One of the biggest upgrades Apple brought to the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max was the new Dynamic Island. The tech giant ditched the eye sore that was the notch for its Pros this year and brought a kind of fluid notch that can transform into notifications or live activities.
Now, iOS 16.2 beta has brought a big update to the Dynamic Island that has seen minor software tweaks since its launch.
Currently, when music is playing, the Dynamic Island shows the battery icon along with either the Wi-Fi or signal bars. With this new update, the island will shrink down in width and all three icons will now be visible when music is played. It will also have a sleek animation that will set it in place.
Depending on the live activity, Apple shows only a few icons on the top of the iPhone 14 Pro. If it is an activity with more content, then there are only a few icons that are currently visible. This was slightly worrying at times because the signal bars would vanish upon launching an app or playing music, leading users to think that they had lost signal. This update will fix that and is much more useful in showing Dynamic Island’s purpose of handling live activities along with relevant phone information side-by-side.
The update only mentions Now Playing audio and not any other apps that this will be rectified on, for now. It is also worth noting that the update is meant for iPhone 14 Pro users only and not for iPhone 14 Pro Max models that have a larger screen and don't face the same issue.
The Dynamic Island is one of our favorite features of the Pro models this year, although we do hope that more third-party developers find a way to make use of it. iOS 16.1 recently brought live scores to Dynamic Island, which is a brilliant addition.
iOS 16.2 is likely to roll out by the end of the year and is the final big update to the iPhone's current software. It is still only available as a developer beta but the public beta version could be out soon as well.
Other than the upgrade to squeeze in iPhone icons with the Dynamic Island, iOS 16.2 will bring a new Freeform app (Apple had announced this back at its developer conference in June), which is a brainstorming and collaboration tool, along with a medications widget for the Lock Screen and Apple News integration for the Weather app.
Another feature that Apple announced at its September event is finally going to launch this month. Emergency SOS via satellite will roll out to all iPhone 14 models very soon and is one of the big safety features the tech giant is debuting this year along with Crash Detection.
