Adverts
When Apple revealed the iPhone 14 Pro's Dynamic Island, I explained that I thought the feature was brilliant, but that I'd also like to disable it as soon as I got my hands on the device.
I worried that the animations might be too annoying, like a person who slowed down the movement of the iPhone UI whenever Apple allowed me to.
Adverts
One Deep Purple headphone later, I can say that I no longer care about the Dynamic Island. The animations are more than tolerable, and you get used to the look of the pill-shaped notch very quickly.
Not only that, but most of the time, you don't need to interact with Dynamic Island if you don't want to. You can just passively let it do its thing.
Adverts
That said, I would probably still turn it off if Apple offered the option to do so. Unfortunately, you can't actually disable Dynamic Island, but there is a workaround.
As I expected when I first spoke about my desire to turn off the pill notch, the feature is enabled by default on the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max.
It's such a huge feature for Apple that the company won't let you stop using it. Dynamic Island caught everyone's attention. Android clones are undoubtedly coming.
I also said at the time that the feature is probably something you can't disable in iOS 16. That was the case. Apple doesn't even have an option in the Settings app to customize Dynamic Island behavior.
But it turns out there is a way to change the Dynamic Island. As MacRumors explains, there is a Dynamic Island gesture in iOS 16 that allows you to partially disable animations.
Two things happen when an app runs in the background. The pill grows in size and user interface elements appear on it, specific to the application running on the device.
For the Music app, you see album art on the left and an audio waveform on the right. The UI element on the right side is usually the animated one.
If you find this annoying, you can remove it by swiping left to right or right to left on the elongated pill.
In the case of the Music app, the waveform disappears. But Dynamic Island still shows the album art. You can't turn off the Island, but you can make it less distracting.
The background app won't stop either, so the music will keep playing.
MacRumors it also claims that the swipe gesture works when two apps are running on the Dynamic Island. You can swipe over the larger segment to make it disappear.
You can then do the same with the second activity. This disables all Dynamic Island activity. But it's something I haven't been able to replicate.
