When the iPhone X was launched with the unseemly ‘notch’ at the top, it immediately became a subject of ridicule for Android users and spawned more memes and jokes than any tech product in recent memory. But what a difference a few months make. What started off as a design quirk that most people balked at, has quickly turned into a must-have design element that’s being embraced with gusto by one Android OEM after another.
You can either love it or hate it, but the notch is becoming impossible to ignore with every passing day. Google has known as much for a while now, and to make things easier for its hardware partners, incorporated support for the ‘feature’ in Android P, inviting criticism and evoking bewilderment in equal measure. Now, the company is apparently going a step further and looking to include support for the admittedly-divisive design element in its popular Chrome browser.
Listed as ‘DisplayCutoutAPI’ in a recent commit to the Chromium Gerrit, the support for the feature is expected to “switch on the viewport-fit code” in Google Chrome Chrome once it’s implemented. Spotted first by XDA Editor-in-Chief Mishaal Rahman, the implementation of the feature in a future version of Chrome is yet another admission by Google that the notch is here to stay; and whether we like it not, resistance is futile.
When one thinks about it dispassionately, it makes sense to support the notch in all apps natively, now that devices with the feature are proliferating at an astounding rate. However, even as most Android users are learning to live with it, many continue to oppose it vehemently. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for them to come around, because things are only going to get worse for them before it gets any better.
