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Customize notifications with Notification Channels in Oreo for Android
Christine Ottoni • September 28, 2017
Use Notification Channels to customize your Android notifications
Mobile notifications can be a real hassle. Sorting through them can be a pain, and finding the important ones can be even trickier.
If you’re looking to streamline your notification experience on your Android device, Oreo comes with a cool new feature called Notification Channels.
Notification Channels let you set levels of importance and modify notifications on a case-by-case basis. One thing to note is that Notification Channels have to be programmed by app developers. So if you’re trying to customize notifications for an app, and it doesn’t support customization, then you’re out of luck.
There are a lot of apps that already support this customization like most apps in the Google Suite.
Let’s get started. We’ll walk you through how to use Notification Channels for Gmail.
Open Notification Channels for a specific app
Go to Settings > Apps & notifications.
Navigate to App info > Choose your app of choice (in this case Gmail) > App notifications.
You’ll see a list of all the notifications you can receive from the app.
You can open each notification and customize specific alerts.
Basic customization
You’ll find a few ways you can customize that particular notification. First and foremost is the importance level. Oreo has four different importance levels to choose from.
– Urgent: will make a sound and a notification will pop up on your screen.
– High: will make a sound if your phone’s volume is turned up.
– Medium: no sound but with visual notification in the bar.
– Low: No sound, no visual.
Choose the importance level that makes sense for you. You can also customize the sound and set the notification to vibrate.
Advanced customization
In the Advanced section, you can toggle notification dots on or off and add or remove blinking light. You can also choose to show notification content on the lock screen and even override do not disturb mode for those super important messages that need to get through.
More custom settings are often available in the app, and when there are, a note letting you know will appear at the bottom of the page.
Customize on the fly
You can also customize notifications as you receive them. Just pull the notification menu down and slide the notification to the right slowly so you don’t dismiss it by accident.
Select the gear icon and open All Categories. This will take you to the app’s notifications category.
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