Weekend discussion: Do you want iPhone-like notification summaries on Android?

For the middle of March, it was a surprisingly busy news week. Google finally confirmed that Gemini is taking Assistant’s spot at the table this year — a surprise to no one, I’m sure. We got our first look at the Pixel 10 trio, a familiar set of smartphones that seems to add an additional camera sensor to the base model. And Android 16 Beta 3 arrived, marking platform stability for Google’s upcoming operating system ahead of its June release.

While Android 16 continues to look like one of the most familiar OS upgrades we’ve seen in ages, there’s plenty of interesting news hiding under the hood. Sure, Google’s pending Quick Settings redesign is still in the works, but for my money, nothing stuck out quite like some hidden code for notification summaries. Although we might not know for sure until I/O, it seems like Android 16 — or, perhaps, whatever second update is arriving in the back half of the year — will take a page out of the Apple Intelligence playbook, and I’m not so sure how to feel about it.

This morning, my review of the iPhone 16e went live. I’d encourage anyone remotely interested in smartphones to check it out, even if you wouldn’t dream of switching to iOS. The iPhone 16e is an interesting phone, if not one I found myself liking very much. Apple has evolved its mobile platform from a restricted-but-reliable walled garden into something with a whole lot more flexibility — and plenty of problems. While it’s obvious the two things aren’t related, watching iOS turn into the bug-ridden mess I’ve heard Android be accused of for years is bound to deliver a little schadenfreude.

Really, Apple Intelligence is the biggest problem with the iPhone 16e, a device with specs picked specifically to deliver Apple’s AI suite at a slightly cheaper price point. It’s simply not a platform I’ve found to be remotely worth the cost of buying in. And so, coming from a couple of weeks dealing with notification summaries on iOS, I have to admit I’m a little worried about the concept of Android adding the same sort of toolset.

The good news, of course, is that Android’s notification summaries — in whatever current, early state they exist in — can be disabled. That’s based on the strings Mishaal Rahman and others found in Android 16 Beta 3, with Mishaal even managing to get the settings up and running on a test device. I also inherently trust Google to deliver a better notification experience than anyone at Apple, considering the current M.O. on iOS is to hide notifications to declutter your lock screen.

I might be skeptical about notification summaries coming to Android — even if they’re done well, I just don’t know if I live the sort of life where I need a few group chat conversations routinely shrunk into a few simple words — but I’m curious about everyone else. This is bound to be a divisive topic, I think; it’s possible my time on iOS has simply burned me to giving the same feature another chance when it arrives on a completely different platform. But I’m curious about everyone else, especially since plenty of our readers are bound to have no experience with notification summaries at all.

I’m hoping we’ll see some good conversations in the comments below, but, as always, we’ve got a poll as well. Are you interested in notification summaries on Android? Are you willing to give whatever Google’s cooking up a shot, or do you want your phone to stay as AI-less as possible?