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Google acknowledges our notch nightmare with Android P

Google acknowledges our notch nightmare with Android P

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Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

You’re all aware of the smartphone notch takeover. The Essential Phone launched with a notch, then the iPhone X made it mainstream, and now, nearly all phone manufacturers think the notch is the future of phones. Here’s the thing, though: these random Android phone makers haven’t been able to make their notch phones run seamlessly because the OS isn’t designed for that segmented screen — or at least it hasn’t been, until now.

The freshly announced Android P has “display cutout support,” aka notch support. Developers will be able to test how their full-screen apps work with notches through the tools Google is releasing today. This is good and useful because a few of these notch iterations have looked horrible, mainly because the software wasn’t built to consider these cutouts. Sometimes the time or network bars didn’t line up properly, for instance. You can see an example here with a phone called the Noa N10.

Now the support onus is on developers. Congrats on the responsibility you’ve all inherited.