Android 16's next big update will truly bring Pixel's live notifications to life

Google's take on Apple's Live Activities is here with Android 16. Live Updates, for those unaware, is a new notification class that is intended to display important information about ongoing activities like food delivery, ride-hailing app pickup, navigation, timers, and akin. Live Updates have elevated permissions, allowing them to appear above all other notifications in the status bar and on the lock screen.

Live Updates went live with Android 16, which began rolling out in stable back in early June. However, the update only brings the long-awaited feature in limited capacity, and not in its entirety. Full Live Updates support is expected to land later this year, preceding support for Wear OS devices.

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For reference, Android 16 stable laid the groundwork for Live Updates by essentially letting apps create said notifications. In this implementation, however, the system does not treat Live Updates any differently from standard notifications. This means that even if developers are using the 'progress-style' notification template for their apps, the app's notifications don't appear in their fully expanded look.

Although Google suggested that full Live Updates support would arrive later this year, it never really gave a concrete timeframe. The feature's absence in Android 16 QPR1 Beta 1 further blurred the potential release timeline, but that changed with the release of Android 16 QPR1 Beta 2 and the more recent QPR1 Beta 2.1.

As highlighted by credible Android analyst Mishaal Rahman in a report for Android Authority, full support for Live Updates appeared to be disabled in Android 16's early QPR betas, primarily because the tech giant had changed the underlying requirements for a notification to be classified and be promoted to a full Live Update.

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Previously, notifications only needed to meet three criteria to be classified as a full Live Update:

1. Use the progress-style notification template.
2. Be marked as an ongoing activity.
3. Include a short summary of the notification to be displayed in the status bar chip.

Now, a notification also needs to declare a new POST_PROMOTED_NOTIFICATIONS permission and call the requestPromotedOngoing API. Those two additions are key changes present in the latest QPR1 updates, but missing in Android 16 stable. According to the report, using a sample app to trigger the new permissions, Rahman was able to get the full Live Updates experience going, complete with a fully expanded look on the lock screen and a persistent status bar chip.

Full Live Updates support in the QPR beta makes it highly likely that the functionality will land in stable with the first Android 16 quarterly release in September. Check out what Live Updates will look like when live below.