Dynamic Island Settings: Every Toggle and Where It Lives

#The two screens that control it

Type "Dynamic Island" into the Settings search field and you get nothing back. That is not a bug and it is not a missing screen on your phone: Apple never filed the feature under that name. What the island shows is almost entirely Live Activities, and Live Activities are configured per app. The Mac version of this question has a completely different answer, covered in Dynamic Island for Mac, because macOS ships no island at all.

Three places matter, in this order.

On older iOS versions the per-app toggle sits directly under the app's own row in Settings rather than inside an Apps list. The toggle only appears for apps that actually implement a Live Activity.

That is the entire user-facing surface. There is no brightness, size, color, duration or animation setting for the island anywhere in iOS, and no hidden panel behind Accessibility or Developer mode.

#What each toggle actually changes

The per-app switch is the real one. Turn off Live Activities for a delivery app and it can no longer start an activity, so nothing from it reaches the island or the Lock Screen. This is the switch to reach for when one specific app is the problem, and it is reversible with no side effects: notifications from that app keep arriving normally, they just arrive as notifications.

The Face ID and Passcode switch is narrower than it looks. It sits under Allow Access When Locked, alongside Control Center, Notification Center and Wallet, and it hides Live Activities on the Lock Screen for every app in one move. It does not stop the island itself. Unlock the phone and activities still appear up there, because the island is drawn while the device is unlocked.

Neither switch touches the system states. An incoming call, the Face ID unlock animation, the orange and green microphone and camera indicators, the silent switch confirmation and an AirDrop transfer all route through the island as system behavior, not as app Live Activities. No setting removes them. Now Playing is the one people misjudge most often: music controls in the island come from the system's playback state, so turning off a music app's Live Activities does not clear them. Pause or quit the player instead.

#Controlling the island with gestures

Most of what people want from a settings screen is actually a gesture. Apple documents four, and they are worth knowing because none of them are discoverable:

• Tap the activity to jump into the app that owns it.
• Touch and hold, or swipe from the center toward either side, to expand the activity into its detailed view with whatever controls the developer put there.
• Swipe from a side back toward the center to collapse it again.
• Swipe from one side or the other to switch between two activities when two are running. The island splits into a pill and a small circle when that happens, and the circle is the one in the background.

The expanded view is where per-activity control usually hides. A timer gets pause and stop, a recording gets a stop button, some apps add a dismiss control. Which buttons exist is the developer's decision through ActivityKit, not a preference you can change. If an activity has no way to end it from the island, the app itself is the only way out.

#What no setting will change

Worth saying plainly, because a lot of pages hedge on this. You cannot turn the Dynamic Island off. It is the camera and Face ID cutout plus the software Apple wraps around it, and there is no switch that converts it back into a plain notch. The most you can do is empty it: disable Live Activities app by app and end the sessions you started.

You also cannot restyle it. No color, no corner radius, no size, no animation speed, no custom shape. The App Store listings that promise Dynamic Island customization are drawing their own content inside their own app or building wallpapers that sit under the cutout; iOS exposes no API for changing the system island, so nothing installed from the store can restyle it. Reduce Motion, under Settings, Accessibility, Motion, is the closest thing to an animation control on the phone, and Apple documents no Dynamic Island specific effect for it.

Which activity wins the island when several are live is also iOS's call, not yours. Apple decides the priority and gives no ordering preference to users or, for that matter, to developers.

#A pass to quiet a noisy island

If the island has become a distraction rather than a status bar, work through it in this order rather than hunting for a master switch that does not exist.

1. Name the offender first. Watch for a day and note which apps actually post. It is usually two or three, not twenty.
2. Open Settings, then Apps, then that app. Turn its Live Activities switch off. Repeat for each one you named.
3. If the Lock Screen is the real complaint, leave the per-app switches alone and turn off Live Activities under Face ID and Passcode instead. One switch, and the island still works while you are using the phone.
4. End the sessions you started. Stop the timer, stop the Voice Memos recording, end navigation. System sessions ignore the Live Activities switches entirely.
5. Check inside the app. Sports and delivery apps often have finer switches than iOS does: this team, this order, not every one.
6. Leave calls and the privacy indicators alone. They cannot be removed, and the microphone and camera dots are the one thing in that strip you actively want.

#What the same question looks like on a Mac

Shorter answer: there is nothing to configure. macOS has no Dynamic Island and no Live Activities, and there is no System Settings pane for the notch on a MacBook. Through macOS 26 Tahoe the cutout stays passive hardware that the menu bar routes around, on every machine in the Tahoe supported devices list.

Two settings do exist near the notch, and both are about collisions rather than content. Apps whose menus run into the camera housing can be launched in a shorter screen area: select the app in Finder, choose File then Get Info, and tick "Scale to fit below built in camera", which Apple documents as the fix for overlapping menu bar items. And System Settings, Control Center, is where you thin out menu bar items so fewer of them crowd the cutout, which is the free half of the advice in hiding menu bar icons on a Mac.

Anything richer comes from a third-party notch app, a small category that includes NotchNook, Alcove and the app behind this site. Those bring their own settings windows, which is where the real per-feature control lives on the Mac. NotchBay, for instance, has a Settings window with a live Permissions page, and each permission (calendar, microphone, screen recording, accessibility, full disk access, notifications) is only requested when the feature that needs it is switched on. Its island ships in a light and a dark theme, graphite by default, and the weather chip takes a city of your choosing.

The requirements are strict and worth stating before anyone downloads: macOS 26 or later, and a MacBook with a notch. On a Mac without one, or on an external display, it runs as a small floating pill at the top edge instead of wrapping a cutout. Call controls need the Accessibility permission, Google Meet control works through Chromium browsers rather than Safari, message mirroring and the Focus chip need Full Disk Access, and the clipboard tray keeps the last 60 clips plus whatever you pin rather than an unlimited archive.

#Frequently asked questions

#What this means for the notch

The shape of Apple's answer is informative. On iPhone the island is a system service with a handful of on and off switches, and every decision about layout, priority and animation belongs to iOS. On a MacBook the same strip of screen has no service behind it at all, so the settings question moves entirely into whatever app you install, and those apps end up shipping the preferences Apple never wrote: which chips appear, which permissions are granted, which theme, which city. Two cutouts, opposite philosophies. One is a closed feature you configure at the edges, the other is empty space that only does what you choose to put in it.