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 download notifications, and the change has an effect on apps on Android 12 today.
Trampolines are usually used by apps that do not open their own activity when you tap on a notification, such as when you share links with yourself through an app like Pushbullet, and when you tap on 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, while Pushbullet users only receive a warning message.
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 forbid notifications to start activities directly. pic.twitter.com/QWEEMtKDUO
– Artem Russakovskii (@ArtemR) 18 February 2021
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.
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 typing a notification.
For more information on the launch of Android 12, check out our announcement post where you can see what’s new here. If you want to install the developer preview on your own device, you can find it in our Android 12 download guide.
