Android 8.0 Oreo Feature Focus: Notification Dots
- Paul Thurrott
- Sep 18, 2017
-
33
After making major changes to how notifications work in the previous Android release, Google is offering some nice refinements in Android 8.0 Oreo. Among them is notification dots, which are cute icon overlays that help you visually understand which apps have updates for you.
Notification dots appear as colored overlays or badges over an app icon when that app has a pending notification. These dots are colored-coded to the app icon, too, so a notification dot for, say, Instagram will use a different color than a notification dot for Google Play Store. You’ll have to trust me on that one, sadly, as my apps wouldn’t cooperate this morning:
Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox
Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift!
"*" indicates required fields
Note: Notification dots appear on icons on both the Home and Apps screens.
Notification dots do not replace the notifications that apps place in the notification shade at the top of the screen. Which makes sense, since you’d normally only see notification dots on those apps you’ve pinned to the home screen. Instead, they’re designed as an at-a-glance reminder that something has happened.
You can dismiss a notification dot in a variety of ways: By launching the app, by dismissing the notification(s) (or all notifications) in the notification shade, or by displaying the app’s notification preview and swiping the notification away. Because notification previews are also new to Android 8.0 Oreo, I will be discussing that feature separately soon.
Note: Notification dots can appear on a Home screen folder too. This indicates that one or more apps in the folder are displaying their own notification dots.
Notification dots are enabled by default. If you don’t like this feature for some reason, you can disable them globally: Navigate to Settings > Apps & notifications > Notifications and set “Allow notification dots” to Off. You can also configure whether any individual app displays this overlay. Just navigate to Settings > Apps & notifications > App info, find the app in question, and choose “App notifications.” Then, set “Allow notification dots” to Off.
Tagged with
Conversation 33 comments
-
wocowboy
Premium Member<blockquote><a href="#177513"><em>In reply to glenn8878:</em></a></blockquote><p>Yes, the iPhone has had this for years, but Paul doesn't like the fact that they are red and that they show the number of updates or notifications each app has available for you. He has ranted against those dots since they were introduced. This is silly, of course. In Oreo, these are just dots, you have to actually go to each app to find out what is going on, take the time to do that so that they will reset. And they are color-coded to each app icon, Ooooooo! God forbid these notification dots stand out as a noticeable color or actually give you any information, like the number of unread emails you have waiting for you or the number of unread text messages, or some sort of indication of the important information the app has for you. That would be bad! </p>
-
Stooks
<p>Thurrot.com All Google…All the time.</p>
-
Stooks
<blockquote><a href="#177519"><em>In reply to Nicholas_Kathrein:</em></a></blockquote><p>Nicholas you are total Google fan…just look at your post history it is crystal clear. I have no problem with that. I do wonder why you come to this supposedly Microsoft news site???</p><p><br></p><p>To that point if it were only about Smartphones (his coverage of Google) but it is not. Recently I would say 50% of the content here is about Google products or how Microsoft software is on Android. His use and conversion to them. At the same time his bashing of Microsoft products gets more and more frequent. Which I am not totally against when it is warranted but it is getting a little too much IMHO.</p><p><br></p><p><br></p>