Android O notifications can be snoozed and categorized. Yes, Google is giving the user even more control over how they interact with notifications, and this is great if you’re someone who has a lot of notifications coming through to your device. Not all users like having notifications constantly popping up, but there are those which purposely leave all or most notifications on and untouched so they can be assured that they always see what’s coming in just in case something is important. That being said, notifications can be a bit much sometimes which is here these new notification controls will come in handy.
With the ability to snooze notifications users will be able to literally snooze them individually in different increments of time. While Google may decide to expand on this in the future, what’s available in the Android O Developer Preview 1 are three different times, which include the ability to snooze notifications for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or an hour, and since these are at the individual level you can snooze some notifications while leaving others alone. The reason for snoozing a notification is so that it will essentially be dismissed but pop back up later on after the time you’ve designated has passed, this way you don’t forget about whatever that notification has to do with. To enhance this even further, Google is giving developers the ability to have notifications for their apps time out and dismiss themselves automatically if it hasn’t been interacted with after a certain period of time.
As for the categorization, notifications will have the ability to be grouped up into specific categories that Google is calling “notification channels.” Developers will have access to this new grouping option so they can implement it for their own apps, and the next time a few notifications from that app come in if they happen to be related to different category types, like food and entertainment, then they’ll be separated out into their respective channels so users can check the ones that they feel are more important first. In addition to notification channels and snoozing notifications, notifications will be able to support background colors, though this is something that developers will have to implement and is not something that can be customized by the user.