It’s hard not to talk about the Dynamic Island.

When the whole world is trying different approaches to get rid of the notch on smartphones, e.g., pop-up cameras, under-display cameras, etc., Apple just dropped a bombshell by improvising!

The designers at Apple trimmed down the previous notch to a pill-shaped one and created a whole bunch of new animations and interactive notifications around the notch.

VP of Human Interface at Apple, Alan Dye says, “Our goal was to design a space that clearly and consistently surfaces alerts and background activity in a rich and delightful way, the result being an entirely new and intuitive way to interact with iPhone, one that truly blurs the line between hardware and software.”

He also added that it gives the user more control, see activities, and do necessary interactions without leaving the app the user is currently using.

People’s reaction on the internet says that the design is successful already, though that is yet to be tested by real users.

Since the skeuomorphic days of Apple, I have noticed that apple makes the right decision at the right time when it comes to interface designing. When the concurrent technology limits them this time, they leveraged it in a way that no one imagined!

I can clearly see that Xiaomi, Samsung, Huawei, and other big companies will try to implement these in their version of Android, and I don’t see a problem if it benefits the user.

An interesting and fun thing is that I’ve seen a post in r/kustom (KWGT: Kustom Widget Creator) that a user is already trying to build a custom widget imitating the Dynamic Island! Like, Android apps were available to mimic the iPhone X notch.
Design should be this influential!