If you have read my article on Notches on Mobile phone, it would be a good pre-read for this article. I scream on top of my voice that the Notch is not a feature, but a mistake. It is a mistake with iPhone made. Apple does make mistake and that how they learn. But there are other brands which blindly apes Apple and recreates everything Apple makes into their product. We thought the “Notch” fiasco on Android mobiles is one such copy-cat stunt. But unfortunately, it is not as simple as that.
Apple had made a mistake and introduced notch in their iPhone X. There is no debating on that. Every brand out there knows it. But interestingly, they don’t want to go against the tide and bluntly bash Apple. Instead, they took a very interesting route. They adopted notches on their mobiles. Now every Android user out in the world started screaming about it. They were totally against the notch design, but some have embarrassed notches with no friction. But the vast majority is against notches.
Mobiles today have so many unsolved problems like battery life, robust display, OS version fragmentation, etc… The notch was not a listed problem until it was artificially inseminated in the eco-system. Now every mobile user’s attention is on the notch and they have been successfully diverted from other issues that have been plaguing their mobiles.
The same brands which introduced the notch in Android mobiles have now started coming up with solutions for a notchless design. Vivo V9 was one of the first Android mobiles to be available in India and you all must have heard about the Vivo Apex and probably you must have seen how the tech world praises Vivo for getting rid of the “notch”, which Vivo had introduced to the Android world. Similarly, with Oppo, we now see the Oppo Find X as an Engineering marvel for getting rid of the Notch. Other brands will soon follow suit and will introduce re-introduce Notchless mobile. By then we would have completely forgotten the existing true problems with the mobile and probably would have grown accustomed to it.
Or another branching theory would be that the brands are working on innovating solutions to solve the impending issues and they used the “Notch” fiasco to buy time and keep the customers engaged.
This is a very smart move by the brands. When the masses are screaming for an answer, ask them a different question and give them an answer to the new question. The mobiles were great with their 18:5 or even 16:5 aspect ratio. They were moving in the right direction and I just hope that the “Notch” distraction would not hamper the innovation, but instead accelerate it. Let us hope for a better future, as always!
