Until Apple, Google, and the like find a way to hide front-facing cameras and sensors beneath their smartphones’ displays, notches are a hideously unfortunate design solution to maxing out screen real estate. The Pixel 3 has one of the worst notches, and making matters even worse for some Pixel 3 XL users is a bizarre bug that’s reportedly putting even more notches on their displays.
We heard you like notches…@madebygoogle @MKBHD @tldtoday @ArtemR @derekmross pic.twitter.com/VjlYL56Bd5
— Kyle Gutschow (@kylegutschow) October 26, 2018
Users such as Kyle Gutschow and Judner Aura have shared images on Twitter and Reddit of a weird glitch where the UI element that Android uses to “hide” the Pixel 3 XL’s front-facing camera and sensors shows up on the side of the display, in addition to the top. Some users claim that when simply rotating the phone between portrait and landscape modes, which forces a screen refresh, the additional notch will disappear, while others claim that a full reboot is needed to make it go away.
So my Pixel randomly grew another notch today. ???? https://t.co/c6Pff9MVmW pic.twitter.com/ugjfLmCkDZ
— UrAvgConsumer (@UrAvgConsumer) October 24, 2018
We’ve reached out to Google for comment, but the company has already provided a statement to Android Police, confirming the bug is known and will be addressed in a future software update. It is apparently not, as I initially suspected, an attempt to improve notch acceptance by flooding screens with more notches, and then removing all but one so that by itself it doesn’t seem so bad.
(It still does.)