Android 16 could add a new API that lets apps create Rich Ongoing Notifications, reminiscent of the iPhone’s Dynamic Island.
Innovation for the innovation sake. I don’t ever feel my notification miss anything. Not once.
Codename starts with letter W.
are we nearing the end of android…?
No thanks
“Rich Ongoing Notifications”
Translate Google to English:
“Intrusive Unblockable Ads”
Ehh you can block it. You can turn off notifications on apps.
If it’s not the default behavior, the target audience of the ads will not do it.
And much like ad blocking in browsers, if it starts becoming a common behaviour, it will be prevented at all costs.
This is actually pretty cool assuming that there’s a permission for this that I can toggle.
I’m hoping and assuming that apps would need to ask for permission to use this, lest this turn into every app fighting to push their own dynamic island notification to the top bar, just like how back then every app wanted to have its own persistent notification and also that time when every app provided minor status updates using global toasts that didn’t specify which app created it, so you could be doing something in a completely different app and you’d get a completely random and unattributed toast with some vague message like “connection failed” with no way outside of third party apps to figure out which app sent it. /rant
I just love how google has pushed the narrative that the space up top is scarce, therefor no more than 4 persistent notifications can show up there, only to rediscover all that free real estate now.
every app wanted to have its own persistent notification
When? Which apps? I’ve been using Android since KitKat and I only remember persistent notifications by apps that needed them (to keep working, stay in memory).
That said, I agree that a permission would be nice, as I am skeptical of the use cases shown in the article mockups. I think it should stay an ongoing notification thing as anything else would indeed take more space.
I used to have a lot of apps back then that would use them as advertisement banners, it was really annoying. I forget when it happened but I’ve been using Android since honeycomb so I’ve seen a lot
The feature seems somewhat like Apple’s Dynamic Island on iPhones, though technically Android used status bar chips in the past.
I didn’t know what the islands were but as expected it just an Apple™️ way of naming something done before. Let the cycle continue.
I remember people going crazy about it when Apple introduced it, and then I saw a video of it in action and was like, “is that it?”.
If it worked well it’s really nice. The problem is apps in the background tend to not update it as often as it should. So sometimes I’ll have a weather alert that’s 30 minutes old, along with a notification saying “please open the app for more updated info”.
I thought it was only me who was seeing stale data there. It’s just a persistent notification, but it was marketed beautifully. It seems to have the same problems and benefits of persistent notifications. Sometimes I will get rideshare apps leaving up their notifications long past their usefulness too.
Acquiring birds.
