The new Android 13 operating system will have a feature on notifications that is more than a decade overdue. In 2009, when Marvel had two movies in its cinematic universe, Avatar had come out and Apple was launching the iPhone 3GS. This new device from the people of Cupertino inaugurates the automatic notification system. There, apps were required to ask for permission before sending any notifications to users.
Today, in 2022, there are 29 Marvel World movies, plus dozens of shows on the Disney+ platform and the second part of Avatar is coming at the end of the year. While Android 13 has just launched the feature that requires requesting permission from users before sending any kind of notification. A decade later leads us to think that talking about backwardness is almost an understatement. Historically, Android has had a very robust notification system. In particular, a drop-down notification “drawer”, which Apple did not copy until 2011. The operating system developed by Google has long had plenty of controls to selectively block certain categories of notifications.
Android looking to update notifications
Now, if you want to receive notifications of any kind, say direct messages from Instagram or another social network, not all the “Likes” that a notification may have, you can make the block in the app’s notification settings. All these types of notification controls, coming to Android, will be after the app installation itself. When you install an app, by default, you get permission to send some kind of notification. That’s where it all ends now, and that’s where the most important changes are coming.
The operating system does not have any kind of initial warning, not even an alert informing what is happening. With the act of downloading an application comes, by default, the acceptance of any notifications that an app decides to send to Android smartphones.
Seeking to adapt to the new reality
From the essence, what is raised by the operating system that dominates the market, is that it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Android users have been experiencing this since its early days. In recent years, Google has been making it easier to mute certain types of alerts. To fix this, press and hold a notification and, there, you will have the option to make that type of notification “silent”. This means that your device will not ring or turn on, and may even turn off completely.
To complicate matters further, within the categories of notifications, they also depend on their developers to create them. In this regard, many of them do not “play” this situation well. For example, Amazon, they have only three categories for the Android system, namely notifications, account authentication and Alexa. In addition, it is possible that, by mistake, the sending of these messages may be disabled.
However, following the rules is not a common norm for developers when thinking about generating categories of notifications. On Google’s part, in its main application on Android, there are 30 different categories of notifications.
