Let’s face it, some version of Dynamic Island is probably coming to Android phones

That didn’t last long.

Just weeks after Apple launched its iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max with a new, interactive selfie camera cutout called Dynamic Island, some Android smartphone makers are now openly discussing a similar feature with their users.

Lu Weibing, president of Xiaomi China, was spotted by tech blog Gadgets360 and asked the company’s users if they “really needed a smart island” on their phones. However, the discussion does not go further than a few hundred user comments, many of them negative. One commenter called such an idea “plagiarism,” and the other simply said “don’t do it.”

Realme, which started out as a sub-brand of China’s Oppo but was spun off into a separate company, took it a step further with an official forum post (via MySmartPrice) titled, “Let’s create Realme Island together.”

The post asks users if they “can imagine what if the Realme UI added a software trick to turn the camera cutout into a multifunctional feature”. Then the users are asked to draw or describe in words a conceptual picture of such a feature and send it to the company. The best suggestion will then be presented on Realme’s community homepage, and the company’s UI developers will consider it “for possible implementation in the future”.

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Apple’s design elements are often mocked by other smartphone manufacturers, such as Samsung and Motorola, but they’re also often incorporated into their designs – remember Xiaomi’s Apple Watch clone? It goes the other way as well, as Apple occasionally integrates features we’ve seen on Android phones for years and then gives them a fancy name, like. B. Promotional Display.

The Dynamic Island is a real innovation from Apple, in the sense that it’s the first among its competitors to make the screen area around the selfie camera interactive. Like it or not, the Apple brand is incredibly powerful (Apple is currently the most valuable brand in the world, according to analytics firm Kantar BrandZ), and it makes sense that some Android smartphone makers would roll out a similar feature to potentially boost sales boost their products.

However, the dynamic island is quite specific to Apple’s needs. While most smartphone manufacturers rely primarily on fingerprint sensors for lock screen security, Apple’s iPhones have additional hardware on the front, alongside the selfie camera that performs a face scan to identify the user. As a result, Apple needs a larger cutout to accommodate both the selfie camera and FaceID technology, while most Android smartphones these days have a simple punch-hole cutout at the top of their displays.

Ultimately, factors such as development costs and hardware required to enable a similar feature, as well as the popularity of Apple’s new iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max models, will likely swing the tide one way or the other. But I wouldn’t be surprised if most phones in a year or two would have some kind of “smart” island at the top of their displays.