AI is the new hotness in smartphone tech, or so the phone makers keep telling us, and it should be no surprise that they’ve already started lifting ideas from one another.
While this has the benefit of ensuring people have access to all the best AI features, it could also see them lumbered with the worst ones.
Case in point; Apple’s notification summaries feature. Despite being widely regarded as one of the worst parts of Apple Intelligence, the newly-released Android 16 beta 3 features references to a very similar-sounding notification summary system. Which doesn’t strike me as a good thing.
While this new notification summary feature hasn’t been enabled yet, different code strings are in the beta — and reveal some information about how the summaries might work.
How Android's notification summaries might work
The good news is that it looks like users will be able to turn off notification summaries for individual apps. So if you do start getting inaccurate notifications, a problem that forced Apple to turn off notification summaries for a time, you can just switch off any of the offending apps.
Different strings also show that notifications with “similar themes” can be grouped together. These groups can also be silenced, which could be very beneficial for all those times you don’t want to be overwhelmed by specific types of notifications.
Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority points out these strings only seem to relate to “conversation” notifications. After getting the feature working in Android 16 beta 3, Rahman spotted that apps would have to specifically designate their notifications as conversation notifications.
That way Android doesn’t have to scan the contents first, and means the AI isn’t looking through every notification you get. Of course summaries won’t work unless Google’s AI can read and analyze the contents of your messages.
Not making the same mistake as Apple
It's unclear whether other apps will eventually get notification summaries at some point in the future. That said, keeping it limited to these kinds of apps would prevent the AI getting important notifications wrong.
The fact that Apple Intelligence was interfering with news headlines, and offering straight misinformation at times, definitely contributed to the backlash.
But since this feature isn’t officially available yet, there's no telling when Google might release it to the masses. It could be part of Android 16, but it may also not. We’ll just have to wait and see.
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