This story was originally published and last updated .
Do you know these notifications that you type and then nothing happens until a minute or two has passed? Twitter used to be guilty of this, but there are still many apps that show this behavior. Google wants to make it a thing of the past on Android 12, and bans apps from using so-called notification trampolines. It should effectively ban the loading of notifications, and the change already affects apps on Android 12 today – and we’ve learned that Google apps are one of the worst offenders.
Trampolines are commonly used by apps that do not open their own activity when you tap a notification, such as when you share links with yourself through an app like Pushbullet, and when you tap the notification, the website becomes opened the app. Google also uses this method for its own “Send to your devices” feature in Chrome. To save users from a bad waiting experience, Google is prepared to break apps that rely on this method and is already showing a toast that the implementation will disappear once Android 12 is stable. Funny enough, Chrome’s own implementation has been completely discontinued from now on (presumably because of the Play Seriv, while Pushbullet users only receive a warning message.
In fact, Google Apps is one of the worst offenders to use trampolines. We spotted the toast ‘indirect activity’ after typing notifications from quite a few Google apps, including Drive (when you start a Docs, Sheets or Slides via a notification), Home and Calendar.
Left: Google Home Page. Middle: Google Calendar (top section is a model for privacy reasons). Right: Google Sheets.
We spoke to the Pushbullet developers, who confirm that they use what could be considered a trampoline. However, since Pushbullet notifications usually only need to take you to the browser, there is no need to launch the Pushbullet app to kill it only after redirecting users to the requested site. There may be a way around the problem by using the PendingIntent class as suggested in the Android documentation, but only rigid tests can teach it. In any case, the developers have confirmed to us that they will implement the necessary changes to support Android going forward. Google will probably also need to change how it handles notifications in some of its applications.
Do you know how you sometimes tap on a notification and nothing happens for 5 minutes, then it suddenly appears? Twitter did this earlier and other programs are still guilty today.
Android 12 wants to ban this behavior forever and prohibit notifications from starting activities directly. pic.twitter.com/QWEEMtKDUO
– Artem Russakovskii (@ArtemR) 18 February 2021
While the new requirement may make some developer activity cumbersome, ordinary people will probably just be glad they no longer have to wait until their phones do something after tapping on a notification.
For more information on the launch of Android 12, check out our announcements announcing what’s new. If you want to install the developer preview on your own device, you can find it in our Android 12 download guide.