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July 2, 2025
Google’s stable Android 16 update, released last month, brought many under the hood changes, but most of its major user-facing features aren’t live yet. A key example is Live Updates, Android’s version of iOS’s Live Activities. These are a special type of notification designed to be prominently displayed on the status bar and lock screen. While the stable Android 16 release adds preliminary support by allowing apps to create these notifications, the OS doesn’t yet treat them any differently from standard ones. However, full support for the Live Updates feature is just around the corner, as it’s already active in the latest beta release and could arrive in the next quarterly update.
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The stable release of Android 16 provides the foundation for Live Updates by introducing a new “progress-style” notification template. This template simplifies the process for developers to add progress bars to their app notifications — something especially useful for rideshare, food delivery, and navigation services. While this isn’t entirely new functionality, as apps like Uber already use custom-built progress bars, the new template means developers no longer need to build them from scratch.
Currently, Android 16 treats these progress-style notifications just like any other. However, the Live Updates feature will elevate them. Once active, progress-style notifications will appear fully expanded on the always-on display and lock screen, eliminating the need to wake the screen or pull down the notification shade. Furthermore, apps supporting Live Updates can push short messages to an always-visible status bar chip. Tapping this chip will reveal the full progress notification, offering a quick glance at an update without interrupting your workflow.
While Google confirmed that full support for Live Updates will arrive on Pixel phones later this year, the company never specified exactly when. When the first Android 16 QPR1 betas rolled out, the feature appeared to be disabled, as neither our test app nor the Android 16 Easter egg triggered the full experience. The reason, it turns out, is that Google changed the requirements for a notification to be promoted to a Live Update.
Previously, I demonstrated that notifications needed to meet three criteria to qualify as a Live Update: they had to use the new progress-style template, be marked as ongoing, and provide a short summary for the status bar chip. With these in place, a notification would become a Live Update, assuming the feature was enabled in the OS.
The Live Updates feature is disabled by default in the stable Android 16 release but is active in the QPR1 beta. However, for a notification to be promoted in the beta, it must now meet additional criteria. The two main changes are that the app must declare the new POST_PROMOTED_NOTIFICATIONS permission and call the requestPromotedOngoing API. While there are other minor requirements, these two additions are the key changes from the stable release of Android 16.
Using a lightly modified version of Google’s sample app on my Pixel 9 Pro running Android 16 QPR1 Beta 2, I was able to get the full Live Updates experience working. The feature functions exactly as expected, with the notification appearing fully expanded on the lock screen and as a chip in the status bar.
It even looks quite nice on the always-on display; the notification is presented as a clean outline, which helps it stand out against a wallpaper.
Managing Live Updates is also straightforward. You can press and hold a notification and tap “Turn off,” or you can disable the feature from the app’s main notification settings page.
Given that Live Updates is fully functional in the Android 16 QPR1 beta, a formal announcement from Google likely isn’t far off. Developers need to know that the feature is live so they can add support for it, so the longer Google waits to announce it, the longer users will have to wait for their favorite apps to roll it out.