Note: I started writing this article based on Android P preview 1. Android P preview 2, released at Google I/O 2018, actually removed some (most?) of the APIs used extensively in this blog post. Even though none of the UI tricks described below are possible with Android P preview 2, I thought it was still interesting to share them. Indeed, both the technical and design approaches may still be cool and reusable. Let’s hope this article will motivate Google engineers to bring back the required APIs once they will see what kind of interesting stuff they were enabling with Android P preview 1…
One of the new feature in Android P is the support for display cutouts. A display cutout (a.k.a. notch) is a small cut in a portion of the screen displaying no UI. Generally, notches are at the top edge of the screen and hold the cameras and sensors. The very first device I discovered featuring a cutout was the Essential Phone. Then came the iPhoneX and its large notch. More recently, we’ve seen this “disease” spread out to a lot of other Android OEMs…
As you may have understood, I’m not fan of cutouts in general. First, from a developer point of view, as they require quite a lot of work to deal with them properly: we’ve always been used to rectangle-shaped windows1. Secondly from a UI designer point of view as they clutter the UI and make it directional. Finally from a user point of view as they are not intelligible nor visually attractive.
Cutouts look like a temporary solution to technical impossibilities. I don’t consider them as viable in the long term and can’t wait to see full edge-to-edge screens. But they help in the mean time. As a consequence, we need to deal with them and that’s probably why Android P brings support for it. I took some time to look at the framework additions in Android P preview 1 and started to have fun with notches rather than complain about their introduction. So let’s have fun with cutouts!