Android 16’s New Clever Feature to Make Your Phone Less Annoying
There are times when it can be dreadful going through your multiple notifications one by one. And while Android has always allowed you to manually manage these, this process can also be tedious, especially if you have installed numerous apps. Now, a new finding suggests that Android 16 may incorporate a clever Gmail feature to automatically filter and sort notifications.
With Gmail’s intelligent notification organizer, it prioritizes important items and silences those it detects require less urgent action. It also categorizes them to reduce the total number of notifications. Android has its own notification filtering tool, but it is limited to basic organization. As it currently stands, Google is working to introduce a smarter sorting system for Android’s notifications.
Android 16 to Copy a Handy Gmail Feature
The feature was discovered by Mishaal Rahman (via Android Authority), which is called notification organizer hidden inside the latest Android 16 QPR1 Beta. While it’s inactivated, the source was able to reveal the app’s settings.
Accordingly, the tool’s page describes that users can group notifications into four categories: promotions, news, social, and suggested. It then states that categorizing these notifications in different types will minimize the total number of alerts. It was also highlighted that the feature relies into AI to analyze the notifications and that it may contain errors.
Additionally, users are given control over which apps to include in or exempt from the notification organizer, which is useful to override the feature in case it faces filtering issues.
A similar feature was already spotted back in Android 15. However, it was labeled as “Bundled notifications,” and the verbiage of the tool was a little vague and didn’t explicitly mention AI.
Will the Smart Notifications Organizer Come to More Android Devices?
Although the framework for the feature is tied to the open-source Android 16, Rahman speculates that this would be exclusive to Google Pixel devices and could debut first with the upcoming Pixel 10. This is because the AI service used to manage the filtering is not available in the open-source version of Android.
Regardless, Google and OEMs would have some workaround to bring this smart notifications organizer to more Android devices in the future, although we don’t yet know when it may arrive.
How do you manage your app notifications? We’d like to hear your suggestions in the comments.
Source:
Android Authority