What is the Dynamic Island? Apple’s iPhone notch replacement explained

You know the iPhone notch? It’s history! At least it is on the iPhone 16, 15 and 14 Pro. The notch survives on the still-available iPhone 14, 14 Plus and iPhone SE (2022). Instead of the notch, a pill-shaped cut-out now sits at the top of the display of Apple’s flagship phones.

It’s called the Dynamic Island – and it’s unlike any pill-shaped cut-out you’ve seen before.

What is the Dynamic Island?

Look, it’s Apple. It chose to name a new interface feature in a manner that’s reminiscent of a yoga pose. But, to be fair to Apple, the Dynamic Island is dynamic.

Rather than pretend the screen cut-out doesn’t exist, the company doubled down and made it a central part of the iPhone user experience. Notifications burst out of it, alerting you to Very Important Things. Apps are sucked into it, when they busily start doing stuff in the background.

These iPhones are currently available with the Dynamic Island:

• iPhone 16 Pro Max
• iPhone 16 Pro
• iPhone 16 Plus
• iPhone 16
• iPhone 15 Plus
• iPhone 15

The Dynamic Island is present on the iPhone 14 Pro/Pro Max and the iPhone 15 Pro/Pro Max but all four of those phones have been discontinued.

As mentioned above, iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Plus and iPhone SE (2022) do not have Dynamic Island.

Will Dynamic Island come to the iPhone 17?

The short answer is yes. We expect the Dynamic Island to disappear in a future iPhone but it won’t be yet. It’s suggested that under-display Face ID could appear in 2025 with the iPhone 17 Pro.

What if your iPhone’s doing two background things?

Usually the Dynamic Island shows one background ‘event’. If there are two – like when you have Personal Hotspot on as well as playing music – the Dynamic Island splits in two. You get a pill and a dot. It’s all very flexible.

In fact, all sorts of things can live inside the Dynamic Island, including cover art and icons. And because it’s dynamic, it uses as much space as it needs, whether that’s more width to helpfully nudge you about an important notification (a timer, say, or travel directions), or more height to provide you with controls to prod.

The system as a whole was designed to “clearly convey information and present content and controls without distracting from the app you’re in”.

What happened to the tech behind the notch?

Some of it’s now behind the Dynamic Island, and the rest is behind the display. The TrueDepth camera was redesigned to take up less space and the proximity sensor is the bit behind the screen. 

The Dynamic Island in part arrived as a solution to further Apple’s goals at blurring the line between hardware and software – and then use the word ‘magical’ approximately four million times to describe the feature during a keynote.

Will it come to cheaper iPhones?

Yes. Presumably, the Dynamic Island will slowly work its way down the range until, eventually, even the iPhone SE has one. When the iPhone 17 appears we presume the notched iPhone 14 will be discontinued, leaving the Dynamic Island-capable 16 and 15 sitting underneath 17. We may also get a new iPhone SE in 2025.

In the future perhaps the TrueDepth camera will shrink to a tiny barely perceptible dot from which notifications can explode with even more dynamism, like a Xenomorph erupting from John Hurt.

And then the Dynamic Island will disappear as mysteriously as it came, when Face ID goes under the display.