Notifications have been a pretty big focus within Android since Lollipop, and being the company that they are, Google is continuing their mission to ever improve various aspects of the Android operating system with the latest version of the software, Android N. With the developer preview launching yesterday there have been a handful of changes and tweaks to the system functions and some new features to look forward to, but not everything has been covered yet. One of the new changes it looks like focuses again on notifications within Android N, but more specifically on the notification options that a user has access to when long-pressing on the notification.
In Lollipop and Marshmallow, notification options were certainly present, but long-pressing on the notification would only bring up an information detail button that would take you outside of the notification panel when tapping it. This wasn’t necessarily a problem but it did basically take the user away from what they were doing. With the Android N developer preview, long-pressing on notifications now brings up the notification options inside of the notification panel instead, which allows the user to access and change any options for that notification specifically and then go right back to the notification panel to interact with the rest if they wish.
This new in-panel notification options screen lets you manage the notifications for that particular app, allowing you to either silence the notifications, block them, or leave them be and do without silencing or blocking them at all. There are also buttons for more settings if users need them which presumably takes them away from the notification panel like before, and there is also a button labeled “done” when the user is ready to back out of that particular screen. On the more settings screen, users will find options for blocking all notifications from that app, showing the notifications silently, and an option for overriding the Do Not Disturb mode. There’s no telling if Google will bring back the “allow peeking option” which is missing in the Android preview, but there is always a chance Google could reintroduce it in one of the later previews or in the final build of the software that gets pushed to the public.
