The notch is unique in its weird shape and in Apple’s embrace of it. But as a design problem, it’s not unique — at least, it won’t be for long. The notch represents a new challenge coming toward us across all devices, a paradigm that might be useful to think of as “edge-agnostic design.”

To understand where Apple’s mobile devices (and likely those of all manufacturers) are going, we have to get inside Jony Ive’s head; fortunately, he’s given us some clues about what’s in there. Think about what you’d want if you were the minimalist, mercurial industrial designer: a single, monolithic, functional piece of glass that can become anything, like you see in sci-fi movies. We can piece together some of the specifics from his public statements: when the Apple Watch was released, he said that the notion of a screen that even has to transition between “on” and “off” states “feels old.”

We can also see in the design and UI of the Apple Watch how Ive wants us to think about the edges of the screen: not at all. The OLED screen curves to seamlessly join the surrounding device—the superior blacks of OLED indistinguishable from the bezel—so that the screen has no discernible edge. The UI of the Apple Watch is designed to complement this specific goal: watch faces like “Motion” have a pure black background and a single figure like a glowing jellyfish or butterfly that fades into view, floats for a bit, and then fades out. It never enters or leaves the screen via the edge, and unless you know better, you get no indication that there’s an edge at all.

Extrapolate from this, and it’s not hard to imagine what Jony Ive pictures as the ideal iPhone or iPad. Consider if you will: a black piece of glass sits on your table. Periodically, a glowing jellyfish emerges from the around very edge of the device, floats all the way across the screen to the other edge, and disappears around the other side. The screen has no discernible “on” or “off” state, and no discernible “edge” between the screen and the end of the device itself. One big screen.

As manufacturers compete for smaller and smaller bezels, we will inevitably approach this device of nothing-but-screen, and the industry is already on that path. The iPhone X screen goes up to the point that the device edges begin to curve, except for its “notch,” which Apple calls the sensor housing. The Essential Phone does the same, except for a smaller notch for the camera. The Samsung Galaxy S8 has based its entire marketing campaign on how the screen slightly wraps around the devices curved sides. All three have rounded corners. We’re already living in a world where apps don’t end at the water’s edge anymore—they can potentially be overlapped, cropped, and wrapped, and thus can’t allow crucial content to live in any corner or any edge of the screen the way designers may be used to.

Going forward, app developers will need to know where they can place what is essential and un-croppable (what Apple calls the “Safe Area” in iOS 11’s new parlance for developers) and where they should provide “runoff” space that beautifully extends your app’s environment to the edge of the device, but which can nonetheless be cut off and overlapped by notches and rounded corners. It may be a big conceptual shift for designers who are used to seeing their designs rendered corner-to-corner in pixel-by-pixel perfection.

Right now, the iPhone X offers pixel-by-pixel control of the left and right sides of your screen, where the Safe Area abuts the edge, but requires developers to offer this overflow and safe zone at both the top and bottom, which also encompasses the rounded corners. The Galaxy S8 flirts with an opposite approach: a traditional clearly-defined top and bottom to the screen, but left and right edge wrap a bit around the sides of the device, forcing you to consider whether your content is “safe” and accessible on the sides of your app.

And in the future, phones will obviously compete for a more and more “edgeless” design: sensor housings made smaller and smaller, sensors embedded “under” the display, screens wrapped around not just the left and right of the phone like the S8 but the top and the bottom as well. Both web and app designers must start preparing for the time when they won’t be in control of designing a pixel-perfect app from top-left to bottom-right, but rather a dynamic set of elements and rules: they’ll be designing for each app an “overflow” region that expands outward in every direction, and a “safe area” inset from all four sides where the crucial interface components go. This is what Apple is future-proofing us for—although the Safe Area is really only necessary for the top and bottom of the iPhone X, it’s been implemented as though Apple knows it will be necessary on all four sides in the future.

So intentionally or not, Apple is already training us for the day when the design of your app becomes a much more complex and dynamic thing, with no one true screen size or shape. It’s no longer outlandish to picture screens that wrap around every edge—edges that probably have no ports at all: iPhones now let you charge wirelessly without a port, listen to headphones wirelessly without a port, and even do development wirelessly without a port. We’re rapidly approaching a time when your iPhone doesn’t need a single port in it. Someday within the next 10 years, Apple will sell us a device that is actually, truly, nothing but screen, and your app will literally need to take on the shape of the device itself…world without edge, amen. We’d better start thinking about what our apps on those devices look like.