By Jason Snell

October 5, 2022 12:29 PM PT

Using gestures inside the Dynamic Island

Note: This story has not been updated since 2022.

The Dynamic Island has nuances. As prompted by Jordan Krahn, I’ve been tapping and swiping on it to figure out some of the subtler gestures it accepts.

And then Ryan Jones came along and made a video:

How to control the Dynamic Island with swipes:

– swipe toward center = collapse
– swipe away from center = expand

Even works with 2 activities, and rubber bands when max'ed out. pic.twitter.com/8tMrVbZrF0

— Ryan Jones (@rjonesy) October 5, 2022

Swiping toward the center of the Island does seem to “minimize” it, though that behavior seems to vary. When I tried it while on a phone call, it made the time and voice waveform disappear, but the phone icon—to indicate that there’s an active phone call—remained. Doing it with playing music caused the music widget to vanish entirely. Swiping back out from the center restored it.

Things get a little more complicated when two items are in the Dynamic Island. Swiping in from the right, over the second, smaller item, caused it to disappear, giving all the space to the main item. Swiping back out brought it back.

Swiping in from the far edges, on the other hand, made the main item disappear and brought the smaller item to the front. Swiping out on the right side of the Dynamic Island, as if trying to send the second item back into its little side bubble, does just that.

(Note: I tested all this with iOS 16.1 beta. These gestures seem to not be active on iOS 16.0!)

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