When Google removed the Play Store’s ability to notify users of app updates, people were understandably offended. This even led to the development of a third-party solution, before Google finally realized it and brought it back as an optional configuration (although disabled by default). This functionality appears to be broken now on several Android phones.
As noted by our own Artem Russakovski, if you try to turn on application update notifications for a Pixel phone, you will simply be stuck. If you navigate to the Play Store app> Settings> Notifications> Updates completed and press the toggle button, the normal procedure takes you to the notification category setting on Android, where you must activate another toggle button. On phones other than the Pixels we tested, this seems to work as expected, but the notifications don’t seem to come.
On Google phones, everything is blocked – nothing happens when you turn the button and the setting is not activated. Take a look:
The Google Play Store has a “Updates completed” notification setting, but enabling it is completely invalid for me.
🤷♂️ pic.twitter.com/1lm5rjjRQg
– Artem Russakovskii (@ArtemR) March 18, 2021
If you go back to the full list of notification categories for the Play Store and find the switch in the list, it looks like it works there. This is only superficial, however, and the choice is not remembered. Go back to the Android settings or the settings of the application itself and it will be turned off again.
It’s hard to say why Google has so many problems with what should be such a simple function for its app store. We must monitor the situation and notify when a solution is implemented, but do not hold your breath for a quick solution.
