Android O Feature Highlight: Notification Badges

BY Rajesh Pandey

Rajesh Pandey

Rajesh is a 26-year old freelance writer from Kolkata, India. He loves to tinker around with his Android devices and flash custom ROMs on them....

All Articles by Rajesh Pandey

Published 7 Apr 2017

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Taking a cue from iOS, Google is introducing native support for notification badges in Android O. While many Android launchers have been able to replicate this functionality for quite a while now, it was wonky at best.

Many Android OEMs have also included notifications/app badge support in their skin, but due to the lack of an official API, very few apps have actually supported it.

All this will change with Android O as Google is working on adding notification badges support to the OS. As of now, the first developer preview of Android O does not have the notification badges feature enabled. However, when you head over to the info panel of any application, you will see a ‘Show badge’ option.

Developers will have to explicitly update their app to take advantage of app badges, though. Nonetheless, with an official API now being available from Google, app/notification badges will work in a much more consistent manner in Android.

[Via Android Police]

Read: Android O Features: All the New and Hidden Features We’ve Found So Far