It’s easy to forget that one of the most powerful features on your Android phone is notification management.
From snoozing to notification groups to muting individual types of notifications from apps, there’s an impressive amount of tools that let you stay informed without becoming distracted by irrelevant pop-ups.
I use most of these features daily, but a recently discovered change could be the best yet.
The notification rules feature was spotted in code strings in the latest Android 17 beta by Android Authority.
While this feature isn’t detailed in full, there are plenty of clues that indicate that notification management will soon become much easier and quicker. The catch is that it may not arrive with Android 17.
The Android features I usually ignore are actually the best things on my phone
Even better, they require little-to-no set up
Notification rules take the manual labor out of managing your notifications
Set rules and actions for individual apps and people
The code strings uncovered in the recent Android 17 beta update suggest that we will be able to create notification rules for specific apps and people.
After selection, we can then apply one of five actions to the selected apps or people (Silence, Block, Silence & Bundle, Highlight, and Highlight & Alert).
Silence and Block are self-explanatory, and Silence & Bundle likely refers to the Notification Organizer feature that launched on recent Pixel phones.
However, it could suggest the creation of custom notification categories, which would be handy for notifications that don’t fit into the preset categories on Pixel (for example, you may be able to create a category for all work-related notifications).
The last two, Highlight and Highlight & Alert, are less clear. Notifications deemed a priority are already placed at the top of the notification list, outside the categories.
“Alert” in this context may mean a custom notification sound or alert that signifies an important notification when you aren’t looking at your phone.
While we currently have a lot of granular control over which notifications we silence and block, notification rules would allow us to make sweeping changes at once.
It takes a lot of time to set up each app’s notifications right now, so being able to make broad changes in seconds and fine-tune them later is much preferred.
However, there’s more to this feature than that.
Calls and texts are in dire need of notification management
We need better control over how we manage notifications from contacts
What stood out to me in these code strings was the “People” tag.
Like most people, I have a huge variety of contacts on my phone, from work contacts, friends, family, landlords, agents, and so on.
Some of these people are more important than others, and missing their calls and texts in the past has been a serious problem. Being able to highlight texts from these contacts will be a lifesaver.
On the other hand, some contacts are never a priority. While I don’t want to block them, calls and texts are never a priority and can usually be handled later.
Silencing these would mean I wouldn’t get distracted without missing them completely. The implication is that while an incoming call will still appear on your screen, it may be silenced or trigger a different alert depending on your rules.
Could we see rules for keywords in notifications?
Third-party apps already offer impressive notification management features, such as triggering rules when a notification contains a pre-defined keyword.
While the triggers and rules discovered in the APK teardown are indicative of a powerful feature, there’s certainly more this upcoming feature could do to help categorize notifications.
However, I think that the most important element of notification rules is convenience. As I mentioned earlier, setting up notification channels is time-consuming.
When I’m setting up a new phone or installing new apps, I often forget to set up channels, which means I’m constantly going back to set new rules.
If notification rules let me apply a single action to multiple apps in one stroke, it will significantly reduce the time I spend managing notifications and the number of unnecessary notifications I read.
Android is set for some major updates
I’m excited about notification rules, but since this feature is clearly still in development, we likely won’t see it as part of the Android 17 stable release. Instead, a future Pixel Feature Drop could serve as the update’s vessel.
Android’s upcoming home screen organizer feature, discovered in the same update, may also arrive in a similar way.
However, a leaked One UI 9 build also contained references to notification rules.
So we may see one or both of these features launch as part of a bigger Android patch between Android 17 and Android 18.
Whenever it launches, I’ll be keen to give these notification rules a whirl and finally get on top of my notifications.
