This app for Samsung’s new Galaxy S10 phones makes great use of hole-punch camera

The Energy Ring app designed for Samsung’s new Galaxy S10 phones is becoming popular, as it makes great use of the hole-punch camera cut-out on Samsung’s Infinity-O display.

Energy Ring activates the light strip that surrounds the hole-punch cut-out to show you how much battery life your Galaxy S10 has.  

The Energy Ring app has added support for the Galaxy S10 Plus, which has a wider, pill-shaped cut-out than the circular cut-out on the Galaxy S10 and S10e.

This is how Energy Ring works:

First, install the free Energy Ring app from the Google Play Store.

You can tap or click on this link to get the Energy Ring app from Google’s Play Store.

Once in the app, tap the switch symbol on the top right of the app. It can be difficult to see if you don’t know where to look.

The app will take you to the S10’s notifications access menu, where you simply need to tap the switch for Energy Ring.

A pop-up will appear that says that Energy Ring will have a worrying amount of access to your notifications, “including personal information such as contact names and the content of messages you receive”.

It’s understandable why someone wouldn’t want to give Energy Ring this kind of access.

Energy Ring’s developer IJP says in the app’s description on Google Play that “Energy Ring does not read any Notification whatsoever, it merely relies on it to be alive. Be assured that the App does NOT access anything”.

It’s difficult to tell how trustworthy a small, third-party developer like IJP is. The prominent XDA-Developers site cites IJP (or “jagan2” as he is known on the site) as a “recognised developer”. It might not be a declaration of trustworthiness, but I doubt that XDA-Developers would promote a developer or app that compromises your security.

If you are comfortable with XDA-Developers’ backing and IJP’s claims that the Energy Ring app doesn’t access your notifications, you can tap “allow” on the pop-up.

Another pop-up will ask you to allow the Energy Ring app to “appear on top”, which you should switch on to make it work.

Once you have installed and set up the app, you will see a ring around the Galaxy S10’s camera cut-out that indicates remaining battery life.

Unfortunately, the ring doesn’t stay on when your Galaxy S10 goes to sleep and the screen turns off.

You can adjust the thickness of the ring, which direction it moves, and the colours that represent a range of remaining battery life.

You can set the ring to automatically turn off when using a full screen app, which turns off the ring when you are watching a video. This is what it looks like if you keep it on.

It could be useful to keep on the Energy Ring if you want to keep tabs on your battery life while watching videos.

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This article originally appeared on  Business Insider .