Do you know those notifications you touch and then nothing happens until a minute or two has passed? Twitter used to be guilty of this, but there are still many apps out there that exhibit this behavior. Google is trying to make this a thing of the past on Android 12 by banning apps from using so-called notification trampolines. This should effectively ban slow loading notifications, and the change is already affecting Android 12 apps today.
Trampolines are generally used by applications that do not open an activity of their own when you touch a notification, such as when you share links with yourself through an application like Pushbullet, and touching the notification opens the website instead of the application. 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 willing to break apps that depend on this method and is already showing a toast that the implementation is going away once Android 12 is stable. Interestingly, the Chrome implementation itself is completely broken as of now, while Pushbullet users only receive a warning message.
Do you know how you sometimes touch a notification and nothing happens for 5 minutes, then it pops up suddenly? Twitter used to do that and other apps are still to blame today.
Android 12 wants to ban this behavior forever and prohibit notifications from starting activities directly. pic.twitter.com/QWEEMtKDUO
– Artem Russakovskii (@ArtemR) February 18, 2021
We spoke with the Pushbullet developers, who confirmed that they are using what can be considered a stepping stone. However, as Pushbullet notifications usually only take you to the browser, there is no reason to start the Pushbullet app just to end it right after redirecting users to the requested website. There may be a way around the problem using the PendingIntent class, as suggested in the Android documentation, but only strict tests will tell. In any case, the developers have confirmed to us that they will implement all necessary changes to support Android in the future.
While the new requirement can make some activities more complicated for developers, ordinary people are likely to be happy that they no longer have to wait for their phones to do something after touching a notification.
For more information on the launch of Android 12, check out our announcement post detailing what’s new here. If you want to install the developer preview on your own device, find out how in our Android 12 download guide.
