The Android 16 launch is coming up faster than you might have expected, so it’s no surprise that we’ve been hearing more and more about what the upgrade will have to offer. The latest rumor to pop up online (via Android Authority) is an all-new organization feature for your notifications.
Code for this feature has been uncovered by Mishaal Rahman in the latest Android 15 QPR2 beta release. Apparently, the main purpose of the new feature is to silence and group together notifications that are similar to each other. That way you won’t be constantly pestered by the same alert every time something minor has changed.
How notifications will be grouped
It looks like similar notifications will be grouped together under a few different categories, including Promotions, News, Social and Recommendations. I know exactly which category I will be ignoring the most, especially since the bundling menu promises to “override an app’s own notification settings”. Spoiler alert: It’s the Promotions category.
I don’t like getting promotional notifications on my phone because, frankly, I don’t care that Dominos is offering half price deals on an already-overpriced pizza. Or that I can get X free photo prints as long as I order in the next 30 seconds. If Android 16 can make them all easier to ignore by bundling them all together, then I am absolutely on board for this feature.
'Notification Cooldown'
This isn’t the only notification change Google could implement in Android 16 either. We’ve seen evidence that a "Notification Cooldown” feature is in the works, supposedly coming to Pixel phones as part of the December feature drop. But code in the Android 16 developer preview suggests that a slightly different version may arrive as part of the new software.
The goal behind this feature is to slowly reduce the volume on notification alerts when individual apps bombard you with notifications. So if your group chat is constantly pinging away, you’ll stop getting that irritating “PING” every few seconds. Hopefully this means that when Android 16 rolls around, the notification experience is significantly less annoying than it is now.
Android 16 will reportedly release some time in the spring, possibly early June if rumors are to be believed. We’ll likely be hearing a lot more over the coming weeks and months, as Google releases the next developer preview and eventually the beta.
