Android 11 will help stop curved displays from breaking your apps

There’s been a trend lately of extremely curved displays on smartphones. We saw a very curved display in the OnePlus 7 Pro and OnePlus 7T Pro, and an even more curved Waterfall display on the HUAWEI Mate 30 Pro. While these displays can help devices feel more premium and even add features like edge glow for notifications, they’ll often make some apps extremely frustrating to use.

Because the app is reading that waterfall display as well, part of the display, some apps will bleed touchable elements over the side. This can be really frustrating because it can be difficult to interact with an element when it’s stuck on the side of your phone.

Google knows this and has implemented an API into Android 11 that should make your experience much better. Now, when a developer is creating an app, they can specify the interactable area of the display to prevent elements from bleeding over the edge.

This is similar to the screen cutouts API in Android 9 Pie, which allowed for better app integration of devices with notches, camera cutouts and the like.

I’m personally not a fan of over-exaggerated curved displays myself, and it seems like even Samsung has scaled them back with the S20 series. Still, we’re likely to see a lot more curvy phones launching in the future.

Do you like curved displays on smartphones? Happy about the feature? Let us know your thoughts down below!