The notch was first designed “three to four years ago”

Apr 20, 2018 09:49 GMT  ·  By

Despite being adopted by Android OEMs en-masse, the notch remains one very controversial design feature that was pioneered by Apple with the iPhone X in late 2017.

Huawei is one of the companies that are now offering a notch on their own flagships, but as compared to the others, it says that it’s not copying Apple because it was actually the first to invent the notch.

The firm claims it first designed the notch “three to four years ago,” but refused to bring it to mass-produced devices because it believed the market wasn’t ready for it. Li Changzhu, Huawei’s vice president of handset product, told Forbes that even though the notch made sense, the company decided to hold it back because of concerns it wouldn’t be received well.

“Consumers, especially those in China, like symmetry, and the notch is not perfect in Chinese culture. They like squares or circles—like rounded corners [of the display]. That’s perfect,” he said.

Courage, they have it

More importantly, Huawei admitted that Apple pioneered the notch on the market, and acknowledged that his company missed the chance to do that despite being the first to invent this feature.

“[Apple] using the notch was courage,” he said. “We missed our chance to [pioneer] with the notch design. Because we were too conservative and cautious.”

The notch was believed to be a compromise that Apple agreed with in order to increase the screen estate on the anniversary iPhone, especially as the company removed the home button incorporating the fingerprint sensor. The notch is the home of the Face ID module on the iPhone X, holding all the front-facing parts required for the facial recognition system to work.

Lately, however, the notch has made it to a growing number of Android phones as more OEMs understand the benefits of such a design gimmick, especially as the trend seems to be evolving towards edge-to-edge screens, not only on flagships, but on devices of all sizes and price ranges.