Are you annoyed by your new iPhone 14 Pro or 14 Pro Max’s Dynamic Island, and want to turn it off? It cannot permanently be done, but there’s a workaround you may have missed.
First things first: The Dynamic Island is not just a feature showing you notifications about app behavior, it’s also there to hide the selfie camera and Face ID components. It cannot, therefore, be fully removed.
It also can’t be disabled; there’s no such option in the iPhone’s settings. If you minimize Apple Music while it’s playing a song, or the Clock app while timer while it’s active, or connect a pair of AirPods to your phone, all of this will show as a notification in the Dynamic Island.
However, if you for any reason want to get rid of the persistent app “widget” that shows up in the Dynamic Island when there’s something happening in the background (such as a timer countdown), there’s a way to at least temporarily turn it off (via MacRumors).
The solution is simple: Just swipe left or right on the Dynamic Island and it’ll go quiet until the next time it’s invoked by some app. Yep, it’s that simple, and also quite easy to miss.
This does not disable the background app that invoked the Dynamic Island. For example, if you do this while Apple Music is playing a song, the song will continue playing, but it will no longer show up in the Dynamic Island. The downside to this is that, once you’ve swiped left or right on the Dynamic Island, it really turns off for that particular task, meaning that tapping on the Dynamic Island won’t bring Apple Music back anymore. Sorry, you can’t have it both ways.
