Android 16 can deliver the best performance Impression of iPhone Dynamic Island

Notifications are one of the most important features of operating systems, especially mobile operating systems such as Android, where most apps are not running all the time. That’s why Google is constantly improving notifications to make them more useful, less distracting, or both. For example, in recent releases of Android, Google made all notifications purgable, minimized heads-up notifications while viewing videos, and blocked old notifications. Next year’s Android 16 update could bring even bigger changes to Android notifications, allowing apps to create rich continuous notifications.

According to information gathered from the latest Android 15 QPR1 Beta 3 release, Rich Oncoming Notices is a new API that allows you to display more than just an icon in your app’s status bar. This API allows apps to create chips with their own text and background colors that appear in the status bar. This is like the new screen recording chip that Google introduced in previous Android beta updates. Tapping on these chips may open some kind of dialog provided by the app that provides more information about the ongoing notification. This is also similar to the new screen recording system that Google just rolled out.

Google is still working on the Rich Oncoming Notices API, so there are a lot of details we don’t know yet. This API is not currently available to Android apps, so we can’t fully demonstrate what rich continuous notifications would look like. However, Google has created a command-line interface so that you can prototype what rich continuous notifications created by different apps might look like. Using some hidden commands, I was able to create a pseudo-rich continuous notification that displays my desired app icon, text, and background color.

For example, here’s a gallery of what the Rich Ongoing Notifications API can be used for in Android 16. I created a mock notification from Google Clock, a mock notification from Uber, where the alarm would go off in 10 minutes. Mock notifications from the app saying my ride will arrive in 5 minutes and the United Airlines app saying my flight will board in 9 minutes. As you can see, there’s a lot you can potentially do with Android apps using Android 16’s rich continuous notifications API.

I know what many people are thinking. Google is just copying the iPhone’s Dynamic Islands feature. Google may have been inspired by Apple to work on the Rich Oncoming Notices API, but status bar chips aren’t new to Android and actually predate Apple’s Dynamic Island feature. It is important to note. Android 12 added an API that allows dialer apps to display ongoing call time in a status bar tip, a year before Apple introduced the Dynamic Island feature.

Android 16 significantly expands functionality by opening up the status bar chip to all apps. While it’s probably true that this expansion takes inspiration from Dynamic Island, it wouldn’t be fair to call Rich Oncoming Notices itself a clone. However, this feature is clearly not yet complete, so my feelings may change as the feature evolves. With Android 16’s planned release date still several months away, there’s still plenty of time for Google to make changes. The reason I think rich continuous notifications will be a feature in Android 16 is because it is tied to a new API and the current release of Android (Android 15) has already reached platform stability.

What do you think about the new rich continuous notifications feature in Android 16? Let us know in the comments section below.