Notification in Android 8.0(oreo): Implementing Notification Channels

Android 8.0 Oreo comes with many cool features like Picture-in-Picture (PiP) Mode, Notification Snoozing, Smart Text Selection and much more. One of them is Notification Dots. With Notification Dots, whenever you have any notification to be checked, you will see a dot on the icon of that particular app which is having the unchecked notification. All developers should review these changes and modify their apps to support them properly, where applicable to the app.

With OREO we can separate your app’s notifications into notification channels. All notifications that are posted to the same channel have the same behaviour, for example we could create a channel for our app’s most urgent notifications, where each notification is announced with an alert sound, vibration and a notification light, and then create “quieter” channels for the rest of your app’s notifications. Android Oreo also gives users more control over notifications than ever before, as in Android 8.0 users can modify the settings for any notification channel that’s present on their device.

In OREO, they have redesigned notifications to provide an easier and more consistent way to manage notification behavior and settings. Some of these changes include:

Notification channels: Android 8.0 introduces notification channels that allow you to create a user-customizable channel for each type of notification you want to display.

Notification dots: Android 8.0 introduces support for displaying dots, or badges, on app launcher icons. Notification dots reflect the presence of notifications that the user has not yet dismissed or acted on.

Snoozing: Users can snooze notifications, which causes them to disappear for a period of time before reappearing. Notifications reappear with the same level of importance they first appeared with.

Messaging style: In Android 8.0, notifications that use the MessagingStyle class display more content in their collapsed form. You should use theMessagingStyle class for notifications that are messaging-related.

Here, we have created the NotificationHelper class that require the Context as the constructor params. NOTIFICATION_CHANNEL_ID variable has been initialize in order to set the channel_id to NotificationChannel.

The method createNotification(…) requires title and message parameters in order to set the title and content text of the notification. In order to handle the notification click event we have created the pendingIntent object, that redirect towards SomeOtherActivity.class.

Notification channels allow you to create a user-customizable channel for each type of notification you want to display. So, if the android version is greater or equals to 8.0, we have to create the NotificationChannel object and set it to createNotificationChannel(…) setter property of NotificationManager.