The latest beta build of the popular Nova Launcher ships with support for Android O-styled “Dots” Notification Badges, one of the app’s developers revealed on Thursday. The feature is available in the 5.2-beta1 build that’s already available for download in all parts of the world for users who have opted to be a part of the Nova Launcher beta program. As expected, the newly introduced type of Notification Badges can be placed in any corner of app icons and will automatically adopt the color of its “host.” The experimental version of the functionality is seemingly limited in nature and only designates particular apps that have notifications waiting for you. Notification Dots supported by the Nova Launcher aren’t interactive like they are in the second developer preview of Google’s upcoming operating system and their ability to adopt the color of their host app is still somewhat imperfect, as evident by the pinkish Flipboard dot that can be seen in one of the screenshots in the gallery below.
Nova Launcher developers will presumably expand on this functionality in the future and likely make Notification Dots interactive, though it remains to be seen how long they will take to implement Dots into a stable build of their popular Android launcher. Apart from a new type of Notification Badges, the latest Nova Launcher beta ships with a rounded Search Bar style and a number of performance tweaks that are meant to improve the overall user experience of the app. Finally, the build also includes some “minor fixes” designed to enhance the app’s compatibility with Android O, one Nova Launcher developer revealed, without clarifying on the matter. Refer to the gallery beneath this writing to see how Nova Launcher’s new Notification Badge style looks in practice.
As expected, the new feature is located in the “Notification badges” section of the Nova Settings app, with developers opting to situate it immediately beneath the Dynamic Badges option that was just added to the stable 5.1 build of the app earlier this month. More details on the popular Android launcher and its upcoming features will likely be available later this year.
