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iPhone 18 Pro’s best Dynamic Island feature is one Apple barely mentioned

iPhone 18 Pro is here (read our review), and its Dynamic Island is better than ever. My personal favorite change is something Apple barely mentioned: an improved dual Live Activity mode.

Dynamic Island on iPhone 18 Pro lets you see more information when running two Live Activities

Apple debuted the Dynamic Island in 2022 on the iPhone 14 Pro. And while software support for Live Activities has expanded a lot since then, the actual Dynamic Island hardware has stayed unchanged.

But with iPhone 18 Pro, Apple managed to shrink the Dynamic Island for the first time.

By moving certain Face ID components under the display, iPhone 18 Pro adds slightly more usable screen real estate than previous iPhones had.

More importantly though, the Dynamic Island can now display more Live Activity information than before.

In Apple’s announcement earlier this month, it spotlighted how three Live Activities can now run at a time—up from the previous limit of two.

That’s a nice upgrade, but the change I’ve found even more beneficial (and I’m not alone) is that your second Live Activity can be a lot more informative on iPhone 18 Pro.

That’s because if you’re only running two Live Activities, there’s more space available than before, and Apple uses that space to give the second Live Activity additional info.

So if you’re listening to media while running a timer—something I do all the time at the gym—now you’ll actually see the remaining time in the Dynamic Island. Before, it only showed a timer icon.

I look forward to seeing how apps make their Live Activities even more useful for iPhone 18 Pro users.

Do you have an iPhone 18 Pro? What do you think of the new Dynamic Island? Let us know in the comments.

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Avatar for Ryan Christoffel Ryan Christoffel

Ryan got his start in journalism as an Editor at MacStories, where he worked for four years covering Apple news, writing app reviews, and more. For two years he co-hosted the Adapt podcast on Relay FM, which focused entirely on the iPad. As a result, it should come as no surprise that his favorite Apple device is the iPad Pro.