How to get bottom, top and corner notches on your Android P beta device

We’re now on day two of Google I/O and while at yesterday’s keynote the company didn’t mention anything about notches, the Android P public beta and the Android P developer preview 2, include an option that allows you to switch on a notch at the bottom, top or even in the corner of a device.

If you had the Android P developer preview 1, this might be old news, but if this is your first venture into Android P, here’s a comprehensive guide that bring notches to your Pixel — or any of the other 12 devices on the beta eligibility list.

Note: the first several steps relate to enabling developer mode in your phone — if you’re already a developer, you can skip ahead.

Begin by navigating to the settings app. Following that, swipe down and open the ‘System’ menu.

Next, navigate to the ‘About phone’ menu (you may skip the next step if you already have developer options enabled)

Then go down until you see the ‘Build number’ and tap on this seven times, or as many times as it takes until you see a message that reads ‘You are now a developer.’

Now that you’re a developer, go back to the ‘About Phone’ menu and you should see ‘Developer options’ (if you don’t see it there should be an ‘Advanced’ pull down menu).

Tap on ‘Developer Options’  and swipe down until you see ‘Simulate a display with a cutout.’ Tap on that option and it’ll open a pop up allowing you to enable a ‘corner display cut out,’ ‘double display cutout’ and a ‘tall display cutout’

Double display cutout will put a notch on the top and the bottom of the device, similar to the ZTE prototype the company revealed a less than a month ago. The corner display cutout will cut out a pit of the display in the top edge of the smartphone’s screen.

The corner is where the Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S was initially rumoured to have its camera (though this turned out be false).

Lastly, the tall display places the cutout near the top making it more vertical than horizontal.

While it’s interesting that you can do this, putting notches on your Pixel is completely unnecessary. Still, it’s a fairly strong indication that the Pixel 3 will adopt the notch.