Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Apple will purportedly debut always-on display tech on the iPhone 14 series.
- This comes more than a decade after the tech first arrived on smartphones.
Always-on displays have been around for years now, but you won’t find this feature on iPhones. However, it sounds like Apple will finally implement it later this year.
Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman reported in his Power-On newsletter that iOS 16 indeed includes support for an always-on display:
This would allow the iPhone to turn down the frame rate significantly on the lock screen and display quickly glanceable information — similar to newer Apple Watches.
Gurman asserts that the always-on display functionality will be exclusive to the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max, adding that the feature was originally planned for the iPhone 13 series.
A long overdue feature
Always-on displays are commonly used to show the time, weather, battery percentage, and/or notifications, and they’ve been around for more than a decade. The tech debuted on Nokia’s Symbian smartphones back in 2009 and 2010 before arriving on Android via the likes of Motorola, LG, and Samsung a couple of years later.
Still, it’s better late than never for Apple, and the combo of an OLED screen and low refresh rate (e.g. 1Hz) could make for a negligible hit to battery life on the iPhone 14 series.
This isn’t the only upgrade coming with iOS 16 though, as it’s believed that Apple will also bring wallpapers with “widget-like” features and improved windowing/multitasking.
