The selfie camera and facial recognition cutouts are increasingly becoming harder to hide as smartphone manufacturers pack more powerful hardware in these areas, increasingly taking more space. Rather than trying to hide this area, Apple took an interesting path with the iPhone 14 introducing the “Dynamic Island” which aims to make use of the cutout necessitated by the selfie camera.
For the uninitiated, Dynamic Island is a software implementation in the form of a pill-shaped cutout that can change shape and size to display alerts and notifications. The creative way to use the cutout has drawn praise from both the media and users and going by the reports, it won’t be long before we start seeing a similar implementation on Android.
For instance, Xiaomi China President Lu Weibing has already asked their users (when responding to a fan on Weibo) whether they will be interested to see the Dynamic Island functionality on their Xiaomi smartphones. The company, however, is yet to make an official announcement.
On the other hand, a theme developer for Xiaomi has been hard at work, with the developer already submitting a theme that offers functionality similar to Dynamic Island.
The theme in question, Grampy UI, was shared on Twitter, but the developer notes Xiaomi has not yet approved it. It utilizes the hole punch cutout at the top left of the display to show the currently playing song. The theme also only works with Chinese only ROMs.
While this implementation has fewer functionalities than Apple’s Dynamic Island, it indicates great potential should manufacturers focus on porting it over to Android, given that more than one developer would be tasked to make the feature work across a range of devices.
Xiaomi is not the only manufacturer that has indicated an interest in introducing Dynamic Island. Realme, a sub-brand of Oppo, has also confirmed that they will be working on a similar feature for their smartphones.
In a post to their forum, Realme challenges its fans to help create a “Realme Island” that expands out from the hole punch selfie camera. They explain that this unused space could be leveraged to display incoming calls, alerts, and notifications, among other things.
It is a very similar take to Dynamic Island, however, it seems that Realme wants to pack more features in their implementation.
Once Apple had received the plaudits for creating the Dynamic Island, and the implementation being software based, it was only going to be a matter of time before other manufacturers picked it up. Not to mention, most Android manufacturers have very similar cutouts on their displays, although they tend to be smaller.
