Apple’s Dynamic Island, that pill-shaped and wholly fungible black space that sits atop your iPhone 16 (along with iPhone 15 and iPhone 14 Pro models), is relatively small in the scheme of things. As measured by me, it usually sits between 22mm and 32 mm wide and 6mm deep – unless you touch it and then it can expand to 7 centimeters wide by almost 3 centimeters deep.
It’s a sometimes useful space, but it’s also screen real estate that I’m tired of giving up.
Please understand that I’m generally a Dynamic Island fan and wrote about it lovingly in 2022 (I called it “clever and impressive”). But I’m a bigger fan of everything else happening on my iPhone 16 Pro Max screen and grow weary of this rather large and often mostly dark cutout.
I started pondering the future of this space again after a spate of new rumors regarding Apple’s possible plans for the iPhone 17. Some claim Apple might be looking to reduce the size of the island by shrinking the components contained within it.
One of the reasons I like the Dynamic Island is because it’s not just dead space, and it’s also not all screen. Instead, the Dynamic Island is a clever combination of the two. There’s a proximity sensor, an infrared projector (a.k.a Time of Flight [ToF] sensor), and a 12MP camera.
Before the Dynamic Island, there was the TrueDepth notch, which was introduced with the iPhone X as part of the then-new Face ID system. I also love Face ID with all my heart. It’s so much more efficient than unlocking your phone, apps, and services with your finger.
Island living
What Apple did with the Dynamic Island is it moved the notch down and into the screen space and then sliced it up so that the three components are bisected between the two sensors and the one camera by a tiny bit of active screen. This is how notifications and display elements notifying you of system activity (a red dot to show you the camera or microphone is active, for instance) appear between the Face ID sensor and the camera lens.
I like this effect and how Apple designed all the Dynamic Island animations to make it appear as if the pill smoothly grows and shrinks to fit the current purpose. It’s all so well done.
Even so, I want as near an unblemished iPhone 17 screen as possible – what the iPhone display was before the iPhone X. I know it was smaller and of a lower resolution, but it had no weird notch, not even a cutout.
In the world of modern, edge-to-edge displays, this is almost but not quite a pipe dream. The Samsung Galaxy S24, for instance, has just a tiny drill-through for the front-facing camera. On the interior flexible screen of its Galaxy Z Fold 6, Samsung covers the camera cutout with pixels that disappear when it’s time to take a selfie.
This is what I want for the iPhone 17. No more half-measures to accommodate the True Depth Module. I want Apple to find a way to permanently hide Face ID and the proximity sensor behind the display. I wonder if one of them can be shrunk enough to live in the ultra-thin screen bezel.
For the 12MP (or maybe 48PM) front-facing camera, let’s go the Samsung route and hide it with live pixels that shift to transparent when it’s selfie time.
You might think this will kill the Dynamic Island. It might, but the concept of surfacing app status and other activity notifications could be handed over to Siri. Maybe it could sometimes go from the screen surrounding glow to a Dynamic Island-like animation that briefly appears at the top of the screen. I’d enable it when you shake the phone.
Considering that Siri’s Apple Intelligence update is supposed to bring more third-party app knowledge to its digital assistant, I think this makes sense.
Building a raft
Even if Apple does away with the physical island and all those little status notifications, will we miss it that much? How often do we have to stare at our phones to know what’s going on? If the status or activity update is that important, it should be a notification.
There’s a non-zero-percent chance this will happen. The iPhone 17 could, after all, be a major handset redesign. We think it’ll be a lot thinner (at least one model, usually referred to as the iPhone 17 Air) and have way better cameras. If the screen undergoes a major update, like the tandem OLED technology in the ultra-thin iPad Pro M4 13-inch, then the removal of the Dynamic Island makes some sense.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate the Dynamic Island, but sometimes I feel like I’ve been stranded on (or at least with) it, and I’m ready for a rescue.