Blog/Apple iPhone and its new ‘Dynamic Island’

9th September 2022

Apple recently unveiled its new iPhone Pro 14 and iPhone 14 Pro Max, and the feature everyone is talking about is a nifty little development that turns a negative into a positive – the ‘Dynamic Island’.

Recent iPhones have featured a bigger screen that covers more of its frontage, however, in order to accommodate the speaker and the camera within the screen space (because there’s no room for them to go elsewhere), Apple had to build in something known as ‘the notch’.

The notch was a real compromise in Apple’s typically beautiful design (we’ll leave the Magic Mouse to one side) – being an awkward black chunk at the top of the beautifully rounded, rectangular screen.

But Apple have taken this chunk, applied their best creative minds to how to overcome it, and what they’ve come up with is something with the most Apple name of any apple device – the ‘Dynamic Island’.

This ‘Dynamic Island’ replaces the static notch with a black area that changes shape, size and position depending on the app you’re using, and not only does it house the camera and the speaker as before, but it also gives you key information pertaining to the app you have open.

If you’re using the timer, it displays the time remaining in the Dynamic Island. Listening to music? Your choice of song and artist, volume and time appears in the Dynamic Island, which is now a different size and shape than when you were using the timer. On a call? Want to know the call duration? You guessed it, Dynamic Island.

The one thing each variation of Dynamic has in common is that it conveniently covers the speaker and the camera – not that you’d know that’s why it was there in the first place, so smart is its design.

How slick the animation is between uses is not yet clear, however, if it’s in line with any of Apple’s other UI design, I’m sure it will be super.

Well done guys! Lovely innovation.