Android O will give you even more control over notifications

One of Android’s biggest advantages in recent years has been the way it handles notifications. And in Android O, Google is making that even more powerful by allowing apps to group alerts in “notification channels,” giving users more precise control over what kind of notifications they get. 

For example, a news app could allow users to only receive notifications from technology sites, and shut off other kinds of breaking news. It’s a feature that’s similar in a lot of ways to Google’s Gmail sorting, which allows a fine-grained control over what kind of email users get notified for. Android O will extend that kind of filtering to any developer, which in turn should hopefully make it easier for users to only have their phones buzz when they actually want them to. 

Along with notification channels, Google is adding a system level ability to snooze notifications in Android O. Users will be able to snooze notifications and cause them to reappear at a later time, and apps will even be able to update notifications while snoozed (although that won’t make them reappear). Additionally, developers will be able to cause notifications to automatically timeout after which they’ll automatically dismiss themselves.

Lastly, Google is adding the option for developers to set background colors for notifications, which could either be really useful for distinguishing notifications at a glance or the worst thing ever depending on how developers implement the feature.

The article was published on : theverge