Android 16 could be borrowing a key notification trick from the iPhone

• Work on Android in beta form continues
• Android 16 could feature a new notifications trick
• For now it’s called Rich Ongoing Notifications

With Android 15 now rolling out to Pixel phones, we can start turning our attention to what’s coming with Android 16 – and some digging into the latest beta code for the operating system has revealed a Dynamic Island-style notification system.

This comes from Mishaal Rahman over at Android Authority, and the feature is called Rich Ongoing Notifications. That gives you some idea of what’s involved: persistent notifications that show up in the status bar at the top of the screen.

On newer iPhone models, there’s a Dynamic Island notification bar that expands to show information such as sports scores, media that’s being played, or an arrival time for a cab pickup. It appears Rich Ongoing Notifications will offer something similar.

Evidence of the tweak to notifications has been found in the Android 15 QPR1 Beta 3 release, though as usual with betas, there’s no guarantee that the feature will make it into a final release or be released in its current form.

Phone chips

Here’s how it works: apps will be able to put a notification alert or ‘chip’ in the status bar, with custom text and a custom background color. That chip could then show live information – about a flight arrival time, for example.

For now, the Rich Ongoing Notifications feature hasn’t been enabled, though Rahman was able to get it working and create a few mockups showing how the chips would look in action (you can see one of them embedded above).

While this definitely has Dynamic Island…