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Here's how Google's changing notifications in Android 16 with Live Updates
Published onJanuary 28, 2025
- Android 16 introduces Live Updates, a new class of notifications for ongoing activities.
- Live Updates are prominently displayed on the lock screen as well as on the status bar.
- These notifications are intended for rideshare pickups, food delivery alerts, navigation, and other use cases.
If you’re waiting for your Uber driver to arrive, then you’re probably either glued to the Uber app or periodically pulling down the notifications panel to see where they are. Your friends with iPhones don’t need to keep the Uber app open or manually check their notifications, though, thanks to Uber’s support for Live Activities on iOS. Android currently lacks an equivalent to Live Activities, but that’s changing in Android 16 with the introduction of Live Updates.
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A Live Activity in iOS is a type of notification that displays frequently updated information, such as the status of a flight, rideshare, delivery, or sporting event. Live Activities are shown on top of the iPhone’s Dynamic Island and the lock screen, making them easily visible. Android offers various notification types, including heads-up notifications, which appear briefly in a floating window above the status bar. Unlike Live Activities, which persist and update in place, frequent updates using heads-up notifications would require numerous individual notifications, potentially becoming intrusive. The new Live Updates feature in Android 16 aims to address this limitation.
Google didn’t share a lot of details about the feature in its blog post announcing Android 16 Beta 1, but that’s because this mode is only partially implemented in Beta 1. Android 16 Beta 1 only introduces support for progress-centric notifications, a new notification style that shows the progress of something like a rideshare pickup, a food delivery dropoff, or distance until the next turn. Developers can use this new notification style to denote states and milestones in a user’s journey through points and segments on a progress bar.
If this doesn’t sound like anything new to you, I don’t blame you. After all, rideshare apps like Uber have already been showing notifications like this for years now. Uber had to do a lot of custom stuff to make its notifications look like that on Android, though. Google has basically created a standardized version of what Uber’s been doing. With the new progress-centric notifications in Android 16, any app can create notifications like Uber.
More importantly, progress-centric notifications will be displayed more prominently on the lock screen. This is important given that Google is working on a new compact notification shelf on the lock screen for Android 16. When the new compact option is enabled, notifications are collapsed into a shelf that you have to tap to expand. Progress-centric notifications, i.e. Live Updates, likely won’t be collapsed into this shelf along with other notifications.
While I can’t confirm this to be the case, strings I discovered in Android 16 Beta 1 suggest that Live Updates will always appear on the lock screen. The OS currently doesn’t refer to this new class of notification as Live Updates, instead referring to it as live notifications. However, it’s likely this is merely an early copy and that it’s talking about the same feature.
<string name="live_notifications">Live notifications</string>
<string name="live_notifications_desc">Pinned notifications display live info from apps, and always appear on the status bar and lock screen</string>
<string name="live_notifications_switch">Show live info</string>
What’s interesting about these strings is that they also mention live notifications always appearing on the status bar. Google’s blog post didn’t say anything about the placement of Live Updates on the status bar, but the Android developer docs state that promoted/live notifications may “show as chips in the status bar, and/or permanently appear on always-on displays.”
This lines up with my previous reporting on the Rich Ongoing Notifications API. Back in October, I discovered a hidden command-line interface that allowed me to create mock live notifications with customizable app icons, text, and background colors. These mockups appeared as chips in the status bar, as shown in the gallery below.
Given the reference to status bar chips in the Android developer docs, it’s likely that Live Updates will appear as status bar chips. They’ll also show up on always-on displays, which is interesting. Google hasn’t shared any information on how to make progress-centric notifications appear in the status bar as chips or on the always-on display, so we’re not sure if that’s even possible yet in Android 16 Beta 1. The feature is clearly still a work in progress, so we’ll likely have to wait for a future beta to see Live Updates in all their glory.