Android O adds a neat new animation to the notification tray when you drag down on it to reveal your list of notifications. To be clear, these are animations for the icons that show up in the status bar when you touch and drag down on the notification tray. So for example, say you have an email notification, an SMS notification, and a notification or two from a couple of other apps. When you drag down on the notification tray in Android O‘s first developer preview, each notification icon snaps from the status bar up into the tray as its corresponding notification is revealed.
The reverse happens when you slide the notification tray back up, with the icons snapping back into the status bar portion of the notification tray as you slide it back up out of view. You can take a look at the video below that was uploaded by Android Police if you’re having trouble visualizing this, but imagine you have five or six notifications in your status bar. As you drag down the notification tray, the status bar stays persistent but resides at the bottom of the tray, and each notification populates above it in the order that they came in with the most recent one being the very top notification you see, and the oldest one being on the bottom of the list at the end of the notification tray. So with this new animation, as you drag down on the tray, the most recent icon floats up to the top of the notification tray next to the notification context, and the same thing happens for the rest of the icons.
This in no way serves a functional purpose but it does showcase that Google is incorporating more elements of design into the Android software and adding more attention to the little details, and it’s certainly going to be a nice little addition for those who have a passion for good design even if it is just in the software of their smartphone. At the very least, this is a decent way for Google to inject some eye candy into the operating system, and if you find yourself among those who appreciate good software design, this is one of the new adjustments to the OS that you’ll want to take a look at.