How to hide the notch on the Pixel 3 XL

Google has added a notch to the Pixel 3 XL. You might love it, but if you are reading this you’re at least on the fence about it.

There isn’t an option to ‘hide’ the notch unless you know where to look for it though.

Rival phones such as the OnePlus 6 and Huawei P20 Pro have a setting in the display menu of their Android builds that give you the option to black out the status bar. At a glance, this makes it look like your phone doesn’t have a notch.

Out of the box, it looks like you can’t do this on the Pixel 3 XL. But you can!

Here’s how.

Bye bye notch, we hardly knew thee

Step 1

Open the Settings app, and then tap through these menus:

System > About phone

Step 2

Then scroll to the bottom of the page where you’ll see your phone’s Build number

Step 3

Tap on this several times and you’ll see a message countdown until you can become a developer (as Google puts it).

Step 4

You’re about to unlock developer mode. Tap until you’re prompted to enter your PIN, and then you’ll be able to access developer mode.

At this point you should only perform the actions we are about to describe. You should not change any other settings in developer mode.

Step 5

Tap the back button to go to the System menu, and then tap Advanced.

Step 6

You’ll now see Developer options. Tap this and scroll down to the subsection Drawing.

Step 7

Tap on Simulate display with a cutout. It’s set to default, so tap Hide to change it.

This hides the notch by blacking out the top corners of the display. You can go back and change this to Default to show the notch at any time.