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Google Bans Android Phones From Having Three or More Notches (theverge.com) 116

Posted by msmash from the enough-is-enough dept.
Google is building official notch support into Android P, but it's laying out some ground rules first: two notches is the limit. From a report: In a blog post for developers yesterday, Android UI product manager Megan Potoski wrote that Google is working with device partners "to mandate a few requirements" for app compatibility purposes. Among those are limits on notches. The mandate says that Android P phones can't have "more than two cutouts on a device." Only one notch is allowed per side, and notches are only allowed on the top and bottom edges -- not the left and right.
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Google Bans Android Phones From Having Three or More Notches More

Google Bans Android Phones From Having Three or More Notches

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  • Why does the notch have to be near the speaker and the mic. When I rotate the phone what were once sides are now top and bottom, it's just a short fat phone.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Why does the notch have to be near the speaker and the mic. When I rotate the phone what were once sides are now top and bottom, it's just a short fat phone.

      Well, in general, the sole purpose of a notch is for the selfie-cam. Sure you can do fancy things like have a motorized popout camera that shows up, but other than novelty, that's something that can break easily - either by getting dirt into the mechanism, or subjecting the exposed portion subject to bending forces, etc. Plus waterproofing and such is

  • Too bad (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @01:23PM (#57042544)

    They could have refused notches completely and mock Apple for doing something so ugly and impractical.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by zdzichu ( 100333 )

      Android did it first, with Essential phone.

    • Re:Too bad (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Oswald McWeany ( 2428506 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @01:39PM (#57042726)

      They could have refused notches completely and mock Apple for doing something so ugly and impractical.

      It really is an absurd (and ugly) design "feature". I've yet to meet one person who has said, "what this phone needs is a notch".

      • Re:Too bad (Score:5, Funny)

        by infolation ( 840436 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @01:53PM (#57042868)

        I've yet to meet one person who has said, "what this phone needs is a notch".

        Yet... now that Google's banned them, I really want a three-notch phone.

        • Re:Too bad (Score:5, Funny)

          by BLToday ( 1777712 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @02:33PM (#57043200)

          I've yet to meet one person who has said, "what this phone needs is a notch".

          Yet... now that Google's banned them, I really want a three-notch phone.

          Screw it. We’re going straight to 5 notches.

        • I've yet to meet one person who has said, "what this phone needs is a notch".

          Yet... now that Google's banned them, I really want a three-notch phone.

          Make it four and we can have a round Android device.

          Though I assume they don't include corner cutouts in their notches, so it is more like a max of 6 cutouts.

        • And I want a phone with cutouts in the middle of the screen. On the back, too.

      • You do realize that the notch on the iPhone has a functional purpose, right? It's where the face scanning hardware lives. The absurd design decision is to add a notch to the phone for no other reason than to make it look more like an iPhone, which is what we're seeing from a variety of Android handset manufacturers.

      • You're seeing the glass half empty. What someone really said was "what this phone needs is more display where this empty part of the bezel is". They can't fill the whole bezel so they just fill what they can. If they didn't have the notch you'd just get less screen.

        • You're seeing the glass half empty. What someone really said was "what this phone needs is more display where this empty part of the bezel is". They can't fill the whole bezel so they just fill what they can. If they didn't have the notch you'd just get less screen.

          And that's perfectly fine. I don't mind a bezel. I'd rather have a thin bezel than no bezel and a notch taken out of the screen that makes the screen useless for a common scalable design.

          • How is the display useless? Usually they put the status bar in the notch area which gives you more space for app usage.

    • They could have refused notches completely

      That ship sailed in October 2011, when Notch's company Mojang listed Minecraft: Pocket Edition for sale on Android Market (now Google Play Store).

    • The could also have tried to develop daring, innovative technology, rather than doing the obvious thing.

    • They could have refused notches completely and mock Apple for doing something so ugly and impractical.

      Meh. You write an OS for multiple clients then you have to provide the tools that the manufacturers want. I would rather they get in on the game on time than the situation we had on Android a few years ago with fingerprint readers: multiple insecure manufacturer-specific implementations came out before Android got a standard solution.

  • LOL (Score:5, Funny)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @01:26PM (#57042582)

    This headline just made me laugh and laugh and laugh, thinking of some phone company exec saying to his staff:

      "If the people want notches, by God we will give them notches! Notches on the back, on the sides, on every screen edge! Two on larger edges! I want all notch proposals on my desk by tomorrow morning and there better not be a single place I can think of having a notch that does not have one!".

    • Re:LOL (Score:5, Informative)

      by nitehawk214 ( 222219 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @01:37PM (#57042706)

      Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades [theonion.com]

      • I've been using the same brand of 5-blade razor for over 10 years. Yes, it has a fucking aloe strip. Yes, I'm very happy with it. No, I don't want to go back to three blades. No, I don't want 6 blades, either.

        They thought they had a good point, but they didn't. The internet never forgets, never forgives them, here you are, Future Man, rubbing their faces in it. They're like the Smithsonian of fake news, give them a break.

    • Re:LOL (Score:4, Funny)

      by Oswald McWeany ( 2428506 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @01:40PM (#57042740)

      This headline just made me laugh and laugh and laugh, thinking of some phone company exec saying to his staff:

        "If the people want notches, by God we will give them notches! Notches on the back, on the sides, on every screen edge! Two on larger edges! I want all notch proposals on my desk by tomorrow morning and there better not be a single place I can think of having a notch that does not have one!".

      There will probably be more notches on my next phone than my bedpost.

    • What I want to know is whether it's two or three. Surely slashdot editors can count that high.

      (And why is this filed under "apple"?)

    • Thats. Just. Sad.
      Used to be, we cared about memory, picture and sound quality, performance.

      Now its how many notches should it have?
      how is this funny?

    • Notches on notches.
      Notches on notches on notches.
      Soon there'll be no screen left because of all the notches...

      • Image the wotsisname triangle. where you replace each side with _/\_. IIRC it's bounded and never crosses itself yet it has an infinite perimeter.

        I have no idea what happens when the notch is rectangular and points inwards.

        Sometimes I really wish I was like more brainier at sums and shit like that.

  • You mean manufacturers aren't allowed to cut notches on their phones when they take another aspect of a user's privacy? Movement privacy = one notch. Health info = second notch ...

  • Fuck everything. We're doing five notches.

  • WTF is a notch? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    OK, I know what a physical notch is, but what does it have to do with phones other than aesthetics? What is "notch support"?

    The stupidity coming from capitalist industry is getting to be painful

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by suutar ( 1860506 )

      it's a spot where the screen area is intruded on by non-screen stuff. The most famous, I think, if not the first was the apple iphone X, which has a notch in the top of the display area to hold the selfie camera and probably some other stuff. App developers have to know about it so they don't try to use pixels that aren't there for anything important, so it's effectively a feature they have to support.

      • it's a spot where the screen area is intruded on by non-screen stuff. The most famous, I think, if not the first was the apple iphone X, which has a notch in the top of the display area to hold the selfie camera and probably some other stuff. App developers have to know about it so they don't try to use pixels that aren't there for anything important, so it's effectively a feature they have to support.

        FaceID camera and Illuminator.

  • Anyone else have no idea what a notch is? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by skam240 ( 789197 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @01:39PM (#57042724)

    Maybe describe what a notch is in the summary for those of us whose lives don't revolve around our stupid phones.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Notch is the guy who made minecraft. Google is trying to restrict cloning of him before it gets out of hand.

    • A notch is typically a rectangular cutout on one side of the screen to make room for front-facing cameras, physical buttons, etc.

      The quoted description is a long way to say, "The top and bottom edges may each have a single notch."

      • A notch is typically a rectangular cutout on one side of the screen to make room for front-facing cameras, physical buttons, etc.

        The quoted description is a long way to say, "The top and bottom edges may each have a single notch."

        Personally I'm quite happy with my notchless moto droid z. Just make the usable display a rectangle, I have no need of a quarter inch of extra, interrupted, screen space.

        Just my bent $0.02.

    • I'd define a "notch" as a concavity in the outline of a handheld device's screen to accommodate a speaker, front-facing camera, or microphone. The iPhone X was the first well-known smartphone to have one, which Apple calls the "sensor housing", and apps such as Halide [theverge.com] have adapted to show indicators in the "ears" on either side of it.

    • I had a lot of difficulty figuring out what it is as well, or what its purpose is.

      It is that black rectangular tab of plastic that comes down into the screen that makes the screen a non-rectangular shape.

      Its purpose is to make a space for the front-facing camera while still having the screen take up as much space as it can on the front of the phone. The time and battery status are displayed in the extra screen real estate.

      It came out on the iPhone and now a ton of android handset manufacturers are copying i

    • I only had to click on four related links before an article author FINALLY bothered to explain what a notch in this content even $%^&ing means! Arrogantly, one article began, "You’re all aware of the smartphone notch takeover."

      No. No, we most certainly are NOT!

    • A notch is something that everyone in the tech world knows about and the existence of notches has been discussed here on every phone related story since before the iPhone X was released, though the iPhone made it popular.

      Your UID indicates you're not new here, so were you in a coma for the past 2 years or maybe in the jungle finding yourself?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Someone said "hay, wouldn't an all screen phone be cool?" and so they made it, but then realized that there was nowhere to put the camera and earpiece so they cut a little notch out at the top and then Apple copied them and now phones with an ugly chunk taken out at the top are the thing for 2018.

  • If you told me a few years ago that putting a cutout on the screen itself would be a thing... if you later told me that a company like Google would limit the amount of cutouts directly on the screen to "just" two... The Tech industry is not what I expected and even harder to predict. Assume *inane* as the driving force behind "innovation", I guess, and work from there.

    • It is all silly but there's a method to the madness. It's a simple continuation of the push for "bezel less" devices. Eventually the notches won't be needed but for now there's no great way around it. I don't think there's a display that is good for shooting a front-facing camera through it (yet). I doubt a phone without a front-facing camera would succeed. The phones with a pop-out camera are sillier than the notches.

      • it is mental retardation to insist on bezel-less screen. There is great way around notches good for decades, have a bezel or area above screen. everyone is fine with it.

  • say (Score:4, Funny)

    by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @01:43PM (#57042762)

    Don't Hispanic phones have "Bonus Notches" ?

  • Correction (Score:3)

    by Artem S. Tashkinov ( 764309 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @02:03PM (#57042932) Homepage
    Let me correct you, Google: zero notches is the limit and the notch in the Pixel 3 XL [theverge.com] is the most horrible thing I've ever seen.
  • ... zero notches. Of course, maybe I'm alone in not being not bothered that my phone is 0.25" longer than a "notchy" phone in order to accommodate a camera and speaker. (If phone size were all that important to me, I wouldn't have encased the thing in an Otter box case.)
  • There...are...four....notches

  • Two shalt be the number of notches thou may install, and the number of the notches shalt be two or less. Zero thou may choose, and one is righteous in my sight, and thou mayst proceed to two, but thou shalt not proceed to three. Four is right out.

  • WTF (Score:5, Insightful)

    by owenferguson ( 521762 ) <owenferguson@hot ... minus herbivore> on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @03:03PM (#57043452)
    So now "notch" is the word we use for "occlusion" when talking about shitty screen design?
  • Won't they get fined by the European Union for anti-competitive notch-ism?

  • I still prefer bezels (Score:4)

    by Tomahawk ( 1343 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @04:56PM (#57044394) Homepage

    Give me 90 degree corners (not rounded ones), a 16:9 screen, and bezels instead of notches where needed. I want a big screen, and want to see and use all of it.

    Many designs for phones these days just making them annoying to use.

    Sony got the right idea with the XZ2 Premium. I wish more manufacturers would go back to that. Stop making the phone "pretty", and make it fully usable.

  • ... what the simple fuck is a notch and why am I furiously outraged that Google is doing this to the children.

    I'm an iPhone user from day one. Work pays for them.

  • Stop being idiots and fix these two arbitrary and stupid restrictions:

    * Rotate to upside down. It never makes sense to forbid it, maybe have an option to disable for that one person who thinks it's a great feature to not be able to do it

    * Rotate home screen on handset. Come on, there are a significant number of users who use their gigantic phones in landscape, not portrait. Maybe have an option to disable that for the one person who thinks its a great feature to be unable to do it.

    Thanks guy

  • Two notches please. One the full width of the device at the top. The second at the bottom, and also the full width of the device.

  • Remember when the Apple mouse had one button while all of the others had more than that? Except Microsoft didn't limit mice connecting to Windows to just two buttons.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )
      I remember when Apple had a mouse that was perfectly round. You couldn't figure out which way was "up" without looking at it and aligning it properly in your hand before using it.

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