The live updates of Android 16 will not work with your favorite music player, and it is a disappointment

Listening to music, audio books or podcasts is one of the most common smartphone activities, which is why Android gives media notifications. Instead of gathering them with other alerts, Android displays multimedia notifications under the fast setting panel, on the locking screen, and even on the always hand screen. However, you must reduce the notification shade just to see the name of the current track. A new feature in Android 16 presents status bar chips that could solve this problem, but unfortunately, this will not work with your favorite music player. Here is why.

Android 16 provides a new notification feature entitled Live Updates, which are essentially the Android version of live activities on iOS. Live updates are special notifications that the system increases to appear in a good place on the locking screen, the display always on, the notification panel and in the status bar. By design, they are always entirely widened and cannot be collapsed by the user.

On the locking screen and the screen always on, live updates remain entirely widened even when other notifications are minimized. In the notification drawer, they appear at the top, while in the status bar, they become tiny chips with an icon and a short extract of text from the application.

In order for the notification of an application to be considered a live update, it must meet several key criteria:

• He must have a special authorization. The application must request the new POST_PROMOTED_NOTIFICATION Authorization added in Android 16 QPR1, which the user can grant or revoke at any time from the parameters.
• He must be explicitly. The application must ask the system to promote its notification to a live update, either by defining the EXTRA_REQUEST_PROMOTED_ONGOING flag or using the requestPromotedOngoing API.
• It must be “in progress. “This indicates to the system that the notification concerns a substantive task with which the user is” actively committed “, which prevents him from rejecting.
• He must follow Specific formatting rules. The notification must have a title and a priority greater than the minimum. It cannot be a group summary, integrate personalized content or use a personalized background color.

Although the previous requirements are simple, there is a last crucial limitation: the style of notification. Only notifications using one of the four specific models can be promoted to a live update.

• Standard: This is the basic notification model without special features.
• Big text: This model is used for notifications containing a large block of extensible text, such as an email.
• Call: Tappé for incoming call alerts, this style often has a large contact photo and provides specific actions to calls such as “response” or “decline”.
• Progress: New in Android 16, this style is designed for any task which must display a progression bar.

So why cannot media notifications become live updates, especially since they often have bars of progression? The answer is that they do not use the style of progression of Android 16. Instead, music, audio and podcast applications generally use the dedicated multimedia style model. As mentioned above, they do it to receive the special treatment that Android provides the multimedia reading notifications. If they were to go to the style of progression, their notifications would not be pinned in the fast parameter panel or would not display other things the multimedia output switch. In the end, media applications should sacrifice essential features just to access the functionality of live updates – a compromise that they are unlikely to do.

This raises the question, then: why cannot Google simply make the media style notifications appear as live updates anyway? After all, Samsung has already done something similar in One UI 7, showing media notifications as “live notifications” by default. It would be an excellent user experience, allowing you to see the current track and access media controls with a single tap on the status of the status bar, eliminating the need to slide down.

As far as we can, there is no technical reason, Google cannot do it. It seems that the company simply does not consider multimedia reading as a valid use case for live updates. According to Google’s documentation, the functionality concerns activities that are “actively underway, with a separate start and end” and require the user’s attention “throughout the activity”. The appropriate uses include “active navigation, current telephone calls, active carpooling and active monitoring of food delivery”, while inappropriate uses include things such as “chat messages, alerts, upcoming calendar events and rapid access to application features”.

Thus, although reading the media is not explicitly prohibited, this does not correspond to Google’s “time sensitive” model, which is why the multimedia style is not automatically promoted. It’s a shame, however, because we think that showing the current reading information in a status bar chip would be a fantastic functionality – and at least Samsung seems to agree. Hopefully Google sees what its partners are doing and reassess its position.

For those who wish to try the live update function, you will need to install the Android 16 QPR1 beta on a compatible pixel device, because the functionality is not active in the stable version. You will also have to find a supported application, like Google Example of application. Developers interested in supporting live updates can consult the Google official documentation and experience the latest alpha version of Jetpack kernel library.