In 2022, with the launch of the iPhone 14 Pro, Apple finally did something about the camera notch that had been ridiculed by many. By changing the camera part to a floating “dynamic island,” Apple was able to make a UI virtue out of something that was previously just a bit awkward. With some clever animations, the camera notch seems to grow and shrink to display notifications.

The best Dynamic Island apps combine with “Live Activities” to display real-time information about apps running in the background. For example, Apple Music shows a preview of the song you are listening to, and a long press opens it wide for playback control. This is not limited to first-party apps; Citymapper, United Airlines, Uber, Spotify, and others use this discreet homescreen widget.

Something similar seems to be coming to an Android device near you soon: while researching the Android 15 QPR1 Beta 3 release, Android Authority's Mishaal Rahman Rich Ongoing Notifications and was able to discover something called “Notifications.

Although this API is not yet available for Android apps, Rahman was able to create a mockup of how he imagined this feature might be used by using a few hidden commands and drawing his own choice of app icon, text, and background color. For example, here is how he envisions it working for Uber:

Admittedly, this is not as fancy as Dynamic Island, but it is, after all, just a mock-up.

Nevertheless, assuming this is the way this feature will be implemented - and if it is not abandoned between now and the release of Android 16 - it is easy to assume that this is a direct response to the success of Dynamic Island on the iPhone.

But as Mishaal points out, that is not entirely fair to Google. Because the earliest implementation of this feature (the block in the status bar indicating the length of an ongoing call) was added in the second beta of Android 12, more than a year before Apple announced Dynamic Island. You can see it in the first and second pictures in X's post, embedded below.

This feature is hidden in the Android 15 beta, but Rahman believes it will likely appear in Android 16 next year. That's for practical reasons: with Android 15 reaching Platform Stability and starting to roll out to Pixel devices earlier this month, it's unlikely that Google would want to add an entirely new API at this point.

But that doesn't mean we won't see this a year down the road. As reported earlier this month, it is rumored that Google may release Android 16 next year, in Q2 instead of the usual fall.