Apple, you’re doing the Dynamic Island wrong

I love the idea of Dynamic Island; making lemons into lemonade and all that. Apple have turned a hardware constraint into something practical and delightful.

I like that I don’t notice that there’s some inactive space where the cameras/sensors are. The animations they’ve used feel perfect, making it feel almost alive. I like that it offers a visual element to the iPhone’s background activity like playing music or a podcast. But it’s flawed.

There are two ways in interact with the app that’s running in the Dynamic Island:

1. As a widget, up there at the top of the screen
2. In the app itself

You access each of these via the Dynamic Island with either a tap or a long-press. Before you read any more, take a moment to think about which way round this should be.

Me? I would expect a quick tap would open the Dynamic Island so I could interact with it as a widget:

• Pause/play, scrubbing, skip back/forward a track in Music
• Loud speaker, mute, phone down in Phone
• Check who scored in Apple Sports’ Live Activity

So a quick tap would offer a wee bit more functionality or information that you can access with a tap.

A long press should do something weightier, more deliberate, like taking me away from the app I’m currently using and land me on the relevant page of the app that was running in the Dynamic Island.

But it’s the other way round…

A tap on the Dynamic Island opens the app that’s running in there, taking you away from the app you’re currently using. I accidentally do this all the time, thinking I’ll trigger the widget popover…

A long press does that, of course. But how many people will think to long press? It makes the multi-tasking dimension the Dynamic Island brings both less discoverable and more awkward to access.

I’m assuming Apple’s thinking is that, since tapping an app icon on the Home Screen launches the app, the same should happen with the Dynamic Island. But it isn’t an app: it’s the Dynamic Island!

Again, I can see where they’re going with the long press. A long press usually triggers a popover, like a context menu, and the widget is like a popover, overlaying the app beneath it.

The logic of the design language may be right, but it feels wrong.

Let the user access the app’s widget first, then the app itself with a tap of the widget. Two quick taps. Or if you want to bypass the second tap, and therefore the widget, a long press of the Dynamic Island makes sense.

In theory, there’s good news in that this is a software thing, rather than baked into the hardware, and can therefore be changed relatively easily, but the Dynamic Island has been around for three iOS releases so I doubt Apple agree with me.