Google Pixel 3 among Android phones copying the Apple iPhone X design

The new display almost takes up almost the whole front of the phone, but not quite. Apple cut out a little “notch” to house its front-facing camera and other sensors that power Face ID, which replaces Touch ID as the main authentication method in the iPhone X.

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Not everyone loves the notch. But Apple wanted its tenth-anniversary iPhone to have an edge-to-edge screen and a front-facing camera, and that’s the compromise Apple came up with, love it or hate it.

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Of course, since Apple released the iPhone X, several Android phone makers have begun adopting the notch into their own designs. Here’s the brand-new OnePlus 6:

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And here’s the LG G7 ThinQ, announced in May:

LG

And here’s the Huawei P20 Pro:

Huawei

And here’s the Asus Zenfone 5 coming later this year:

Asus

We’re just getting started; these are only the notched Android phones we know about.

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Notched smartphone designs are even supported in Google’s next version of Android, called Android P. This will help other Android phone makers adopt similar edge-to-edge phone designs.

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Many wonder if Android P’s notch support means Google’s next Pixel smartphones will have a new notch design. One of the big complaints with last year’s Pixel phone was that it looked outdated in a post-iPhone X world:

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Of course, Android phone makers taking their hardware cues from Apple is nothing new. As long as the iPhone has existed, other smartphone makers have looked to Apple’s designs to inspire their own. China’s Xiaomi is a good example of this.

Xiaomi

But, to be fair, there was an Android phone with a notch before Apple did it. Andy Rubin’s Essential Phone introduced a smaller notch … months before the iPhone X.

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And other companies deserve some credit, too: Samsung, despite its penchant for loving Apple’s designs a little too much at times, chose not to go down the notch path with the Galaxy S9.

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Another Android phone looking to break from the notch trend is Vivo: That company’s solution to the where-do-you-put-a-selfie-camera-in-an-all-screen-phone dilemma is more clever: The selfie camera literally pops out of the top of the phone when you need it.

Here’s hoping we see more Android phones that approach the notch, and the problem it’s trying to solve, with more creativity like this.