance at it.
That is actually the biggest reason why Apple could not shrink the size of the notch by much or even change its shape significantly — doing so would have compromised the security of the iPhone. Even the Dynamic Island is actually not very different in actual size from the notch. It is only placed a little lower and seems cut out from the display rather than an extension of the top of the phone.
Even as we write this, there is a debate raging about whether the Dynamic Island actually obstructs the viewing experience more than the old notch does, but that’s another story.
Dynamic Island: Time for Android to make the notch more than just a cosmetic touch
Even with the Dynamic Island, Apple has not compromised on functionality. The Dynamic Island contains the cameras and sensors that make FaceID secure and with Apple’s tweaks, can expand to show notifications and other information when needed.
In short, just like the Notch, the Dynamic Island is not just about finding a place to park a selfie camera and keep it as small and unobtrusive as possible. It is about phone security and now also has the ability to display additional information. It undoubtedly looks cool too, but it has a strong functional side.
Most Android players, on the other hand, have reduced the notch to a mainly decorative extra that houses the selfie camera, and which has to be kept in the display because there is no space for it on the super narrow bezels around it. It is interesting to note that even five years after Apple brought Face ID to the iPhone, there is hardly any Android device that claims to offer secure face unlock.
Most Android phones do support face unlock but you are warned at the very outset that the system is not a secure one and that you would be better off using the fingerprint sensor that is a part of almost all Android devices these days. The main reason for this is the belief that a notch should be as small as possible, rather than perform a function. And with smaller notches come smaller functionalities.
Apple has tended to regard the notch as something that is critical rather than cosmetic. Which is why it has always built functionality around the notch — functionality that extends well beyond snapping selfies.
Most Android players, however, seem to have been largely preoccupied with its size, shape, and location and have never thought of it as something beyond a bearer of selfie cameras. Will the Dynamic Island change that? We think it can.
A Xiaomi developer has already shown how a notch on a Xiaomi phone can be ‘extended’ to show connected earbuds, and this is just the beginning. The coming days could see the Dynamic Island concept come to Android with a vengeance, and notches becoming a sort of notification area for phones, as Android players realise what Apple always knew about the notch — it was about what it could do, not how it looked.