After 6 long months, an Android phone finally cloned the iPhone 14

Heartfelt kudos to Android maker Realme for being the first to clone iPhone 14’s Dynamic Island. It was a rough six months, but everyone at the Chinese OEM (a BBK subsidiary, just like OnePlus/Oppo) came together and made this generic product .

The Realme C55 has launched in Indonesia for around $195 and features a new “Mini Capsule” UI. When it’s time to display a specific type of notification, this phone has two black bars that shoot out from the front camera lens, displaying more information than you’d normally get in a single status bar icon. It looks like the new Dynamic Island notification space on the iPhone 14. While the iPhone’s dead screen space is due to housing a bunch of FaceID sensors, there’s no new hardware here (which will take a bit longer to copy), just a normal front camera that turns into a giant pill.

Apple’s end-to-end control over the OS and app ecosystem means all sorts of apps use the Dynamic Island notification motif, but Realme is just an Android maker creating an Android skin, so It seems the only real notification that appears on the “Mini Capsule” is the status of your battery. Connect the phone and you will see some charging statistics. On low battery, the pill will have a red outline and warn you that your phone is about to run out. Realme also has plans for an update that will show a step counter and data usage.

The rest of the phone isn’t much to write home about, this is still a budget phone. Specs include a 6.7-inch 90Hz LCD display, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a 5000mAh battery. An additional tier of 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage is also available. The SoC is a MediaTek Helio G88, a 12nm chip with two Cortex-A75 CPUs, six Cortex-A55 CPUs, and an ARM Mali-G52 GPU. It’s not all bad on the cheap side as you get a headphone jack and a MicroSD slot. There is also a side fingerprint reader and the phone comes with a surprisingly modern Android 13.

The body of the device contributes to the “counterfeit iPhone” look with a flat metal band that wraps around the sides, much like an iPhone 4 or 14. The back is where things get a little different, with two large camera bumps wrapped around two inexpensive cameras. sensors, and the yellow version of the phone has a classy-looking iridescent back.

This might be the first iPhone 14 clone, but it won’t be the last. Next in line on the copier is Huawei, which is rumored to have a fake dynamic island lined up for the Huawei Nova 11. The phone will go on sale in the first half of this year, assuming Huawei finds the chips for it.

Listing image by Realme