Now You Can Hide the iPhone X’s Notch Using a Custom Wallpaper

Many are a big fan of the new iPhone X.  But some aren’t overly thrilled with the notch at the top. Unfortunately, the bezel at the top is necessary in order for Apple’s new Face ID to work.  But that doesn’t mean that you have to hate the way it looks, does it?  Would you rather have a regular black bar across the top of the iPhone X?  Or is the awkward notch growing on you?  Well, there is a simple solution – all you need to do is get a custom wallpaper designed to hide the remaining bit of bezel.

I’m not sure that I really like the way this looks.  As much as the bezel notch at the top does appear to be “annoying”, hiding the notch isn’t really that appealing to me.  I would like to point out that the notch is annoying.  Not necessarily a bad thing.  That being said, Notcho is a new app that creates special wallpapers designed to hide the iPhone X notch.  It comes with 11 pre-selected options to chose from, but you can also create your own using any image that you want.  Just select “Import” and pick an image from your camera roll.  Then select “save” and Notcho will crop your picture to fit your iPhone X screen.  There are ads with Notcho, but for $1.99 you can go ad-free.

If you’d rather not pay, and you don’t want to use branded wallpaper on your iPhone X, Gadget Hacks have put together seven notch hiding wallpapers of their own.  Just select the images you want and download them. Then hit ‘Share’ while viewing any of those images and select ‘Save Image’ to store it on your iPhone.  If you still can’t find a wallpaper you like, you can always create your own with Photoshop.

Once you’ve found your new wallpaper and saved it to your iPhone X, you still need to set your new wallpaper. To do that, just launch the Photos app and select the image you created or downloaded. Then hit ‘Share’ and tap on ‘Use as Wallpaper.’ When you see the option to choose ‘Still’ or ‘Perspective,’ pick ‘Still’ so that the bezels line up. Then just hit ‘Set’ and you’ll be asked if you want to use it as your home screen, lock screen or both.

I think it’s great that there are options out there for people who don’t like the notch at the top of the screen.  But I also think that it’s time to let that notion go and just embrace the notch.  It’s not that bad, is it?  Yes, we’ve suddenly become spoiled by the fact that there are no bezels at the bottom of the screen, but it’s still fairly bezel-less.  It feels a bit like people are complaining about the one thing that Apple couldn’t do.  I would argue that this is one thing that they needed to do in order to enable FaceID.  So it’s not like this is a design flaw.  It’s the design.  Perhaps Apple will be able to do away with this during their next generation, but for the time being, I think we need to embrace the bezels and not get so hung up on it.