Notifications are something we receive on our phones daily. This can feel overwhelming if you receive a ton of them, but it seems that a future Android update could change that. According to a report from Mishaal Rahman over at Android Authority, Android 16 could introduce notification bundling similar to Gmail.
Better notifications management
Depending on how busy you are and how many apps you’ve enabled notifications for, during the course of the day, it would be easy to receive hundreds of notifications. This can come from your shopping apps, social media apps, email apps, messaging apps, and so on.
Android has come a long way in how it manages notifications. Typically it groups notifications from the same app together. This makes it easier to see at a glance, but ultimately it can still feel overwhelming and claustrophobic.
According to Rahman’s report, Google is working on an update that could change the way notifications look on Android 16. This comes in the form of a feature called “bundled notifications”, which Rahman speculates could be part of the Android 16 update. Rather than just grouping notifications from the same app together, these bundles will follow some sort of theme.
Right now it seems very similar to Gmail which lets users group emails based on their category. This includes Primary, Promotions, Social, Updates, and Forums. These bundled notifications follow a similar theme, except that it groups them into Promotions, News, Social, and Recommendations. The feature doesn’t seem to be live yet, so it is unclear how exactly this will work.
A taste of what’s to come
Android 16, like any other major OS update, is expected to bring many changes under the hood. Earlier reports indicated that it could introduce a notification cooldown feature. It is also expected to bring back custom icon shapes, which were previously part of Android but were later removed.
Google is also expected to roll out Android 16 sooner than expected. The company usually reserves the release of the first developer preview for the early part of the new year. Android 16 is breaking tradition where the first developer preview was released back in November.
The company is expected to release the update towards the middle of 2025, barring any major issues. This would make its release a good 2-3 months compared to more recent Android releases. This is done to ensure that Google’s Android partners have more time to prepare the update for their devices.
