Apple could resort to software trickery to conceal the iPhone 14’s notch by making the hole-punch and pill-shaped cutouts appear as a contiguous, longer pill shape.
- What’s happening? An anonymous tipster has said that iOS will make individual cutouts in the notch area of the iPhone 14 appear as a single pill shape.
- Why care? While the notch area will take up less space on the iPhone 14, making both hole-punch and pill-shaped cutouts appear as a longer pill shape could result in a better experience when scrolling, using apps and so on.
- What to do? Download and try out apps that help conceal the notch to get an idea of how Apple could make the iPhone 14’s hole-punch notch less prominent.
How Apple could improve the iPhone 14’s notch experience
Apple might use software trickery to make the iPhone 14’s notch appear as a single uniform pill shape, according to an anonymous tipster on MacRumors.
Rather than stick with the uneven aesthetic, the suggestion is that Apple has chosen to turn off the pixels in the dead space between the cutouts in order to create the appearance of a unified pill shape that is less distracting when viewing content on the screen.
iOS could also black out the area around both pill-shaped (for the TrueDepth camera and sensors) and hole-punch (for the selfie camera) cutouts to host content.
For example, Apple could make the area slightly wider to fit status icons on the left and right sides, or even extend it downward into a large rounded square when delivering certain notifications.
This information is from an anonymous source so take it with a pinch of salt.
Why we don’t trust this rumor
MacRumors also couldn’t tell if chatter discovered in sketchy Weibo postings, suggesting the same unified pill software implementation, could be trusted.
If this information is correct, count us surprised. There’s no precedence for iOS software tricks to conceal the notch. Since the iPhone X, which introduced Face ID and the notch, Apple has made zero efforts to hide the notch in software.
With the notch area on this year’s iPhone 14 family taking up even less space than before, why would Apple suddenly bother to make two smaller cutouts appear as one contiguous shape? Read: Featured jailbreak tweaks for the notch on iOS 14