Chrome OS will reportedly be getting notification dots sometime soon according to a new report. The notification dots if you’re not familiar are little indicators that will show up on top of the home screen shortcuts for applications to tell you that you have unread notifications for those apps. This only shows up on app icons which have been placed on the homescreen, and they’re only visible on devices running on Android Oreo, that is unless you have a third-party app launcher which has already incorporated this type of feature.
While there is no direct statement about the notification dots actually appearing on Chrome OS, a Chrome commit that was recently discovered seems suggest that these notifications dots will be implemented at some point. In regards to what the information in the commit is that points to this potential feature, the following string of code, “ShelfView::OnShelfItemChanged handles update the icons indicator,” which doesn’t necessarily guarantee that notification dots are coming to the platform, but considering Google has been trying to bring certain elements of Android to the Chrome OS ecosystem it seems like something that would be a potential change to look out for.
This also makes more sense given that Google has been steadily migrating more and more Chromebooks to the support list for machines that will support the use of the Play Store and the installation of Android apps. With a large number of Chromebooks already able to use Android apps, the notification dots could be a decision Google is making for this particular reason. This is an Android-based feature, after all, so Chromebooks with Android app support having notification dots for those apps would make a whole lot of sense. When or if Google does actually plan to implement this feature beyond any internal testing is still unclear, and if it does begin to roll it out to users at some point it will likely pass through the Canary, Dev, and Beta channels before it ends up moving onto Stable builds of the Chrome OS platform, which could mean that notification dots on Chrome OS could still be a fair distance out from this point.