In 2022, with the launch of the iPhone 14 Pro, Apple finally did something about its much mocked camera notch. By switching to a floating ‘Dynamic Island’ for the camera, the company was able to make a UI virtue of something that was previously just a bit awkward. With some neat animations, the camera notch seems to grow and shrink to show notifications as it comes in.
The best Dynamic Island apps combine with ‘Live Activities’ to show real-time information about an app you’re running in the background. Apple Music, for example, shows a preview of the song you’re listening to, which opens wider to offer playback controls with a long press. It’s not limited to first-party apps, either, with the likes of Citymapper, United Airlines, Uber and Spotify all making use of the discreet homescreen widget.
It sounds like something similar will be coming to an Android device near you very soon. While digging through the Android 15 QPR1 Beta 3 release, Android Authority’s Mishaal Rahman was able to discover something called Rich Ongoing Notifications — an API that allows apps to put more than just an icon in the status bar to provide extra useful contextual information.
While the API isn’t available to Android apps yet, Rahman was able to use some hidden commands to generate a mockup of how he imagines the feature to be used, by drawing in app icons, text and background colors of his choosing. Here, for example, is how he envisages it working for Uber:
Granted, that's not as swanky as Dynamic Island, but it is just a mockup, after all.
Nonetheless, assuming this is how the feature will be implemented — and if it isn’t abandoned between now and the release of Android 16 — it’s easy to assume this is a direct response to the success of Dynamic Island on iPhone.
But as Mishaal points out, that’s not entirely fair to Google, as the earliest implementation of this — a block in the status bar showing the length of ongoing phone calls — was added in Android 12’s second beta, over a year before Apple unveiled Dynamic Island. You can see it in the first and second pictures in the X post embedded below.
Here is Android 12 Beta 2's ongoing call chip in action, along with the new call notification style. It's enabled by default; Google Dialer just doesn't support it yet. pic.twitter.com/OZbrvCL80xJune 12, 2021
While the feature is hidden away inside an Android 15 beta, Rahman believes this is more likely to arrive with Android 16 next year. That’s for practical reasons: Android 15 has reached Platform Stability and started rolling out to Pixel devices earlier this month, so it seems unlikely Google would want to add a whole new API at this point of its life.
But that doesn’t mean we’re necessarily a year away from seeing this. As reported earlier this month, it’s rumored that Google may be mixing things up next year with an Android 16 release in Q2, rather than the usual Fall window.
