Islet

A Dynamic Island for Pixel, built in Material 3 Expressive.

Islet puts a small black pill exactly over your phone's camera cutout. At rest it is invisible — it is the same black as the panel around the lens. When something happens it grows: album art and a live equaliser while music plays, a peek when a notification lands, a battery reading when you plug in. Tap it and it opens into a full card with controls.

No ads. No accounts. No in-app purchases. No analytics. No internet permission at all — check AndroidManifest.xml, there isn't one, so nothing Islet reads can leave the device.

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How it lines up on every Pixel

This is the part that usually goes wrong, so it is worth saying how it is done.

Islet has no per-model lookup table. Pixel cutouts are not consistent — the 4a, 5, 5a and 6a punch in the top left, the 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 punch in the centre, and the diameter moves by a few pixels between generations. Any hard-coded table is wrong the day a new phone ships.

Instead the geometry is read from the platform at runtime:

val metrics = windowContext.getSystemService(WindowManager::class.java).currentWindowMetrics
val cutout  = metrics.windowInsets.displayCutout

DisplayCutout.getBoundingRectTop() is the exact rectangle of the hole in display pixels. Islet centres its window on that rectangle's centre, not on the centre of the screen — which is what makes the left-punch models work — and re-measures on every configuration change, rotation and display change.

The window itself is the other half of the trick:

gravity = Gravity.TOP or Gravity.CENTER_HORIZONTAL
x = cutout.centerX - display.width / 2
layoutInDisplayCutoutMode = LAYOUT_IN_DISPLAY_CUTOUT_MODE_ALWAYS
flags = FLAG_LAYOUT_NO_LIMITS or FLAG_LAYOUT_IN_SCREEN or …

Because the window uses centre gravity with a fixed offset, the island stays pinned to the lens as it grows and shrinks — there is no per-frame repositioning to lag behind an animation.

If you use a screen protector with an oversized cutout, or you just want it a hair lower, Settings has nudge and bleed sliders plus an alignment guide that outlines exactly what the platform reported, so you can see what Islet sees.

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What it shows

Now playing	Artwork, title, artist, wavy progress bar, tap-to-seek, previous / play / next. Works with any player that publishes a MediaSession, which is all of them.
Notifications	A short peek with app, title, body and up to three actions. Anything you have silenced at the channel level stays silent here too — Islet reads the ranking and respects it.
Charging	A brief battery peek on plug and unplug.

Tap a peek to pin it open. Swipe up to send it away. Swipe down to expand.

Design notes

• Material 3 Expressive throughout — MaterialExpressiveTheme, the expressive motion scheme for every transition, and LinearWavyProgressIndicator for playback.
• Material You colour. The settings app takes the wallpaper palette. The island takes its accent from the album art (with a luminance floor, because a brand colour picked to sit on white disappears on a black pill), falling back to the wallpaper palette when there is no art.
• The resting state is nothing. No glow, no border, no "app is running" hint. If it is not telling you something, you should not be able to see it.
• Idle means idle. With nothing to show, the window sets FLAG_NOT_TOUCHABLE, so swiping down over the camera pulls the shade exactly as it does without Islet installed. (There is a setting if you would rather it were always tappable.)
• The equaliser is synthetic. A real spectrum would mean the RECORD_AUDIO permission, which is an absurd price for a decoration.

Permissions, and why

Permission	Why
SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW	Draw the one overlay window.
Notification access	The single grant that provides both the notification feed and MediaSessionManager active sessions.
FOREGROUND_SERVICE_SPECIAL_USE	Keep the overlay resident so it reacts instantly.
POST_NOTIFICATIONS	Somewhere to put the minimum-importance "running" notice Android requires.
RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED	Come back after a reboot.
VIBRATE	Haptics on tap. Optional in Settings.

There is deliberately no INTERNET, no QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES (a <queries> block covers app labels) and no analytics SDK of any kind.

Install

Grab the APK from Releases and install it.

1. Open Islet.
2. Grant Display over other apps and Notification access.
3. Flip the switch.

A Quick Settings tile is included if you want to drop the island for a game or a film.

Build

git clone https://github.com/dylanneve1/islet
cd islet
./gradlew assembleDebug

Requires JDK 17+ and the Android SDK with API 37 (Android 17). Release builds are signed with a keystore described in a git-ignored keystore.properties; without one, assembleRelease falls back to the debug key so the build still works from a clean clone.

• minSdk 31 (Android 12 — where Material You starts)
• targetSdk / compileSdk 37 (Android 17)
• Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Material 3 1.5.0-alpha28
• ~2 MB release APK, no third-party runtime dependencies beyond AndroidX

Known limitations

• Expanded cards sit under the status bar. TYPE_APPLICATION_OVERLAY windows are z-ordered below the system status bar, so the clock and icons draw on top of the card while it is open. On a light-icon status bar this looks intentional; on a dark-icon one the icons are hard to read for the couple of seconds a peek lasts. The compact island is deliberately narrow enough to stay clear of both.
• Landscape hides the island by default, because the cutout is no longer at the top of the screen. You can turn that off.
• No text replies yet. Notification actions that open a remote-input field are shown and will launch the app rather than replying inline.

Licence

Apache 2.0. See LICENSE.