OnePlus stole Apple's Dynamic Island, but made it way better – Android Authority

I’ve never really liked Apple’s Dynamic Island. Sure, the notch replacement is occasionally helpful for checking songs on Spotify, following directions in Apple Maps, and keeping up with my fantasy football score, but most of the time, it just sits there — heavy on the island, light on the dynamic. In other words, it’s like a notch with a few extra features here and there. And yet, I know I can’t get rid of it since it houses the hardware needed for Face ID.

However, I think it’s time for Apple to look outside of its walled garden because Android brands are copying Dynamic Island, but they’re doing it much better. OnePlus’s Live Alerts are what I wish Dynamic Island was, and I’m happy to admit it.

I first discovered OnePlus’s Live Alerts in the best way — in the natural course of setting up my OnePlus 13. Sure, I would have known they were coming as part of the announced features of Oxygen OS 15 back in October, but at the time, I was much more focused on the promised Apple Intelligence rollout and comparing the iPhone 16 Pro to anything else I could get my hands on. As such, I was so focused on the actual Dynamic Island that I didn’t realize a simpler, smoother option was right around the corner.

Then, I got my hands on a OnePlus 13 review unit in Midnight Ocean with OnePlus Buds Pro 3 to match, and I did what anyone would do — I set up Spotify to get to work with a fresh pair of ‘buds in my ears. After a song or two, I noticed a small — but somehow familiar — oval flanking the selfie camera at the top of my 6.8-inch display. Sure enough, the OnePlus 13 let me know what song my daylist had shuffled to. But, unlike the iPhone 16 Pro that I’d just spent more than a month using, as soon as I paused the music, the island was gone. It was brilliant.

Of course, my first taste of a Live Alert only left me wanting more. I restarted the music I’d just paused and then tapped on the alert to see if OnePlus let me interact with it differently than Apple’s simple controls. It did. At least with Spotify, if you tap the Live Alert, it opens into a card that takes up about a third of your display, offering control over your playback, media output device, and your four most recent playlists or artists — just about what you get on the cover screen of a Motorola Razr Plus. The level of interaction makes it easy to control your music without diving too deeply into a Spotify rabbit hole.

Immediately, I realized that this was what I wanted Apple’s Dynamic Island to feel like. I wanted a tap on the card to give me a little interaction with whatever I’m doing and a longer press to open the app — the opposite of how Apple handles things. It’s the type of interaction that allows me to use my phone less, which is what a simplified interface like Dynamic Island was meant to do all along.

More importantly, though, I think OnePlus’s approach to stacking Live Alerts is better than Apple can match. Right now, when you expand one of the cards within your Dynamic Island stack, that’s it — you can only see the one. You can keep a closer eye on your kitchen timer or pause your Spotify playlist, but not both. With Live Alerts, though, you can expand all of your cards at once, allowing you to stay alert in the kitchen while you keep up with the last week of the NFL’s regular season. It’s as if you stacked several widgets on top of each other, but I love that you can clear them all away at the end.

Maybe that’s what I like best about Live Alerts — they feel like widgets and are easy to use, but then they disappear when you’re done with them. Unlike the Dynamic Island, which always takes up a consistent amount of space around the entire Face ID module, there’s no indication that there’s even a Live Alert interface unless you’re using it. If your phone is sitting idle, you’ll only see a punch hole for the selfie camera — no extra darkened area, no indicator that you were previously listening to music, just an uninterrupted status bar across the top of your phone. It’s great. And yet, I still think that Live Alerts could go even further.

One problem with pill-like notifications — whether on Android or iOS — is that support remains limited. Right now, Dynamic Island will give you alerts from a few third-party apps like Uber and Google Maps, but it’s far from universal. Unfortunately, OnePlus’s Live Alerts are even more limited. Right now, music playback controls work with Spotify but don’t work with YouTube Music, massively limiting your choice of streaming services. OnePlus doesn’t offer Live Alerts for ridesharing or navigation apps, either, making it challenging to tackle too many tasks at once.

Also, OnePlus is far from the only Android brand with its eyes on conquering Apple’s Dynamic Island. Before long, Samsung will have its own version available as part of One UI 7, interestingly called the Now Bar. I’m not sure I love the name, but it looks like an interesting — if slightly upside-down — alternative. Rather than putting your controls at the top of a tall, thin display, Samsung’s Now Bar will sit right between the lock screen shortcuts when your phone is locked before switching to the top status bar when you unlock your phone.

In some ways, I think I’ll like the Now Bar better than Live Alerts when I get my hand on it, but not all the time. I’ll appreciate that reaching from the bottom of my screen is easier, but if I unlock my phone, the Now Bar becomes no better than the Dynamic Island. It’ll limit me to one app or timer at a time, and I’ll be right back to asking for more.

Ultimately, I think that for any Android brand to have a shot at replacing Dynamic Island, the solution will have to come from Google itself. Right now, the different approaches perfectly live up to the old “be together, not the same” tagline, but they’re doing so at the cost of one cohesive experience. They support different third-party apps, layouts, and tap-based controls, making them all lag behind Apple’s single, unified experience.

But, if Google is looking for inspiration when it gears up to challenge Apple, I hope it looks to OnePlus first.