If you’ve been following the news from MWC 2018, you’ve probably heard of the Vivo Apex, an almost bezel-less concept phone with a pop-up front camera. It seems they aren’t the first ones to think of the idea. A Twitter exchange between an Essential fan named Rafael and Essential CEO Andy Rubin shows off that the company has a patent for the technology. Rafael sent over a Gizmodo article about the Apex and Rubin responded with a link to a Google Patents page that showed Essential filing a US patent back in May 2016 entitled "Apparatus and method to maximize the display area of a mobile device." A follow-up patent is currently pending.
It shows basically the exact thing Vivo showed off and the patent was granted in August 2017. Another implementation shown has the camera placed on the top-left corner of the screen and acts as a permanent camera icon. But, of course, we must remember that even if a patent has been filed it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’ll come to a device soon. But if Rubin was willing to talk about it, perhaps our odds of seeing one in the future might be more likely than we think.
Source: Android Police