Android 16 may automatically organize your notifications with Gmail-style categories

Notifications play a big role in our day to day lives, whether you love them or you hate them. If you don’t stay on top of your notifications, though, then you may feel overwhelmed by all the chatter and the noise they create. Fortunately, Google is working on a new feature, possibly for Android 16, that could bring some order to your notifications. The feature is called bundled notifications, and it could organize your notifications Gmail-style.

Many of the best email apps generally organize your inbox automatically by analyzing the content of emails and who sent them. Gmail, for example, can sort your emails into 5 different email categories automatically. These categories are:

• Primary: Emails from people you know and messages that don’t appear in other tabs.
• Promotions: Marketing, interests, social and political causes, and other promotional emails will be shown here.
• Social: Emails from social networks, media-sharing sites, dating services and other social sites will be shown here.
• Updates: Confirmations, receipts, statements and other notifications will be shown here.
• Forums: Emails from online groups, discussion forums and mailing lists will be shown here.

Android doesn’t currently organize your notifications like this, though it does group notifications from the same app together. While digging through the second beta for the next quarterly release of Android 15 that Google just released today, I discovered a hidden page under Settings > Notifications called Bundled notifications. With a bit of tinkering, I managed to surface this page, as shown in the screenshots embedded below.

The bundled notifications feature is currently disabled by default, though I don’t know if that will change when Google launches it in a future release, assuming it doesn’t scrap the feature entirely. To enable the mode, you currently have to toggle the “Use notification bundling” setting. After doing so, you can choose which categories, or “themes,” to enable. The current “themes” are Promotions, News, Social, and Recommendations.

The new bundled notifications feature, if done well, could make notifications more manageable for people who don’t check them regularly or who simply get a ton of them. If Google does introduce the bundled notifications feature in Android 16, it will join the new notification cooldown feature in cleaning up your notifications.

Google has been on a roll recently with regards to notifications, introducing changes like old notification blocking, minimized heads-up notifications, and more. It’ll be interesting to see what else the company has in store for us in next year’s big Android update.