#What it actually is
The pill is two holes, not one. The front camera sits in one, the Face ID projector and infrared camera in the other, and the display between and around them is switched on and driven black so the two cutouts read as a single shape. Everything interesting happens in those real pixels: the shape grows, splits, animates and accepts touches, because it is a display, not a bezel. Apple has never shipped the same idea on the Mac, where the notch stays passive and every island-style behavior comes from a third-party app instead, a category mapped in the Dynamic Island for Mac roundup.
The purpose is narrower than the launch demos suggested. It is a place for things that are happening right now and that you did not explicitly ask to see: a timer counting down while you read something else, turn-by-turn directions while you reply to a message, a recording in progress, a track that keeps playing after you leave the Music app. It is not a notification center, it holds no history, and nothing lives there permanently. When the activity ends, the pill shrinks back to its resting size and the space goes quiet.
That is also why it feels different from the notch it replaced. The notch was a hole the interface had to route around. The island is a hole the interface points at.
#Which iPhones have one
Two rules cover nearly every case: the Pro models from the iPhone 14 Pro onward, and every model from the iPhone 15 onward, with one exception in the current lineup.
| Model | Dynamic Island | Note |
|---|---|---|
| iPhone 14 Pro, 14 Pro Max | Yes | The first two, September 2022 |
| iPhone 14, 14 Plus | No | Same notch as the iPhone 13 |
| iPhone 15, 15 Plus, 15 Pro, 15 Pro Max | Yes | First year it reached the non-Pro models |
| iPhone 16, 16 Plus, 16 Pro, 16 Pro Max | Yes | All four |
| iPhone 16e | No | The entry model keeps a notch |
| iPhone Air | Yes | |
| iPhone 17, 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max | Yes | |
| iPhone 13 and earlier, every iPhone SE | No | Notch or a home button |
Model list as Apple describes the current and recent lineups. The 16e is the one recent model that kept the notch.
No iOS update adds a Dynamic Island to a phone that does not have one. The cutout shape is manufactured into the panel, and the software is built on top of that specific geometry. An iPhone 14 or an iPhone 16e running the exact same iOS build still shows Live Activities, just on the Lock Screen and in banners rather than around the camera. Anyone shopping second-hand should read the table as a hardware spec, because that is what it is.
#The four gestures that run it
There is no menu and no onboarding for this. The whole interaction model is four gestures, and most people only ever discover the first one.
- Tap. Opens the app that owns whatever is showing. Tapping a running timer opens Clock, tapping the navigation pill opens Maps.
- Touch and hold. Expands the pill into a card with that app’s own controls: scrub and skip for audio, pause and cancel for a timer, mute and end for a call. This is the gesture worth learning, because it is where the island stops being a status light and starts being a remote control.
- Swipe outward from the center. Same expansion as the hold, for people who find a long press slow.
- Swipe back toward the center. Collapses the expanded card without opening anything.
When two things are live at once, the island splits: the main activity stays in the pill and the second one becomes a small circle beside it. Each half is independently tappable, so the circle is not decoration. Two is the ceiling, and a third activity waits rather than stacking.
One more detail that confuses people: the island only draws on the Home Screen and inside apps. On the Lock Screen the same activity renders as a Lock Screen card instead, which is why an unlocked phone and a locked phone can look like they are running different features.
#What shows up there, and why
Two very different pipelines feed the same strip, and telling them apart explains most of the behavior people find inconsistent.
System events are Apple’s own, and no app can request them. Face ID unlocking, Apple Pay confirmations, an AirDrop transfer, AirPods connecting, charging when you plug in, the ring and silent switch, a Focus change, a Voice Memo recording, a call in progress, the privacy dots when the camera or microphone is live. These are short, unskippable and identical on every supported iPhone.
Live Activities come from apps, through Apple’s ActivityKit framework. A developer defines the states and the data; the system decides the shape. The framework asks for four presentations of the same activity: a compact leading view on the left of the cutout, a compact trailing view on the right, a minimal view for when the phone is juggling two activities, and the expanded view you get from the long press. An app that only bothered with one of them looks broken in the other three, which is the usual reason a food delivery pill looks worse than the built-in timer.
The timing is also Apple’s, not the app’s. An activity can keep updating for up to eight hours, then the system ends it, and it can linger on the Lock Screen for up to twelve hours total before being removed. A long-haul flight will drop off the island before it lands.
iOS 26 added two things worth knowing. Apps can now schedule an activity ahead of time rather than starting one live, so a boarding pass or a reservation can appear on its own. And Live Activities running on the phone now relay into the menu bar of a Mac on macOS 26 Tahoe over iPhone Mirroring, which is the first time the feature has appeared on a Mac at all, in a form the Mac itself cannot originate.
#What you can change, and what you cannot
The blunt part first: you cannot customize the Dynamic Island itself. There is no setting to turn it off, resize it, recolour it, move it, or change its animations. It is system UI drawn around a hole in the panel, and Apple exposes none of it. Searching Settings for it returns nothing, because there is nothing named after it to find.
What you can control is the traffic through it.
- Per app. Settings > Apps > the app you want > Live Activities. The toggle only appears for apps that actually implement the feature, so a short list here means most of your apps never adopted it.
- On the Lock Screen, for everything at once. Settings > Face ID & Passcode, enter your passcode, then Live Activities under Allow Access When Locked. Switching that off hides them from the Lock Screen while the phone is locked.
- Now Playing. The audio pill follows whatever is playing, so it goes away when playback stops rather than needing its own setting.
The App Store listings promising Dynamic Island customization deserve a plain explanation, because the name is doing a lot of work. Those apps cannot touch Apple’s UI. What they do is publish their own Live Activities through the same public framework every other app uses, so a battery readout or a countdown of theirs appears in the island, drawn to Apple’s template and subject to Apple’s eight-hour ceiling. That can be genuinely useful. It is not customization of the island, and an app that claims otherwise is describing something iOS does not permit.
#Questions people still ask
Does the Dynamic Island cost battery life?
The pill itself is close to free. It is an OLED panel, black pixels are pixels that are off, and a resting island is mostly black. The cost sits in the activity: an app pushing frequent updates over the network, and a screen that lights up more often because there is something worth glancing at. Apple publishes no figure for it, so treat heavy Live Activity apps as the thing to watch in Battery settings, not the shape at the top of the screen.
Do Android phones have something similar?
Several makers have shipped their own version of the idea around a punch-hole camera, including Realme’s Mini Capsule and Samsung’s Now Bar, and third-party launchers and overlay apps add lookalikes on almost any phone. They are separate implementations with their own APIs and their own app support, not the same feature, and an Android app that draws a pill on a phone whose camera sits elsewhere on the screen is decoration rather than hardware design.
#What this means for the notch
The iPhone settled the argument about whether a camera cutout can earn its keep. Put live status where the hardware already interrupts the screen and people use it, without a setting, a tutorial or a choice. The MacBook notch has occupied the same never-covered position since 2021 and still does nothing with it, because Apple ships no equivalent there and no API for one. So the Mac version is a third-party category instead, from free open-source builds like boring.notch to paid apps. The iPhone gets one implementation that every app targets. The Mac gets a choice of implementations, each betting on a different idea of what the space is for.
